**Advanced Mini PC: TL50 Review**

The advanced mini PC from Mini's Forum is an impressive device that offers excellent performance and features, despite some minor drawbacks. One of its standout features is its integrated graphics performance, which is significantly improved compared to previous models. The 80-core execution engine and the Iris Xe architecture provide a noticeable boost in performance, allowing for smoother gameplay and better video playback.

The integrated graphics performance is particularly noteworthy, as it allows games like Counter-Strike to run over 100 frames per second, while titles like The Witcher 3 and GTA 5 can be played at 1080p on low settings. This is a significant improvement over the previous generation's integrated UHD graphics, which were struggling to keep up with even light engine titles.

However, it's worth noting that some games, particularly more demanding ones like Cyberpunk, may still struggle to maintain frame rates above 30 FPS, especially when running at higher resolutions. Nevertheless, this is still a significant improvement over the PlayStation 4 in terms of gaming performance.

**Other Features and Upgrades**

In addition to its impressive performance, the TL50 also features other notable upgrades and capabilities. For example, it supports 2.5-inch drive bays, which allow users to add additional storage capacity. This is a welcome feature for those who need more storage space without having to sacrifice too much portability.

Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of the TL50's design is its lack of upgradable RAM support. The unit comes with 12GB of fast DDR4 RAM, but due to the size and placement of the heatsink, it's not possible to upgrade or remove the RAM. This may be a disappointment for some users who want more flexibility in their mini PC.

**Thermal Performance**

One of the major concerns with the TL50 is its thermal performance. The unit can peak at temperatures as high as 99°C Celsius, which triggers thermal throttling and reduces performance. While this only occurs during intense benchmarking sessions, it's still a concern for users who plan to push their mini PC to its limits.

Fortunately, the fan profiles are well-designed and quiet, with the fans only kicking in when needed. However, if Mini's Forum could adjust the fan profiles to kick in at lower temperatures, it may help prevent thermal throttling and improve overall performance.

**Conclusion**

Overall, the TL50 is an impressive mini PC that offers excellent performance and features. While it has some minor drawbacks, such as its lack of upgradable RAM support and thermal issues, these are not enough to detract from its overall value and capabilities. With its fast integrated graphics, 2.5-inch drive bays, and quiet operation, the TL50 is a great option for users who need a compact yet powerful mini PC.

As with any pre-production unit, there's always room for improvement, and Mini's Forum has stated that they're working to address some of the issues mentioned above before the device is released. With further tweaking and refinement, the TL50 could become an even more formidable competitor in the world of mini PCs. For now, it remains a great option for users who want a compact yet powerful computing solution.

