The Review of the Mini PC: A Detailed Analysis

As I began to test this Mini PC, I couldn't help but notice that it's normal for devices of its size and type to have smaller form factor chips. However, despite its compact size, the thermal performance is quite good, with temperatures reaching up to 65 watts peak in the Performance Power Level mode. In contrast, the Balanced mode would result in lower temperatures, making it a more suitable option for everyday use.

I've been using the Performance fan mode, which is louder than the Balanced mode, and I've observed that the thermal performance is still quite good even under stress testing with a stress test. The Mini PC's thermal design seems to be effective in keeping the device at a safe temperature, making it suitable for demanding tasks like gaming.

Another notable feature of this Mini PC is its Linux compatibility. Although it didn't receive any screen captures or barographs, I'm happy to report that Linux does work on this device. However, users will need to disable Secure Boot in order to get it up and running. The Mini PC also has a number of connectivity options, including 5 Gbps lamp ports, two USB-A ports, Wi-Fi 6, and an HDMI port.

The touch screen is another feature that's worth mentioning. Although I don't think it's absolutely necessary, the screen is nice to have, especially when trying to see some of the stats or watching a video. The device also comes with a useful feature called "Fly" which allows users to change the power limit and fan profile.

The Mini PC's upgradeability is average, thanks to its small 2,530-sized SSD slot. Unfortunately, this means that users will have limited options when it comes to upgrading storage or other components. The price of the device may also be a concern for some users, especially with the Ultra 91 185h integrated GPU.

In terms of performance, the integrated Graphics falls short in some games compared to more powerful alternatives like the Radon 780m from AMD. However, it does perform well in certain applications and games, such as Assassin's Creed Valhalla. The device also supports Oculink and Thunderbolt, which can provide faster bandwidth and improved performance.

Overall, this Mini PC offers a lot of features and capabilities that make it an attractive option for users who need a high-end portable device. While the price may be a concern for some users, the device's performance, thermal design, and upgradeability make it worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmini Forum I've covered them now for a while their mini PCS and their recent tablet to as well but they have a sub brand which is called Atom Man and this is the first of probably many mini PCS from this brand and it's called the X7 TI now it is a high-end Mini PC it does have a 4-in touchscreen which you can use to control the power levels and see various information on your system stats for example the GPU load temperatures CPU temperatures as well now it is powered by the core Ultra 915h that has 16 cores turbos at a maximum of 5.1 GHz it has USB 4 and that is two ports type- C ports and even oculink so if you're going to run an external GPU I happen to have one especially just for this video I got it an RTX 490 and I'll be covering it very briefly what it's like and what kind of performance differences we get running oculink versus say Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 and manise Forum did send this which is their new portable monitor it has a touchcreen it can run up to 165 htz and it's 1440p 400 nit brightness now it is a long video because I got a lot of ground to cover here so there are chapters this is what you'll find included we have an instruction manual user manual there the tips this just to tell you that if you do replace the Ram or the SSD then the boot time is going to be be a lot longer we get our power cable that'll depend on the region of course an HDMI cable this is the brace the bracket to support the Mini PC and then our power supply which is nice and small but it is powerful 120 wats so this Min PC has plenty of ports we've got a seos reset here too type A's 3.2 USB 4.0 or Thunderbolt 4 me Intel 3.5 mm met with mic support there so your audio jack a intake vent here along the back very good when it comes to connectivity so two 5 GB land ports now they are real Tech the wireless is Wi-Fi 7 which is from Intel another USB 4 ocul Link so if you're going to be using external gpus I'll be testing this later in the video it's very good for that because we get in theory up to 63 uh gbits per second versus Thunderbolt 4 USB 4 which is 40 GB per second so there's a lot more bandwidth there which the cards do need display port that can handle 4K 120 HZ HDMI 2.1 I've tested it out with 4K 120 HZ as well no issues Barrel connector good to see they used a standard Barrel connector here not some weird magnetic connector like other brands do another USB type a 3.2 and a USB 2 Port there so good for ports and we even get this this is a fullsize SD card reader good to have on a Mini PC exit vents or the hot air is going to be pushed out here the fan noise and thermals will be covered in this video our power on button with a LED behind it this is the little switch there for the shutter for the webcam here is a sample of the X7 TI webcam so it's 1080p 30 frames per second and I'm using the inol Dual array microphones that it does have now there is a blue St LED that is on when the camera is on and remember we have that switch at the top which will slide across the shutter disable the webcam if you are worried about privacy and then the underside of it so intake vent right here this is for the mount and you have these rubber feet which I've already removed the rubber feet right here they were a pain to remove to pry off I had to use a pry tool didn't want to damage the Plastics but they came off a lot harder than they typically normally do so below those rubber feet you find those four grps they're gone just to speed up things here with the video a little Gap here for us to pry this off so when you lift that up you can easily put it to one side and I recommend that you put it over to the uh right side here because there is this ribbon okay you don't want to damage that you can unplug it down here or pull the tape off and I believe maybe unplug it here too as well so there are six screws here and six here which again are we remove so 12 little tiny screws we need to take off to remove the bracket here