**CPU Utilization: A Gaming PC in Disguise?**

I recently purchased a device called the Val Express, which I thought would be a great addition to my gaming setup. However, upon closer inspection, it became clear that this little system isn't designed to run PUBG or other demanding games. The only reason it's listed as "gaming" in its product listing is because the seller was keyword baiting.

**A Terrible Gaming Experience**

Unfortunately, my expectations were not met. The device struggled to run even simple games, with massive stutters, low frame rates, and input lag. Network drops also plagued me, some of which lasted over a minute, making it challenging just to stay alive outside of the Zone. This was running way more in line with what I was expecting.

**Emulation: A Silver Lining?**

On a brighter note, I decided to use the Val Express for emulation instead. I purchased a controller called the How Pad, which is designed for classic gaming. The device should be able to run emulated games with very little problem. The How Pad has a tiny LCD screen and comes with instructions.

**Setting Up the How Pad**

After setting up the How Pad, I discovered that it has a unique layout. The keys are arranged in an arcade-style layout, but the design feels unintuitive at first glance. However, once you get used to it, it becomes easier to navigate. The device also comes with a spare switch and a USB cable.

**Playing Games with the How Pad**

Initially, I had some trouble registering key inputs with the How Pad, particularly for left and right movements. This was due to the design of the controller, which can't register those two inputs at the same time. However, this is not a major issue.

**Conclusion: A Gaming PC in Disguise?**

In conclusion, while the Val Express struggled as a gaming device, it showed promise as an emulation machine. The How Pad controller, although designed for classic gaming, has its quirks and could benefit from some design improvements. Nevertheless, with a bit of tweaking, this device can still provide a decent gaming experience.