**Disclaimer**

The TL50 reviewed here was a pre-production unit provided by Mini's Forum as part of their pre-orders program. While the device has been thoroughly tested and evaluated, some minor issues may still be present, and users should be aware that this review is based on a non-final product.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enChris here back taking a look at some mini pcs so this is an intel powered one  with 11th gen in it and it's from a company called Minisforum they sent this out to me  to review it's their elite mini tl50 now the tl50 has the core i5 1135 g7 and iris xe graphics with  its 80 executional cores which is a big step up for integrated graphics performance especially  coming from intel and it's a welcomed change now this model here has 12 gigabytes a ddr4 ram  512 gigabyte ssd which is mvme it ships with windows 10 pro has dual gigabit lan ports  on here wi-fi six which is the ax200 card from intel with bluetooth five it can also take  two additional 2.5 inch drives on this inside the box you will find a guide we have a bracket here  and two cables for our sata 3 drive so it will take two 2.5 inch drives which is really good  not a lot of mini pcs can do that here is our visa bracket and some screws to mount that behind a tv  or monitor then we have an hdmi cable our power supply this one is rated to 65 watts  and it is using a type c connector so a little different normally we have the dc  round barrel plug but not this time and then an eu power cable so depending on the model you order  what region that will be a us uk or euro plug the back here is where we have the bulk of our  connections so two usb twos two usb threes gen one 2.5 gigabit lan and another 2.5 gigabit lan so  very fast lan on this and two of them which is great so you could use this say as a file server  a server now i've got display port this is 1.4 a and hdmi 2.0 so both of these are 4k 60 our  kingzington lock slot right there and then the 9 volts 65 watts total power in there for that  with the type c power supply that is supplied and we have power armor status led behind it two  microphones so these are dual ray mics another two usb 3.0 gen1 ports here and this is type c usb 3.1  and that's display out 4k 60. so in total we get three 4k 60 displays that this can run  which is great and then we've got our separate audio jacks in there and here on this side there  is an intake vent a reset this is for the bios if you mess up any of the settings you can simply  reset it from there you don't have to open it up disconnect the battery anything like that  and another intake vent there so this part around the outside that is made out of alloy and then the  top of it here so there's a gap around the outside that is for ventilation this is plastic and our  wireless antennas this is the wi-fi six that it has they are stuck to the top of this plastic lid  here for maximum signal reception and then turning it over you can see here some more vents on it  and where you slot in that visa mount so you can mount this on the back of a tv  and then removing the rear lid is where we can gain access to our mvme drive and if you  remove it underneath is our wireless card now if you're wondering what about the 2.5  inch drives so you can install two of them that is possible which is really good  and you can put them both on here okay there's vents there and you plug them in just here for  the sake of three drives but what's missing in my box at least is the screws so the mounting bracket  goes over them holds them into place and you're supposed to screw it down here but those screws  are sadly missing and when it comes to further upgrades with this so if you do remove the main  motherboard i believe on the other side there is no sodium slot the ram this is configured with  12 gigabytes of ram that is soldered onto the motherboard and that's it okay that's the way  it is configured no upgrade sadly with this one when it comes to ram first up our buyer so  there's not a lot to show you unfortunately there is no advanced settings tab which would have been  perfect that we could go along and tweak some advanced settings there increase power limits  but minis forum don't want us doing that unfortunately so you can see there that this  is the tiger lag so the core i5 1135 g7 maximum turbo is 4.2 gigahertz it's a quad core it has  the iris xc graphics and it's a 10 nanometer chip and you can see the ram speeds there  uh they are quick so this should definitely aid and benefit that integrated graphics which i'll be  testing later on in this review so under security there are secure boot things we can change here  uh the storage security configuration and the boot menu here is the one that allows us to at  least tweak a couple of things here so just the wake settings network stack configuration and if  you intend to run this as a server file server you want to change this one the ac power loss policy  to make sure it's always power on for you so it's going to power up  now on first boot you will be greeted with the following pre-installed language packs and this  is good that means we don't have to waste time downloading any of these extra languages so i'll  skip ahead i won't go through that setup part of course everyone knows that and it's incredibly  boring so this mini pc it does come with windows 10 pro and you can see i ram the 12 gigabytes  there which runs at 3.7 gigahertz which is rather fast now they have dedicated a little bit 300  megabytes to the iris xe graphics and i just bring this menu up here take a little performance here  you can see that the memory speed very high but it does actually scale down it clocks itself  down i've been seeing it doing this quite a lot and that would just be saving on energy  is one of the reasons it's doing that so it's not actually sitting at that top speed  the entirety of the time you're using it no it actually does fluctuate a little bit there so  the drive on board this one is the kingston and it is nvme and you can see these speeds here then  i mean they're not bad definitely faster than sata3 so you can install an additional  2 sata 3 drives if you wanted to do so you could even run a sata 3 as a boot drive  and use the nvme slot to nvme to external gpu if you wanted to do that now  