that holds the fan in place so fan maintenance straight away can access that clean it out with dust you can pull it right off right now and if any dust does end up building up in the fins right here well you'll be able to blow that out vacuum it out clean it out whatever you can see the good and the bad so we have three copper thermal transfer pipes here so cooling looks to be quite potent for this particular chipset our Ultra 9 185h heat SN here for the SSD pcie 4.0 now that heat sink has a thermal pad that's stuck on it and just a bit of force there you can pry that off and there there is our heat sink which is H quite chunky and my camera doesn't want to focus there we go you can see it's quite a good one actually but the bad there's no spare SSD slot but there is well one tiny one here and it looks to be like a 42 mm in length or in fact smaller than that 30 so it's a very small tiny one not a common size so really the upgradeability is this one so I could go from 1 terab up to 8 terabytes or 4 terabyt or 2 terabytes or something with our PCI 4.0 slot so just a shame that there is no room for another one but the RAM at least you can see it has these heat spreaders on both of the soda modules there so it's ddr5 and it's 5600 megat transfers the speed of them so you can upgrade the RAM easily Wi-Fi card well I believe I can't see where it is unless it's under this I believe it's so folded onto the motherboard so not upgradeable just the SSD and the ram but a real shame that we have no room for 2.5 in drive or another standard size PCI 4.0 SSD here we are in the Bios setup screen so if you are going to be running an external GPU via oculink this is a must you need to go into this particular menu here go to Advanced find onboard device devices settings and then make sure you change this which I believe is on auto or the IG gfx which stands for integrated you want to put that onto HG which I have set now I couldn't get my ocul link GPU to work until that was enabled so that was holding me back I was almost ripping my hair out trying out different ocul link boards and setups but I needed to have that uh enabled there the other is power limits You may wish to up this or lower it depending on what your preferences are so go down here to the power and performance which is under Advanced click here I have it set to Performance mode 65 wats for our power limit 1 and two the default is balance which is 54 and then 60 wats and you can also manually put in whatever you want now I wouldn't really go over I think about 75 or 70 would be the limit you can change that there might help the integrated Graphics so those are the interesting settings there is unfortunately while there is quite a bit in here there is nothing for allocating more RAM dedicated that is to the Intel arc graphics there is this however which is the fan mode Now by default it's on balance which seems to do a pretty good job keeping it quiet but you do hear it ramp up a little bit performance a little bit louder but it will do as it says performance help just lower those thermals lets it turbo a little more so I'm going to keep it on the performance so this is the change I've made here performance to the power limit and performance to our fan profiles you can then go along and save and exit boot order and whatnot if you're going to be booting Linux you'll find that through either here or the first menu but let's go over now into windows so it does ship here with Windows 11 home and of course you're going to need to run the updates and whatnot and is it just me or his window getting increasingly bloated and all sorts of rubbish like now you got co-pilot at the right corner there you have this thing pop up so there's a lot of things I need to clean up with Windows but no blo Weare from um them themselves Adam man there's nothing okay there there's no additional software or anything so we have uh facial recognition there with the webcam that's built in fingerprint reader with that power button so you can use Windows hello to log in without a password real Tech is the two 5 GB lamp ports there wi-fi 7 now I don't have a Wi-Fi 7 router they are super expensive so I can't justify that purchase just yet for testing U but Wi-Fi 6E has been working fine for me and uh using uh the landport at the moment that does work just fine no issues I've had no instability problems nothing like that no crashes no Ram overheating no blue screens of death nothing of course you got the uh AI boost there with this particular chipset now it does have uh 16 cores 22 threads maximum turbo is 5 .1 GHz the ultra 9 185h it's a reasonably potent chipset everything is quick and snappy really good and benchmarks run a ran a few of those and you can see here that impressive results not bad considering the size of it what is on offer is very good so this has uh a really good score for single core performance I mean I have seen a little bit better in fact previous generation probably was actually better for the single core multi core score there is very good as well integrated Graphics this is where the big increase is for the new arc graphics so the new architecture much better than Iris XE they had before graphic score synthetic Benchmark here very good this is where it beats out a AMD Radeon 780m however this is just with the synthetic benchmarks real gaming you see later on it's not actually better uh so that was time spy this here is now time spy if you decided to use an RTX 4090 yes very expensive GPU but I wanted to see what it could do so an impressive score here for Thunderbolt this here was done with Thunderbolt okay you can see there Thunderbolt 4 egpu setup and that is a really good score 28,000 for the graphics score and this is the difference here now if you move over and use oculink with it's 63 in theory gbits per second it won't be that full 63 neither will Thunderbolt 4 at 40 that then takes it up to 32,000 points so it went up there around about almost 4,000 points to score so that is just synthetic bench monks again later in gaming I'll talk just briefly about that the differen is there but you want to be gaming with an external GPU on oculink not Thunderbolt for obvious reasons oh and that's just a little bit more information on the chipset that I just talked about anyway so it is the top end of the Ultra Series right now it's a very good chipset I'm really happy with the performance everything just quick and snappy the Kingston 1 tbte SSD it's pcie 4.0 spec the