**What We Learned Today**

Today's video taught us that anything can be a gaming PC if you lower your standards enough. With that in mind, I hope you enjoyed this video and will consider subscribing to the channel for more content.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ennow according to AliExpress, this unassuming little package is the best selling gaming PC  on the platform... Hmmmm. But you know what else is the best today's video sponsor brilliant.org  brilliant is where you learn by doing with thousands of interactive lessons in math  data analysis programming and AI with brilliant content crafted by professionals from these fancy  places you can build your critical thinking skills through problem solving brilliant  new thinking and code course for example is a brilliant way to build a strong foundation in  writing robust programs so start your daily journey to developing a new skill using the  brilliant link down below for three full 30 days and you'll also get 20% off an annual premiumsubscription now the system in this pack pack cost $170 Canadian dollar which kind of  explains why it's the best selling gaming system on AliExpress but it doesn't explain the gaming  part of it so um yeah let's open it up and have a look oh really I thought it was a massivePC so they're clearly very excited about its size because I mean it's  all they have to talk about on the box there's nothing on this side on the  back we do get some more Mini PC and then no information about what the specific one  in this box is so we're going to have to fire it up to find out oh yeah let's open it upfurther wow that PC really is mini that's tiny and it doesn't weigh anything either but first let's  have a look at the accessories that comes with W this system just needs a 2.5 amp power brick  that is very low power and then as is often the case with these mini PCS we get a Vasa mount on  it so that you can mount it to the back of your monitor and we get a short HDMI cable for thatapplication it looks like a bootleg Max studio it is very plasticky but you can tell that it  really wants to look like an Apple product even with how the ventilation is implemented  in the base but I'm not mad you I to mind me some poverty Apple that is some real flimsy  housing though now in terms of the front we have our power button which is kind of lame on the  side it's got three HDMI ports which makes this really interesting for people who want to power  a bunch of displays for as cheaply as possible and in an act of symmetry on the other side we  have our USB 3 ports and on the back there's dual ethernet that's very interesting in terms of iio  this is a fascinatingly set up Mini PC which definitely has use cases although going by the  form factor I'm kind of assuming gaming isn't going to be one of them although we'll we'll  find a way to turn this into a cool gaming experience later in the video wow this is  a wildly terrible arcade peripheral now aside from its minute Dimensions another thing that  makes this PC interesting is that it's got a Celeron n100 in it one of Intel's newer loser  tier CPUs one that I've not tested before on the channel I'm very curious to see how it performs  with its all ecore layout cuz maybe it is a gaming Beast now we'll find out soon enough  but before we do that let's jump to the Future and crack open this Mini PC to see if it's inherited  some other app traits opening up the little firebat seems relatively straightforward it  seems like it's just these four screws one of which is hiding under a quality control stickerthere we go oh and then aside from a tiny fan we just get some plastic Cod pie then  pops off way more easily than this bit did and then under there we've got a very cute little  motherboard which can also just slide out of the way under that oops oh that was the power button  uh but under that we've got our Wi-Fi antenna and the little Coss battery and when you flip the mobo  around it's clear Tim Cook didn't have his grubby little Ms on this system cuz we've got upgradable  storage and under that is also a replaceable Wi-Fi card with that I think we can still godeeper that is such a cute little heat pipe with tiny heat sink next to that  it does seem like we even have some contact with power deliveryhere we lift that off oo lots of thermalpaste and that's what our chip endowed with four ecores looks  like M what a beauty oh the other bit of cooling was touching some soldered down  Ram as supposed to power delivery so at least Tim Cook approves of some of thisdesign oh it's so cute andlittle get a little LED hey fire bat and here's our little bber mini PC running a  remarkably clean install of Windows 11 not much VD to speak of let's quickly control alt delete  in here and have a look up in our bent corner of our OLED panel and our little Celeron is already  being choked out just running Windows that's a very good sign although that's probably due to  update processes yeah it is Windows update suck in and dry so I'm going to leave it for a while  so it can finish being brutal ized by windows and then we'll try the five most popular games  on Steam at the moment on this system to see how it holds up is the gaming system that it very  definitely is a while was an understatement the update processes took so long I died of  old age waiting for it to finish but luckily baby doid can take over and test the gamingperformance this is running at 1080p lowest settings with balanced Fidelity FX as you can  see it's looking real balanced here lots of balance happening frame rate isn't looking  great but quite frankly it is better than I was expecting this is borderline a usable  experience I'm always surprised to see that CS2 seems to handle the depths of frame rate  despair a lot better than CSG go ever did I'm not saying that you should be playing it with  10 frames per second and that you're going to be competitive online or whatever but there's  less input lag maybe it also seems like the Bots are really punishing the little Celeron  it's doing that fun thing where the CPU bottle makes its own igpu but that balance changes  quite a lot as more Bots die but again despite the frame rate and the fact that Fidelity FX  is doing most of the heavy lifting here so it looks pretty terrible but despite  those things it's running quite a bit better than I was expecting those are also some