Big APU Energy! The All-New S500+ Is A Powerful Ryzen 9 Mini Gaming PC!
# A Comprehensive Review of the More Fine S500 Plus with Ryzen 9 5900 HX APU
## Introduction
Hey, what's going on, everybody? It's eta primepak here again. Today, we're taking a look at a Ryzen 9 5900 HX mini PC that really packs a punch. This is known as the More Fine S500 Plus, and it’s using the Ryzen 9 5900 HX APU. With eight cores, 16 threads, a boost clock up to 4.4 GHz, and built-in Radeon 8 graphics at 2100 MHz, this little mini PC is definitely going to put down some serious power. I've been wanting to get my hands on this for a while due to its form factor and the APU it's using.
## Design and Features
First impressions on the design: it actually looks pretty good. It’s obviously a mini PC, and it’s constructed of aluminum. Inside the box, we also receive a mounting system—a little bracket that can be attached to the bottom of the unit. We’ve got all the mounting hardware we need, cabling for a 2.5-inch SSD or mechanical drive, a 6-foot HDMI cable, and a pretty beefy power supply.
When it comes to these mini PCs, you usually see a 65-watt or maybe a 90-watt power supply if you're lucky. But Morphine has included a 120-watt power supply with this unit. Up front, we have a USB Type-C port that supports display out, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, our power LED indicator, and our power button.
Taking a look at both sides, there’s some ventilation here, and I suspect we’ll need it with this APU because it can draw a lot of wattage. Moving around back, we have our power jack, four USB 2.0 ports (I would’ve loved to see a couple more USB 3.0 or even 3.2 ports back here), but we do have a full-size HDMI port and a full-size DisplayPort. This way, we can get a total of three displays out on this using HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB Type-C up front.
They’ve also included dual Ethernet ports on this PC—one is a one-gigabit port, the other is a 2.5-gigabit port.
## Internal Components
Before we move over to the specs, I wanted to give you a look at the internals here and just see what can be upgraded on this unit. As you can see, we do have a copper heatsink here with a blower-style fan. This is actually a pretty beefy heatsink when it comes to these mini PCs, hopefully keeping it nice and chilly.
Next thing I noticed on the bottom here was an extra M.2 slot. This will support another NVMe drive or we can add an external GPU down the road to this unit. We also have access to pulling the top cover off with two screws on the rear, and from here, you can see that we can access that RAM very easily. It’s running in dual-channel, we have 32 gigabytes here, and another NVMe M.2 SSD. So, we can add a total of two NVMe SSDs and a 2.5-inch drive to this tiny PC.
## Performance Benchmarks
Taking a look at the specs of the S500 Plus for the APU, we’ve got the Ryzen 9 5900 HX—eight cores, 16 threads, base clock at 3.3 GHz with a boost up to 4.6 GHz. This is sold in a couple different variants: you can go bare bones with it (with no storage or RAM) or you can get it up to 64 gigabytes and a one-terabyte NVMe SSD. The RAM is running at 3200 MHz and running in dual-channel, along with the M.2 NVMe slot, you can add a 2.5-inch SSD. It also has Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and it runs Windows out of the box but you could go ahead and install Linux if you want to.
In this video, we’re going to run some benchmarks, test out some PC games, and we’ll move over to a little bit of emulation by the end of this. So, with all that out of the way, let’s go ahead and jump right into Windows 11.
## Gaming Performance
Alright, so here we are. As you can see, we’ve got that Ryzen 9 5900 HX and the built-in Radeon Vega 8 graphics up to 2100 MHz on the 5900HX. This thing is super quick, and I kind of expected it to be eight cores, 16 threads. And when it comes to these Ryzen mini PCs, the first thing I always like to check is the TDP on this CPU. I haven’t changed anything from the BIOS, and this is actually running at about 45 to 50 watts, which is perfect for this little APU.
Through the testing I’ve done so far, I haven’t seen any kind of thermal throttling. I’m sure running Cinebench on this for 10 minutes straight would thermal throttle this little PC, but normal use and gaming—we’re going to keep those clocks on the CPU and GPU. Let me go ahead and run a little bit of a stress test on this GPU, check out those sensors—we’re up to 2100 MHz exactly what we should be running at.
Got my power over here just so we can check this out: 54 watts, and you’ll see it drop back down to around 45. But this is great because with this kind of TDP or this kind of wattage on this APU, we can keep nice clocks on the CPU side of things and we can keep that GPU clock at 2100 MHz indefinitely while we’re playing games.
These 5900 HX APUs are actually really amazing. Time to take a look at some benchmarks. First on the list, we have Geekbench 5 coming in with a really strong single core of 15,37 and multi isn’t looking half bad either at 8,118. Taking a look at some GPU benchmarks, with 3D Mark Night Ray total score here 17,662; Firestrike came in with a 4057; and finally Time Spy with 1630—not bad at all for a mobile chip.