speeds are not the quickest I've seen for this type of Drive of course you could swap this out upgrade it I showed the internals it's not too difficult to get in there but you have to remove quite a few components and that is is a little bit of a pain there now the video playback is very good with this no problems whatsoever uh I'll play back this one which is the jellyfish file High bit rate and you see it's not dropping any frames per second at all there's no starter even at the start 10bit hvc and the Sony swordsmith one this is 4K 60 frames per second and it shouldn't be dropping any frames per second at all sorry I'll just mute that no it seems to be very smooth too so video playback including YouTube that is all good it just handles everything the art graphics with ease when it comes to video files and as many PC as expected can handle things that are a bit heavier than just kind of standard workloads I won't be showing the spreadsheets and whatnot this is Adobe Premier Pro and one of my own videos the timeline is very quick the art Graphics certainly boosts this performance its media playback engine that it does have is quite good at handling these kind of files and I don't really notice any lag so this is a basic edit but even with some Transitions and a few different layers and whatnot it's doing pretty well now obviously a dedicated GPU will still be a lot better but for integrated graphics and this PC I think it does well with 4K video but let's have a look at the export time here now with the art Graphics I am using here the YouTube 4K preset this is what I always test out with integrated Graphics it's a minute of footage only just to speed things up so we're not sitting through this whole long process here there now I do have this up so we can take a look at what the art Graphics is doing it should be doing a lot of the the work there with Intel Quicks sync definitely favors export times with this I don't imagine that this is going to take long at all so you can see this is It's speeding right through this very very quick indeed and I would say it should be around about the 28 second Mark something like that under 30 seconds hopefully considering all the power it does have with the ultra 9 9 185h so there we go that was probably about 29 seconds so my estimate there was pretty much spot on so very quick to export and you can see that it was the art Graphics doing most of the work there CPU just a little it was idle well up to about 50% only there so very good for editing 4K video for a Mini PC as small as this now I'm not really against this if it wasn't going to push the price up I believe it maybe is a little but this touchcreen would you really take advantage of it is it absolutely necessary I personally don't think it is let me know in the comments do you think Min PCS should have this so you can see the date the time here is the most useful thing I can adjust the performance mode so we've got the performance option the balanced tapping here and in energy saving if you want that you can do it all on the fly it adjusts the fan profiles so if you want it to be a little bit more quiet put it in the energy saving so that is the most useful part now the touch screen in itself does work pretty well good I don't really have any issues with it you can see the RAM usage there the Storage storage temperature CPU CPU temperature and the current load of it there and the information on the arc graphics now if you plug in an external GPU it will still show the integrated cuz that's the way it's set up and there isn't at the time of this video any software to configure these little widgets and have them set to say something else I hope that is coming in the future down here our upload and download speeds the current RPM of the fan this is the brightness for the screen we have volume controls this is semi-useful although I normally just use my uh keyboard shortcuts and if you tap on that little USB icon it lets you know the uh layout of the ports and everything the front ports and then the rear ports of it and if you tap in here uh you get some different things like you got the clock if you want to turn that on you can go over and change the language in this screen and if I go back again we have the layout you can set different layouts so there is a few things on there it is always on I haven't found a way to turn it off if you didn't want it uh but you can lower that brightness right down to almost not even see it okay so that's one way to kind of get rid of it so all up it's a little useful widget screen but I don't really think we needed this but it does make it different from the competition so mini form did send me this to which is the portable monitor now I didn't really expect much out of this and I thought you know it probably won't be that amazing it won't be that good but I am surprised it's a good portable monitor and I'll tell you why because the resolution is I think decent for the size so 15.6 in that's a 16x9 aspect ratio resolution is 2560 by 1440 and the best part 165 htz although the advertising material does State 144 HZ and I'm just using a type-c cable here from our Mini PC to the portable monitor now the touch accuracy does does seem to be very good it's fully laminated it's a really nice screen so it's like getting a screen for a quality laptop that you can get additional of course you have to buy this is something they do sell separate but I thought that I would just briefly feature it here in the video because it is actually quite nice and I'm surprised by it now brightness goes up to 400 nits it's got a color color accuracy of uh E2 HDR supported and it's IPS and also low blue light filter built-in speakers they're only one watt each uh times two so there's two of them and they sound pretty bad they're not really that good that's a downside to it the speakers are what can you expect from a portable monitor they're not really that good but I like the touch accuracy brightness of it and that refresh rate so it would even be good for gamers gaming on it in order to make this video not crazy long I'm not focusing too much on the egpu support so that's why OCC link and this is an RTX 4090 that I got specifically just for this video and a little bit of testing it's a beast of a GPU very expensive but it's just to show you best case scenario really of what this can do now I have a very cheap oculink adapter here now this I got off Amazon and it simply just plugs into the PCI slot of