for a pcie drive these are not the fastest it's definitely no samsung pm 981 or a samsung evo  drive so if you wanted faster that is definitely possible there for upgrades if you wanted to  install say a terabyte drive there so i wanted to point out as a couple of other things a nice  little pleasant surprise here that we can run uh with the display out at least here with my lg cx  that i have i'm able to run 4k at 120 hertz but it is 8 bit when it's doing that okay 120 hertz there  and it looks very smooth and i can not really see the difference between the 8 and 10 bit there with  it and the main thing is getting that 120 hertz if your 4k display supports it is really good to have  now xtu can we under volt we can't okay i tried to install it this is the latest version of xtu  maybe there's a way around this i know that there are some forums there's some shortcut or  some sort of hack you can do to try and get it to run but it looks at this point anyway that uh no  we're not able to undervolt sandy with this particular processor so benchmarks that i've  run cinebench have just finished this one up and i mean it's okay this result i did expect to be a  little bit better uh just short of well just over 5 500 now i was expecting this to be over 6 000  now i noticed that it got very hot and i'll get onto the thermals soon and that is why this score  is a little bit lower so some thermal throttling took place it was bouncing around the turbos  between 2.9 and 3.7 across all of the four cores and that's why that score could have been better  there and the same goes for geekbench five that it did actually touch on thermal throttling for  a little bit and that's why this score i believe could be better here so slightly disappointing  i mean the single core score there for a 4.2 gigahertz turbo and the multi-core for a quad core  with the eight threads it isn't bad i mean don't get me wrong it's not bad but i was hoping for  better there and the iris xc graphics this is the opencl score which is is a big step up from the  intel hd graphics that we normally saw at least on the previous generations like the uh the 10th  gen and the 8th gen and things that's a nice step up there too with that one  and then on thermal so so far this is what i'm seeing here with the thermals  98 degrees is what it has peaked at in fact 99 degrees and that's just after doing some stress  testing so yeah it's it's not looking good the fan is very good the way it scales up when it's hot  and then it just disappears once it cools down the fan doesn't remain on and then becomes very quiet  so it's not a allowed machine when it's not being pushed hard but when it's being pushed hard it's  reasonably loud i wouldn't call it actually loud compared to my gaming  laptop it's nothing but it does make a bit of noise and you will hear it  but sad to see this the thermal throttling is taking place hitting 99 degrees isn't exactly good  i know it is a 28 watt processor maybe i've got a bad thermal pace job but i just don't think the  cooler is really up to it maybe they need to put a beefier cooler in this one so general performance  of this particular mini pc is very very good it feels very quick very snappy everything loads up  fast start menu that doesn't lag so there's no point me going over what i would do on the more  low end machines like say the jasper lake that i've just reviewed or the previous gemini legs  now the file playback very good this is a super demanding file here and it plays  it with absolute ease this one is hevc 10 bit 4k not a problem and even 4k 60 sony swordsmith file  this one very very good again no problems with this whatsoever really quick and wherever i  go it just doesn't drop a frame there same with youtube performance again really good  not a problem now onto video editing this is with adobe premiere pro 4k timeline here that does have  some 100 megabit files in there so i noticed that with the preview i want to keep it on a quarter  because otherwise it seems sometimes to be not laggy but it's dropping frames just a little there  so what i'll do now is an export and we'll see how long it's going to take for one minute of footage  now this is something that i normally always test out on these particular mini pcs and it shouldn't  take long at all for one minute of footage should just be over about one minute especially now we've  got the 80 executional calls with the iris xc so the preset i use here is the youtube one  4k and i'll just adjust this now to one minute of footage and we'll see how long it's going to take  okay so one minute right there hit start and there's a delay of about two seconds  and export right here and it should be able to power right through this  and that is actually looking like yes definitely going to be under one minute that is very  quick thanks to the iris xe graphics and we just have a few seconds left so once the bar disappears  completely 100 that's gone i'll hit pause so you're looking at approximately about 48 seconds  for one minute of footage so we're now under one minute in code times  for a quad core this is good so this is where the 10 nanometers and especially the iris xc  does pull ahead from the intel uhd integrated graphics that we had on the previous generations  it's just so much quicker at exporting video using that intel quick sync now for gaming performance  so this is where we should see a really nice step up performance because we've now got well the  80 execution of course iris pro graphics and the faster memory that should be helping out a lot so  this is 1080p on the medium sort of to normal low settings here and it's looking good look at this  60 frames per second so that is a huge step up this is it's not quite double the performance  of before i mean the uhd graphics would have been approximately 30 40 frames per second right now so  that is it's a nice bump up a very nice bump up here and performance in fact it would have been  lower than that it would have really been about 30 frames per second 1080p because i used to  test it out at 720p so overall i'm happy with this increase here  and it is quite quiet when gaming right now there's a bit of tearing coming through on the  screen there so ideally you would put vsync on of course and that would avoid that problem there the  