finetemperatures so we've launched Dota 2 here just in the demo hero bit uh because I'm trying to remove  Bots from the equation cuz that really tanks the CPU performance and I refuse to spend an hour  playing against real people on this system but here at 1080p low settings with full render scale  so it's it's rendering at 1080p this actually isn't too bad there's there's nothing really  happening on screen but it's about 60 frames per second let's see what happens to the performance  when we just Spam a bunch of spells yeah okay it's it's not it's not going great but we can  still drop the render resolution I think we'll set it to 70 that's where it was by default I think  even with the lower render resolution we've still got a bit of CPU Headroom ooh fancy so when we do  that that okay this is still not doing great but it feels kind of borderline usable and this is a  game that a lot of people play and I I'd say you can get away with using the system for it you're  not going to be happy about it it's not going to be a good time for you but it's borderlineusable so this is the third most popular game on Steam at the moment running at 1080p am  I doing it right I think so and despite the very intense Graphics happening here we're getting 30  frames per second very playable for some banana clicking action what is this and why are 400,000  people doing it right now well after Googling it it turns out it's essentially an nft scancool Destiny 2 took ages to get running it kept crashing initially for some reason but then I  redownloaded the game on the little PC's SSD which fixed it because Destiny 2 is all worried  about cheaters you can't have any overlays on it other than the steam one and I think  as far as I read on the internet the Nvidia performance overlay also works but we don't have  an Nvidia GPU so that gray 23 frames per second is going to be our best bet here unfortunately yes  that's a lot better okay now we can actually see it oh this is looking so beautiful look at that  detail looks like the metaverse up in here it's awesome so despite us getting about 30 frames per  second with our 75% render resolution at 720p the game is kind of more more playable than I  was expecting that's a very good start I wonder what resolution this is at it looks like  it's running at 1440p which would explain the seizures we have to do 1080p even that's going  to be a real struggle oh you always know you've got one hell of a gaming system when you load in  midair being kicked out of the plane wow it is running like it's got lead poisoning this is not  going great okay I think we're going to have to drop the render scale to 70 that's as low  as it'll let us go okay that's helped a little bit now we're fully utilizing the system my lordy 100%  GPU utilization and 100% CPU utilization that's some good teamwork right there but unfortunately  teamwork very much did not make this dream work aside from the terrible visuals massive stutters  low frame rate input lag there were also massive Network drops some of which lasted over a minute  which made just not dying outside of the Zone a challenge in itself so this was running way more  in line with what I was expecting now obviously this little system isn't designed to run pubg  the only reason it's gone gaming in its product listing is because this seller was keyword baiting  but I bought something else of the Val Express which may go very well with the kindor games the  system should be able to run with very little problem emulation it's called the how pad and  it's a control interface that should be awesome for classic gaming there's some instructions for  it our how pad oh look at that it looks different to what I was expecting I was kind of expecting a  joystick on it for some reason there's a tiny little LCD screen over there that's super cute  and it's all kind of mounted in this acrylic plate uh all of the keys I don't know it sounds  quite arcadey and then we've got our start buttons and stuff up here and included in  the box is a square USB to type c cable it also comes with a little spare switch so that if one  of them dies you can replace them that's quite a nice touch briefly looking at the manual it  does all seem wildly unintuitive I don't know my eyes immediately started glazing over while  reading this but I'm sure we can figure it out with that let's get it set up   oh all the keys line up and then the little LCD over here tells you if the key inputs are being  registered and then all there was left to do was download retro arch for some old school gamingaction I'm going to blame the controls even though it's not its fault at all what is interesting is  is that for left and right it can't register those two inputs at the same time which I guess  isn't a huge issue I don't know why this is lay out in the way that it is because of the  size of the buttons when you use your standard keyboard grip you have to reach for stuff which  feels really uncomfortable and then the shoulder triggers are next to the normal Keys which I'm  not sure how that's going to work for PlayStation gaming and whoever made it clearly hasn't learned  their left from their right yet cuz I'm pretty sure that's the wrong way around now I'm sure  a bunch of people are going to tell me that actually DAV the shape makes a lot of sense  cuz it's modeled on the Super Nintendo famon Beast 64 controller from 1978 and actually the fact that  you think that it doesn't feel good it's because you're stupid but this is a terrible layout even  if it is originally based on a thing okay with that little Outburst out the way I will say the  keys do have a nice arcade cabinet feeling to them although even in 2D platforming games like  Mario I feel like a joystick would have worked way better for movement and unless you want to  develop osteoporosis in your hands I wouldn't get anywhere near the shoulder trigger situation  and then in terms of the Mini PC I ran up to PS1 games on it which had ran flawlessly so um yeah  I guess that means you can game on it so with that what did we learn in today's video well  these days anything's a gaming PC as long as you lower your standards enough which brings  me to the end of the video thank you for watching subscribe to the channel if you enjoyed the video  maybe watch another video suggestion will pop up in a second and until the next video bye-bye