the GPU you need to plug in a power supply of course and you've got your oculink cable that you then plug in and I had no trouble setting this up it was just that bio setting that I showed you that you have to change make sure you set that otherwise the oculink port does not work so that is one option for oculate external gpus you can use what a lot of people do and that is thunderbolts and that would be USB 4 and this is a cheap adapter that I got quite some time ago from AliExpress I'm sorry I don't even know the name of it or anything but it does kind of work well and I'll briefly very briefly show you the kind of differences you can expect between Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 versus oculink and it is huge it makes a big difference in games more than synthetic benchmarks and now a benchmark that is an in-game one and this is for Assassin's Creed Valhalla now I've set it to 1080p High preset now I'm using the high preset because I'm testing that same preset at 4K later with an external GPU so with the integrated Graphics you can see the result of the inbuilt Benchmark is not wonderful I wouldn't call this playable you want to lower the resolution probably down to 7 20p however testing out that MSI 4090 overclock version with Thunderbolt 4 this same exact test with the high preset bit now at 4K got 89 frames per second with Thunderbolt 4 or us4 right then with the oculink same exact GPU 138 frames per second massive difference this is why if you're going to be gaming and you're using an external GP you really want to use an oculink egpu set up and not Thunderbolt 4 until we get Thunderbolt 5 so those results are huge very different this Title Here is called the last Epoch and it's not a very demanding game I do have a TP to 1080p cuz that's where I want a game hopefully I know that the radon 780m handles it quite a bit better at 1080P and I have it on the low preset for the visuals and it's doing okay around 50 frames second but it does dip down you can see now when there a lot of enemies on screen that frame rate is going to suffer a little bit but overall I consider for this style of game this to be playable and that was a huge lag just then I don't know what caused that but that doesn't normally happen but overall not too bad here the Witcher 3 this is at 1080p on the low preset is struggling you can see at this resolution not looking so great down to 39 9 frames per second it's got a lot of different light sources to render here and the sun is rising up at the moment too so not great let's try 720p now that is a a big difference now at 720p you can see it is getting 60 frames per second which is really where you want to be gaming especially with a style of game such as The Witcher 3 rise of the Tomb Raider set 2 1080p on the lowest preset let's run the ingame benchmark see what the result is clearly there is a little bit of GPU throttling it's not holding the top clock maybe if I increase the power limit because certainly the thermal seem to be all right at the moment when gaming I could improve that result there and hopefully lessen that throttling so I topped out at 53 frames per second I saw it pulling 40 WS the ark Graphics but it didn't always hold that top turbo but not a bad result for 1080p on the lowest preset on to The Thermals now so it does thermal throttle according to HW info gets up to 95° C this is during all my stress tests and everything that I've been doing and that's kind of I hate to say it but it is it's normal really for these kind of smaller form fact uh little mini PCS with these kind of chipset so it'll peek at that but as you saw during the gaming the theral are pretty good they're normally in like the mid kind of 60s and sometimes in the late 50s which is not bad at all now I've been using the performance power level so that is the 65 wats Peak that it gets up to so if you're running on the balanced it won't be as hot as this you won't be seeing these kind of thermals and I've been using that performance fan mode which is a little louder so here's a sample of it in the fan mode performance which is the loudest and stressed out with a stress test so this is worst case scenario finally Linux now to try and keep things short I didn't end up doing a screen capture but yes Linux does work on this and you're able to run it you have to disable the secure boot so Olaf it's a Mini PC and a new brand that is very interesting this has a lot of tech in it and the connectivity absolutely fantastic 5 GB lamp ports two of them Wi-Fi 7 I don't even have a Wi-Fi 7 router yet because can't justify the price of them uh considering the benefits that I'm going to get I don't really think it's worth it just yet but maybe in the future I'll be testing that out still future prooof very good the touchcreen it is nice to have to see some of the stats but I don't really think it's absolutely necessary however on the Fly changing the power limit is the most useful feature of it to change the power limit the fan profile so if you're sick of hearing the fan in the performance mode being a little loud then just drop it into the Eco or the balanced and it really really chops down on the fan noise speaking of which it's not bad in the balanced mode in performance you do hear it a little more it's certainly not the loudest Mini PC PC that I've tested that I have covered but it isn't the quietest either I find it to be acceptable it's not an offensive noise now upgradeability I would rate as being um average because it's got a very small 20230 sized SSD slot that is free and those ssds they are both low and speed and well overpriced 2 terab ones that I've just briefly looked at from say cors here or something costing around about 380 sorry €280 downright too expensive and yes this is an expensive model so the downside is really that probably the price of it which I don't know yet exactly but I've got my guesstimate and I'm pretty sure it's not going to be a super cheap unit especially with that Ultra 91 185h now the integrated Graphics is a big step up over Iris XE from Intel but it still falls short in some games like for example compared to well the current top dog of integrated Graphics which is still the radon 780m from AMD a little bit better so I'd love to see an AMD version of this Mini PC I think would be really good oculink performance so what I saw testing out at least Assassin's Creed Valhalla was a huge difference going from 89 frames per second from the fixed in-game