witcher 3 now so this is running in the mid 40s average 1080p on the low settings preset i think  most people would run it on low settings because you put it on a medium setting then it does get  into the mid 30s late 30s so not ideal but this frame rate is excellent this is really good so  this is around the amd vega kind of performance and sometimes even a little bit better at times  and the thermals holding up well it's only around 64 degrees here so when gaming the  thermals are fine it's just when you run things like cinebench and benchmarks and stress tests  it will hit 99 degrees but for the normal kind of computing and the gaming the thermals are fine so  great to see these big leaps now in the integrated graphics performance it's well overdue with intel  especially and they're finding of course on 10 nanometers away from 14 nanometers which took them  again like a lifetime to get on to the smaller process counter-strike now so this is 1080p  lowest possible settings and the average frame rate here is well over a hundred and if you  even have a high refresh monitor you could take advantage of this but of course i would keep it on  the lowest setting so you don't really want to go whoops grenade ouch you do not really want to put  it on the high settings here you want to keep that frame rate really really high as possible so the  iris xc is a huge stair part with the 80 execution of cores with this model here  this performance i'm really happy with i think for integrated graphics on such a small little mini pc  this is really good well where he is he's waiting around here somewhere hiding  ah i got me where was he no idea ah hiding there i completely missed him anyway that's  enough of my terrible counter-strike gameplay and lastly our linux support so i don't have  wireless for some reason now normally it's detected this intel ax 200 card with this  particular build here i've got of linux mint the new version uh then recently released and  it doesn't seem to want to work with it i don't really know why so i'll probably have  to try out another linux mint distro but i do believe linux should be able to run on this  just fine considering i've gotten this far it's just a minor driver issue that's all okay so all  up there are quite a few areas of improvements with this particular model here so we've got the  2.5 gigabit lan that's really good to see and two of them if you were going to be running say  a router file server or server this is a mini pc that you could do with that those lan ports there  definitely it's something that a lot of people do actually look for to have the extra lan port now  this one it does power on if it loses the power state if you set it in the buyer's setting but  unfortunately the bias options are really locked down no advanced settings which is a shame there  now the integrated graphics performance very good thanks to the 80 execution of cores the faster ram  it's definitely helping and of course the iris xc performance that architecture  over say the 10th gen even iris xc is a big step up over the integrated uhd graphics that we  previously saw which was downright well terrible performance for integrated graphics so games like  counter strike which are light engine titles can run over 100 frames per second and the witcher 3  and gta 5 and most games out there on 1080p on low settings will be playable apart from maybe some of  those super demanding new titles like cyberpunk i think will still be around 30 frames per second  you'll probably want to run that one at 720p but it will actually be well playable and probably  better than the playstation 4 at least with that so that then brings me on to other things that  are good about it well 2.5 inch drive support is good that we can add the two drives but my unit  has no screws for them for some reason they're not in the box but that's not a massive thing  i can easily source those but still it should be there and then the cons so thermals you knew i was  going to say that right the thermals it peaks at 99 degrees celsius celsius there triggers thermal  throttling and that's not good to see at all now it only happens when stressing it out with  benchmarks really so cinebench geekbench it would peak to about 95 but cinebench really pushed it  hard and then it throttled and the cause dropped down across all of the four cores so instead  of holding i think it was 3.7 it was holding originally it dropped right down to 2.9 affecting  greatly the performance there so the benchmarks could have been a little bit better i believe now  if just mini's forum they adjust the fan profiles on this one i think the fan profiles are good  i like the way that as soon as the temperatures drop that fan rpm just completely goes away and  it's quite a silent unit you only hear it when you're pushing it hard really but i believe  if they set a lower point a trigger point for when it starts to get warm so if it kicks in the fan at  a higher rpm a little sooner it probably wouldn't peak to the 99 degrees for short bursts at least  anyway but with the long continuous loads it will thermal throttle so that's really the con for me  the other one is upgradable ram support sadly non-existent with this unit it is 12 gigabytes  of some very fast ddr4 ram but because of the size of the heatsink in this you simply cannot have the  two sodium slots that we're used to seeing in these mini pcs from them so they are missing  so you cannot just go and remove the ram or add another stick or i want to have 32 gigabytes in  this unfortunately not with this one i would have liked to have seen definitely that upgradable ram  and maybe an mvme slot an additional one instead of having the two 2.5 inch drive base but don't  get me wrong it's still great to have that option to add in just a huge capacity of storage  so that's the full story there of the tl50 from mini's forum i think it's good in some areas and  it's just really the major one which is the the thermals on this i do hope that they can somehow  improve maybe the heat sink on this or the fan uh before it is released because this  is a pre-production unit it's currently on what they call our pre-orders pre-sale at the moment  there so thank you so much for watching and i do hope to see you back in the next one bye for now\n"