**A Review of the Mini PC's Performance**

It's absolutely amazing to see this mini PC round around 30 frames per second on average. This is due to its two performance cores, which work in tandem to provide smooth performance. Additionally, the presence of really fast DDR5 RAM and a power limit of 28 Watts also contribute to its excellent performance. The use of a fixed RPM fan noise means that it remains constant and doesn't fluctuate, resulting in good thermals.

The mini PC's cooling system is particularly noteworthy, as Chewie has set up an efficient cooling solution that keeps the components at a safe temperature. This allows for smooth operation without overheating, which can be a major issue with compact devices like this. As a result, the fan noise is minimal and not offensive to the ear. The power limit of 28 Watts may seem low, but it's actually quite reasonable given the device's performance capabilities.

**Hardware Information**

When examining the hardware specifications, it becomes clear that this mini PC is capable of impressive feats. The I3-1215U processor is a decent choice for this form factor, and its ability to handle demanding tasks like video editing and gaming is impressive. Furthermore, the presence of Wi-Fi 6E and gigabit LAN connectivity means that users can stay connected at high speeds.

**Upgrade Limitations**

One notable limitation of this mini PC is its inability to be upgraded in certain areas. The RAM is a fixed 16GB, which may not be sufficient for some users' needs. However, it's worth noting that the device's compact design and cooling system mean that upgrading or repairing internal components can be challenging.

**Real-World Performance**

In real-world use, this mini PC has proven itself to be a capable and efficient device. It handles demanding tasks like video editing with ease, playing GTA 5 at 1080p without any issues. The device also supports 8K resolution and can run multiple displays out of the box.

**Thermal Performance**

The thermal performance of this mini PC is another area where it shines. Chewie's clever design has resulted in minimal fan noise and excellent cooling, which keeps the components at a safe temperature even during demanding use.

**Software Compatibility**

When it comes to software compatibility, this mini PC is a good choice for users who need to run Linux. The device supports Wi-Fi 6E and gigabit LAN connectivity, as well as USB 4 spec, making it an excellent option for those looking for a compact and efficient solution. Additionally, the open-source drivers ensure that the device works seamlessly with popular software packages.

**Conclusion**

Overall, this mini PC is a great choice for anyone looking for a compact and efficient solution for their computing needs. Its impressive performance capabilities, combined with its quiet fan design and excellent cooling system, make it an attractive option for users who want to stay productive on-the-go. While there are some limitations to the device's upgradeability, they are largely outweighed by its numerous strengths.

The 16GB of DDR5 RAM is a nice touch, and while it can't be upgraded, it provides plenty of capacity for most users' needs. The device's ability to run multiple displays out of the box and support 8K resolution also make it an excellent option for those who need to stay productive at high resolutions.