Benchmark using Thunderbolt or USB 4 to then having the RTX 490 breathing a lot better with bandwidth having a lot more versus the say in theory 40 GBS per second with USB 4 but it's only really about like 35 because there's some Thunderbolt overheads in the usb4 overhead and then the ocul link being 63 GBS per second it did a lot better it got then an average with the exact same settings 4K of 139 frames per second now I do apologize for not having many link or Thunderbolt tests and comparisons and all the uh barographs and everything like that I didn't want this video to be too long it already is far too long but if there is the demand for it if this video does well then I may consider doing a more in-depth look at Thunderbolt ocul link with this unit here and this GPU uh that I did get for this video here all up this Mini PC offers a lot it's high-end it's going to be expensive their touch screen is also very good the portable touch screen here one of the best that I've seen L it's certainly going to replace my old 1080p touchcreen I have with a matte coating the only thing is it's glossy so it's quite reflective but I like the brightness and it can run just off a type c Port so that is the Atom Man X7 TI thanks a lot for watching this reviewmini Forum I've covered them now for a while their mini PCS and their recent tablet to as well but they have a sub brand which is called Atom Man and this is the first of probably many mini PCS from this brand and it's called the X7 TI now it is a high-end Mini PC it does have a 4-in touchscreen which you can use to control the power levels and see various information on your system stats for example the GPU load temperatures CPU temperatures as well now it is powered by the core Ultra 915h that has 16 cores turbos at a maximum of 5.1 GHz it has USB 4 and that is two ports type- C ports and even oculink so if you're going to run an external GPU I happen to have one especially just for this video I got it an RTX 490 and I'll be covering it very briefly what it's like and what kind of performance differences we get running oculink versus say Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 and manise Forum did send this which is their new portable monitor it has a touchcreen it can run up to 165 htz and it's 1440p 400 nit brightness now it is a long video because I got a lot of ground to cover here so there are chapters this is what you'll find included we have an instruction manual user manual there the tips this just to tell you that if you do replace the Ram or the SSD then the boot time is going to be be a lot longer we get our power cable that'll depend on the region of course an HDMI cable this is the brace the bracket to support the Mini PC and then our power supply which is nice and small but it is powerful 120 wats so this Min PC has plenty of ports we've got a seos reset here too type A's 3.2 USB 4.0 or Thunderbolt 4 me Intel 3.5 mm met with mic support there so your audio jack a intake vent here along the back very good when it comes to connectivity so two 5 GB land ports now they are real Tech the wireless is Wi-Fi 7 which is from Intel another USB 4 ocul Link so if you're going to be using external gpus I'll be testing this later in the video it's very good for that because we get in theory up to 63 uh gbits per second versus Thunderbolt 4 USB 4 which is 40 GB per second so there's a lot more bandwidth there which the cards do need display port that can handle 4K 120 HZ HDMI 2.1 I've tested it out with 4K 120 HZ as well no issues Barrel connector good to see they used a standard Barrel connector here not some weird magnetic connector like other brands do another USB type a 3.2 and a USB 2 Port there so good for ports and we even get this this is a fullsize SD card reader good to have on a Mini PC exit vents or the hot air is going to be pushed out here the fan noise and thermals will be covered in this video our power on button with a LED behind it this is the little switch there for the shutter for the webcam here is a sample of the X7 TI webcam so it's 1080p 30 frames per second and I'm using the inol Dual array microphones that it does have now there is a blue St LED that is on when the camera is on and remember we have that switch at the top which will slide across the shutter disable the webcam if you are worried about privacy and then the underside of it so intake vent right here this is for the mount and you have these rubber feet which I've already removed the rubber feet right here they were a pain to remove to pry off I had to use a pry tool didn't want to damage the Plastics but they came off a lot harder than they typically normally do so below those rubber feet you find those four grps they're gone just to speed up things here with the video a little Gap here for us to pry this off so when you lift that up you can easily put it to one side and I recommend that you put it over to the uh right side here because there is this ribbon okay you don't want to damage that you can unplug it down here or pull the tape off and I believe maybe unplug it here too as well so there are six screws here and six here which again are we remove so 12 little tiny screws we need to take off to remove the bracket here that holds the fan in place so fan maintenance straight away can access that clean it out with dust you can pull it right off right now and if any dust does end up building up in the fins right here well you'll be able to blow that out vacuum it out clean it out whatever you can see the good and the bad so we have three copper thermal transfer pipes here so cooling looks to be quite potent for this particular chipset our Ultra 9 185h heat SN here for the SSD pcie 4.0 now that heat sink has a thermal pad that's stuck on it and just a bit of force there you can pry that off and there there is our heat sink which is H quite chunky and my camera doesn't want to focus there we go you can see it's quite a good one actually but the bad there's no spare SSD slot but there is well one tiny one here and it looks to be like a 42 mm in length or in fact smaller than that 30 so it's a very small tiny one not a common size so really the upgradeability is this one so I could go from 1 terab up to 8 terabytes or 4 terabyt or 2 terabytes or something with our PCI 4.0 slot so just a shame that there is no room for another one but the RAM at least you can see it has these heat spreaders on both of the soda modules there so it's ddr5 and it's 5600 megat transfers