But when it comes down to it, this is a pretty powerful little APU. But now it’s time to move over to some gaming. First up, I definitely wanted to test Elden Ring here it is—at 720p low, we’re getting an average of 44 FPS, really not that bad for a Ryzen APU but I wanted to see if we could take the resolution up just a little bit more so I went up to 900p. We’re still at low settings but we could actually run this at 30FPS.
900p low on this mini PC and I’m not exactly sure how well it’s coming across in a YouTube video that’s been compressed, but uh going from 720p to 900p with a game like this really does make a difference. Next up, we’ve got Skyrim—this is the original version—we’re at high settings, 1080p, looking really good here. I didn’t unlock the FPS or anything like that but we’re running at a constant 60. I haven’t seen it dipped one time while playing this game at high settings.
Taking a look at GTA 5—and in the past month, we’ve actually got a real nice performance boost when it comes to APUs. I mean basically across the board from the 3000 series up to the 5000 series which we have in this PC—we’re at 1080p normal settings and I got an average of 81 FPS out of this game. Definitely some of the best performance that I’ve personally seen out of a Ryzen 5000 series APU so far.
Street Fighter 5 is another one I always like to test—we’re at 1080p high settings, running at 60. Unfortunately, I can’t run Afterburner up in the top left-hand corner but we’re only pulling around 35 watts from this APU while running this at 1080p high.
## Emulation Capabilities
The emulation first up—we have PS2 using PC SX2 Direct X 11 back in, we’re at 1080p with Gran Turismo 4. And I did try 1440 with this but I was getting some stutters here and there—if I turned on a few of the hacks in the emulator, I’m sure I could run this at 1440 but I’d rather run it without any hacks at all and 1080p is smooth as butter.
And of course, we had to test some PS3 with one of those games that does require a pretty beefy CPU to run at full speed—looking really good but you can see that that CPU is being pretty stressed out—we’re at 90 degrees Celsius and it did hit 91 with this emulator. We didn’t hit thermal throttle but it’s getting really close.
## Thermal Management
These are the highest temps I saw while doing any kind of emulation or gaming, but when it comes down to it, it can definitely do these PS3 games for being such a small form factor PC—we’re pushing a lot of wattage into this 5900HX and I was worried about the temps but they’re really not that bad. This is set up the thermal throttle at 95 degrees Celsius, and for emulation and gaming, we didn’t hit it like I mentioned at the beginning—if we stressed that CPU out for more than 10 minutes with all 8 cores and 16 threads, I’m sure we could but on average at idle were around 39 degrees Celsius, average gaming 75, and the max I saw while doing any kind of gaming or emulation was 91 degrees Celsius.
It definitely sounds hot for a bigger desktop PC but we’re working with a very small form factor PC here and we’re pushing a lot of wattage into this APU. And when it comes to fan noise—it’s definitely audible especially when you hit around 71 degrees Celsius. So, while gaming, you will hear this thing spin up—it’s got a blower-style fan in it, it’s not as loud as a gaming laptop with a dedicated GPU but you can hear this. It’s not a totally silent PC.
Whenever I’m doing these mini PC tests, I always have it plugged into a kilowatt meter at the wall so we can see total system power consumption. And at idle, this pulls around 18 watts, average gaming 62, and the maximum I could get this to pull from the wall with the way it’s set up right now was 71 watts. Remember, it comes with that 120-watt power supply and we could pull more but I think we’re right there at the thermal limit of the built-in cooler.
## Conclusion
So yeah, this is definitely a great-performing little mini PC—we’ve got a pretty high-end CPU in here being the 5900HX. It’s still a mobile variant but it’s putting out some really good performance given that we only have an eye GPU and it’s based on Vega clocked at 2100 MHz. This will be a great little machine if you know what you’re getting into—it’s not a 1080p or 4K AAA gaming machine but you can definitely get some gaming out of the way with the chip they have in this PC.
And on their website, they claim that you can connect a GPU over the M.2 slot—if you're interested in checking a video like that out, let me know in the comments below. I think it would be really interesting to pair up a desktop RTX 3060 with this thing but that’s going to wrap it up for this one.
Really appreciate you watching—if you’re interested in learning more about the S500 Plus, I will leave a couple links in the description. And if you want to see more mini PC videos like this, make sure you hit that subscribe button and turn notifications on so you know when I post the next one.
And if there's anything else you want to see running on the S500 Plus, let me know in the comments below—but like always, thanks for watching!
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This article provides a detailed breakdown of the More Fine S500 Plus mini PC with the Ryzen 9 5900 HX APU, covering its design, performance, gaming capabilities, and more.