the speed of them so you can upgrade the RAM easily Wi-Fi card well I believe I can't see where it is unless it's under this I believe it's so folded onto the motherboard so not upgradeable just the SSD and the ram but a real shame that we have no room for 2.5 in drive or another standard size PCI 4.0 SSD here we are in the Bios setup screen so if you are going to be running an external GPU via oculink this is a must you need to go into this particular menu here go to Advanced find onboard device devices settings and then make sure you change this which I believe is on auto or the IG gfx which stands for integrated you want to put that onto HG which I have set now I couldn't get my ocul link GPU to work until that was enabled so that was holding me back I was almost ripping my hair out trying out different ocul link boards and setups but I needed to have that uh enabled there the other is power limits You may wish to up this or lower it depending on what your preferences are so go down here to the power and performance which is under Advanced click here I have it set to Performance mode 65 wats for our power limit 1 and two the default is balance which is 54 and then 60 wats and you can also manually put in whatever you want now I wouldn't really go over I think about 75 or 70 would be the limit you can change that there might help the integrated Graphics so those are the interesting settings there is unfortunately while there is quite a bit in here there is nothing for allocating more RAM dedicated that is to the Intel arc graphics there is this however which is the fan mode Now by default it's on balance which seems to do a pretty good job keeping it quiet but you do hear it ramp up a little bit performance a little bit louder but it will do as it says performance help just lower those thermals lets it turbo a little more so I'm going to keep it on the performance so this is the change I've made here performance to the power limit and performance to our fan profiles you can then go along and save and exit boot order and whatnot if you're going to be booting Linux you'll find that through either here or the first menu but let's go over now into windows so it does ship here with Windows 11 home and of course you're going to need to run the updates and whatnot and is it just me or his window getting increasingly bloated and all sorts of rubbish like now you got co-pilot at the right corner there you have this thing pop up so there's a lot of things I need to clean up with Windows but no blo Weare from um them themselves Adam man there's nothing okay there there's no additional software or anything so we have uh facial recognition there with the webcam that's built in fingerprint reader with that power button so you can use Windows hello to log in without a password real Tech is the two 5 GB lamp ports there wi-fi 7 now I don't have a Wi-Fi 7 router they are super expensive so I can't justify that purchase just yet for testing U but Wi-Fi 6E has been working fine for me and uh using uh the landport at the moment that does work just fine no issues I've had no instability problems nothing like that no crashes no Ram overheating no blue screens of death nothing of course you got the uh AI boost there with this particular chipset now it does have uh 16 cores 22 threads maximum turbo is 5 .1 GHz the ultra 9 185h it's a reasonably potent chipset everything is quick and snappy really good and benchmarks run a ran a few of those and you can see here that impressive results not bad considering the size of it what is on offer is very good so this has uh a really good score for single core performance I mean I have seen a little bit better in fact previous generation probably was actually better for the single core multi core score there is very good as well integrated Graphics this is where the big increase is for the new arc graphics so the new architecture much better than Iris XE they had before graphic score synthetic Benchmark here very good this is where it beats out a AMD Radeon 780m however this is just with the synthetic benchmarks real gaming you see later on it's not actually better uh so that was time spy this here is now time spy if you decided to use an RTX 4090 yes very expensive GPU but I wanted to see what it could do so an impressive score here for Thunderbolt this here was done with Thunderbolt okay you can see there Thunderbolt 4 egpu setup and that is a really good score 28,000 for the graphics score and this is the difference here now if you move over and use oculink with it's 63 in theory gbits per second it won't be that full 63 neither will Thunderbolt 4 at 40 that then takes it up to 32,000 points so it went up there around about almost 4,000 points to score so that is just synthetic bench monks again later in gaming I'll talk just briefly about that the differen is there but you want to be gaming with an external GPU on oculink not Thunderbolt for obvious reasons oh and that's just a little bit more information on the chipset that I just talked about anyway so it is the top end of the Ultra Series right now it's a very good chipset I'm really happy with the performance everything just quick and snappy the Kingston 1 tbte SSD it's pcie 4.0 spec the speeds are not the quickest I've seen for this type of Drive of course you could swap this out upgrade it I showed the internals it's not too difficult to get in there but you have to remove quite a few components and that is is a little bit of a pain there now the video playback is very good with this no problems whatsoever uh I'll play back this one which is the jellyfish file High bit rate and you see it's not dropping any frames per second at all there's no starter even at the start 10bit hvc and the Sony swordsmith one this is 4K 60 frames per second and it shouldn't be dropping any frames per second at all sorry I'll just mute that no it seems to be very smooth too so video playback including YouTube that is all good it just handles everything the art graphics with ease when it comes to video files and as many PC as expected can handle things that are a bit heavier than just kind of standard workloads I won't be showing the spreadsheets and whatnot this is Adobe Premier Pro and one of my own videos the timeline is very quick the art Graphics certainly boosts this performance its media playback engine that it does have is quite good at handling these kind of files and I don't really notice any lag so this is a basic edit but even with some Transitions and a few different layers and whatnot it's doing pretty well now obviously a dedicated GPU will still be a lot better but for integrated graphics and this PC I think it does well with 4K video but let's have a look at the export time here now with the art Graphics I am using here the YouTube 4K preset this is what I always test out with integrated Graphics it's a minute of footage only just to speed things up so we're not sitting through this whole long process here there now I do have this up so we can take a look at what the art Graphics is doing it should be doing a lot of the the work there with Intel Quicks sync definitely favors export times with this I don't imagine that this is going to take long at all so you can see this is It's speeding right through this very very quick indeed and I would say it should be around about the 28 second Mark something like that under 30 seconds hopefully considering all the power it does have with the ultra 9 9 185h so there we go that was probably about 29 seconds so my estimate there was pretty much spot on so very quick to export and you can see that it was the art Graphics doing most of the work there CPU just a little it was idle well up to about 50% only there so very good for editing 4K video for a Mini PC as small as this now I'm not really against this if it wasn't going to push the price up I believe it maybe is a little but this touchcreen would you really take advantage of it is it absolutely necessary I personally don't think it is let me know in the comments do you think Min PCS should have this so you can see the date the time here is the most useful thing I can adjust the performance mode so we've got the performance option the balanced tapping here and in energy saving if you want that you can do it all on the fly it adjusts the fan profiles so if you want it to be a little bit more quiet put it in the energy saving so that is the most useful part now the touch screen in itself does work pretty well good I don't really have any issues with it you can see the RAM usage there the Storage storage temperature CPU CPU temperature and the current load of it there and the information on the arc graphics now if you plug in an external GPU it will still show the integrated cuz that's the way it's set up and there isn't at the time of this video any software to configure these little widgets and have them set to say something else I hope that is coming in the future down here our upload and download speeds the current RPM of the fan this is the brightness for the screen we have volume controls this is semi-useful although I normally just use my uh keyboard shortcuts and if you tap on that little USB icon it lets you know the uh layout of the ports and everything the front ports and then the rear ports of it and if you tap in here uh you get some different things like you got the clock if you want to turn that on you can go over and change the language in this screen and if I go back again we have the layout you can set different layouts so there is a few things on there it is always on I haven't found a way to turn it off if you didn't want it uh but you can lower that brightness right down to almost not even see it okay so that's one way to kind of get rid of it so all up it's a little useful widget screen but I don't really think we needed this but it does make it different from the competition so mini form did send me this to which is the portable monitor now I didn't really expect much out of this and I thought you know it probably won't be that amazing it won't be that good but I am surprised it's a good portable monitor and I'll tell you why because the resolution is I think decent for the size so 15.6 in that's a 16x9 aspect ratio resolution is 2560 by 1440 and the best part 165 htz although the advertising material does State 144 HZ and I'm just using a type-c cable here from our Mini PC to the portable monitor now the touch accuracy does does seem to be very good it's fully laminated it's a really nice screen so it's like getting a screen for a quality laptop that you can get additional of course you have to buy this is something they do sell separate but I thought that I would just briefly feature it here in the video because it is actually quite nice and I'm surprised by it now brightness goes up to 400 nits it's got a color color accuracy of uh E2 HDR supported and it's IPS and also low blue light filter built-in speakers they're only one watt each uh times two so there's two of them and they sound pretty bad they're not really that good that's a downside to it the speakers are what can you expect from a portable monitor they're not really that good but I like the touch accuracy brightness of it and that refresh rate so it would even be good for gamers gaming on it in order to make this video not crazy long I'm not focusing too much on the egpu support so that's why OCC link and this is an RTX 4090 that I got specifically just for this video and a little bit of testing it's a beast of a GPU very expensive but it's just to show you best case scenario really of what this can do now I have a very cheap oculink adapter here now this I got off Amazon and it simply just plugs into the PCI slot of the GPU you need to plug in a power supply of course and you've got your oculink cable that you then plug in and I had no trouble setting this up it was just that bio setting that I showed you that you have to change make sure you set that otherwise the oculink port does not work so that is one option for oculate external gpus you can use what a lot of people do and that is thunderbolts and that would be USB 4 and this is a cheap adapter that I got quite some time ago from AliExpress I'm sorry I don't even know the name of it or anything but it does kind of work well and I'll briefly very briefly show you the kind of differences you can expect between Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 versus oculink and it is huge it makes a big difference in games more than synthetic benchmarks and now a benchmark that is an in-game one and this is for Assassin's Creed Valhalla now I've set it to 1080p High preset now I'm using the high preset because I'm testing that same preset at 4K later with an external GPU so with the integrated Graphics you can see the result of the inbuilt Benchmark is not wonderful I wouldn't call this playable you want to lower the resolution probably down to 7 20p however testing out that MSI 4090 overclock version with Thunderbolt 4 this same exact test with the high preset bit now at 4K got 89 frames per second with Thunderbolt 4 or us4 right then with the oculink same exact GPU 138 frames per second massive difference this is why if you're going to be gaming and you're using an external GP you really want to use an oculink egpu set up and not Thunderbolt 4 until we get Thunderbolt 5 so those results are huge very different this Title Here is called the last Epoch and it's not a very demanding game I do have a TP to 1080p cuz that's where I want a game hopefully I know that the radon 780m handles it quite a bit better at 1080P and I have it on the low preset for the visuals and it's doing okay around 50 frames second but it does dip down you can see now when there a lot of enemies on screen that frame rate is going to suffer a little bit but overall I consider for this style of game this to be playable and that was a huge lag just then I don't know what caused that but that doesn't normally happen but overall not too bad here the Witcher 3 this is at 1080p on the low preset is struggling you can see at this resolution not looking so great down to 39 9 frames per second it's got a lot of different light sources to render here and the sun is rising up at the moment too so not great let's try 720p now that is a a big difference now at 720p you can see it is getting 60 frames per second which is really where you want to be gaming especially with a style of game such as The Witcher 3 rise of the Tomb Raider set 2 1080p on the lowest preset let's run the ingame benchmark see what the result is clearly there is a little bit of GPU throttling it's not holding the top clock maybe if I increase the power limit because certainly the thermal seem to be all right at the moment when gaming I could improve that result there and hopefully lessen that throttling so I topped out at 53 frames per second I saw it pulling 40 WS the ark Graphics but it didn't always hold that top turbo but not a bad result for 1080p on the lowest preset on to The Thermals now so it does thermal throttle according to HW info gets up to 95° C this is during all my stress tests and everything that I've been doing and that's kind of I hate to say it but it is it's normal really for these kind of smaller form fact uh little mini PCS with these kind of chipset so it'll peek at that but as you saw during the gaming the theral are pretty good they're normally in like the mid kind of 60s and sometimes in the late 50s which is not bad at all now I've been using the performance power level so that is the 65 wats Peak that it gets up to so if you're running on the balanced it won't be as hot as this you won't be seeing these kind of thermals and I've been using that performance fan mode which is a little louder so here's a sample of it in the fan mode performance which is the loudest and stressed out with a stress test so this is worst case scenario finally Linux now to try and keep things short I didn't end up doing a screen capture but yes Linux does work on this and you're able to run it you have to disable the secure boot so Olaf it's a Mini PC and a new brand that is very interesting this has a lot of tech in it and the connectivity absolutely fantastic 5 GB lamp ports two of them Wi-Fi 7 I don't even have a Wi-Fi 7 router yet because can't justify the price of them uh considering the benefits that I'm going to get I don't really think it's worth it just yet but maybe in the future I'll be testing that out still future prooof very good the touchcreen it is nice to have to see some of the stats but I don't really think it's absolutely necessary however on the Fly changing the power limit is the most useful feature of it to change the power limit the fan profile so if you're sick of hearing the fan in the performance mode being a little loud then just drop it into the Eco or the balanced and it really really chops down on the fan noise speaking of which it's not bad in the balanced mode in performance you do hear it a little more it's certainly not the loudest Mini PC PC that I've tested that I have covered but it isn't the quietest either I find it to be acceptable it's not an offensive noise now upgradeability I would rate as being um average because it's got a very small 20230 sized SSD slot that is free and those ssds they are both low and speed and well overpriced 2 terab ones that I've just briefly looked at from say cors here or something costing around about 380 sorry €280 downright too expensive and yes this is an expensive model so the downside is really that probably the price of it which I don't know yet exactly but I've got my guesstimate and I'm pretty sure it's not going to be a super cheap unit especially with that Ultra 91 185h now the integrated Graphics is a big step up over Iris XE from Intel but it still falls short in some games like for example compared to well the current top dog of integrated Graphics which is still the radon 780m from AMD a little bit better so I'd love to see an AMD version of this Mini PC I think would be really good oculink performance so what I saw testing out at least Assassin's Creed Valhalla was a huge difference going from 89 frames per second from the fixed in-game Benchmark using Thunderbolt or USB 4 to then having the RTX 490 breathing a lot better with bandwidth having a lot more versus the say in theory 40 GBS per second with USB 4 but it's only really about like 35 because there's some Thunderbolt overheads in the usb4 overhead and then the ocul link being 63 GBS per second it did a lot better it got then an average with the exact same settings 4K of 139 frames per second now I do apologize for not having many link or Thunderbolt tests and comparisons and all the uh barographs and everything like that I didn't want this video to be too long it already is far too long but if there is the demand for it if this video does well then I may consider doing a more in-depth look at Thunderbolt ocul link with this unit here and this GPU uh that I did get for this video here all up this Mini PC offers a lot it's high-end it's going to be expensive their touch screen is also very good the portable touch screen here one of the best that I've seen L it's certainly going to replace my old 1080p touchcreen I have with a matte coating the only thing is it's glossy so it's quite reflective but I like the brightness and it can run just off a type c Port so that is the Atom Man X7 TI thanks a lot for watching this review\n"