Overall, I'm impressed with this mini PC, and I think Chewie has done a great job in designing a compact and efficient solution that meets the needs of most users.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enChuwi is back with another Mini PC now this model retails for 350 US Dollars approximately and the  call box from them I think is actually a good little mini PC and don't let the core I3 naming  put you off as it did me because you'd think that oh core I3 that's going to be terrible right well  actually it's not bad because it's 12g and core I3 so we do have the Intel UHD Graphics it's got six  cores eight threads it's got ddr5 Ram 16 gigabytes worth this configuration they sent out to me with  512 gigabytes of storage it has Wi-Fi 6E gigabit Lan and even a USB 4 Port that does support  external gpus power delivery and it can also run a for example 8K TV at 30 Hertz if you happen to  have one of those which most people don't but hey for future proofing it's still good to have  you can also install a 2.5 inch drive and it can run two displays in fact sorry three to display so  pretty impressive for the price point and as I see from the performance it's actually a good little  mini PC included with the core box you will find a user manual we do have a product inspection report  a warranty card our power supply here and the power supply cable we then get a sata 3 cable with  the power there to it and some screws four of them for a 2.5 inch Drive they're using a brand power  supply hunt key I have seen many of these before and it is a 90 watt power supply and let's have  a look at the build of it now so we have middle on the top here but it's just this part here and then  on the reverse side the rest of it is Plastics you see on the underside this is the metal we've got  here looks like there's two fans there but in fact the cooler and the fan is right in the middle and  I'll show you that shortly when we take a look at the internals two rubber feet right here front of  it this again is plastic our power about it now I like the look of it it's kind of like a small  Tower PC look and because it's a little bit larger than some of the other mini PCS plenty of space  inside for cooling which is good so we do have a vent here on that side vent on the other so again  that's a positive there having all the ventilation and again here you can see another vent so all the  ports on the back we've got two separate 3.5 millimeters so audio out to audio in this is a  USB 4 Port here so it's 40 gigabits per second it supports DisplayPort out 8K 30 4K 120 I am able to  run with this which is good with my LG CX and it does also support power delivery and that again is  great so if you don't want to use the DC in which they provide then you can just use type c gigabit  Lan Port only kind of understandable because they are trying to make this a more affordable  mini PC here and it's priced about this version with the 16 gigabytes to RAM and 512 gigabyte  SSD around 350 US Dollars which is not bad at all considering it's got the six cores eight  threads and the Wi-Fi ax 201 so Wi-Fi six in there and then you get USB for support so it's pretty  good HDMI 2.0 DisplayPort 1.4 a and four USB 3.0 ports unfortunately not 3.2 that's all right again  because of the price it's understandable then to gain access to the internals is very easy so  we have the four screws here it simply just pops up which is great and you'll see on the underside  that is where we do have the area four of course a 2.5 inch drive so be it a spindle hard drive or  an SSD you can add that and that gives you great expandability when it does come to having well  slower slightly slow of course than pcie but a good choice there for expandable storage and now  you can see where we do have our cooler very large cooler the alloy there all the fins and our fan so  for maintenance it's going to be quite easy to clean that then looking a little closer you can  see the Theta connectors and the power connector there so we've actually got a second set but  there is no room in here looks like they could have actually put two side by side but for some  reason maybe costs they decided not to actually do that you can see the SSD this is our wireless chip  right there so the Intel ax 201 as mentioned so that is Bluetooth five support that it does have  I think it's Bluetooth 5.1 off the top of my head with a course Wi-Fi six they're fast transfers up  to about in theory 2.4 gigabits per second but I only get around about 1.3 with my Wi-Fi 6E router  now if you look through the fins there I can just see some of the RAM chips right there so ddr5  sold it onto the motherboard no Ram upgrades and no Wi-Fi card upgrades with this model  and here we have our bios menu so it looks like it's completely locked down to us if you tap  Escape however you get into this where then you have all the advanced settings so this is great to  see I won't go into this in detail because a lot of it's just way over my head and everyone else's  head and a little bit boring to be honest but we've got this overclocking performance menu now  I haven't messed about with this you could enable it you could go in here and see if you wanted to  undervolt for example on the processor you can do that you can tweak quite a few things you can  see there is well really pretty much every single option you can think of is in here which is really  good to see a lot of Manufacturers just block this out they don't want people going in here of course  now you could even go over to the graphics and I believe you might be able to tweak that up I'm not  too sure if it is actually locked down remember this isn't a k processor at all it's only a core  I3 but these core i3s as you'll see later they're so much better than what the previous generations  were now you see Thunderbolt here one is that there well usb4 does have the Thunderbolt so it's  basically like Thunderbolt 3 and you can just use an external GPU it's all enabled it's all working  which is good uh some of these I definitely don't recommend messing around with switchable Graphics  because of course it's only got the integrated Graphics here there's a lot of different things  in here now there is an option for powering it on if it detects power now this has been a real  surprise to me there's many PC just forget about the core i3s you know of the previous generations  that used to have like dual cores four threads only because this particular model here we've  got okay the two performance cores and four efficiencies and it's actually really quite  good look at this this is bettering some of the core i5s from the previous gen it's that good  so I don't even know why they call it a core I3 they should probably even call it something like a  core i5 and make it a u Core i5 chip but the 1215u because shoe is configured out with 28 Watts with  the power limit 1 and then 45 it is performing a lot better than you would probably see it in  some laptops which would limit it at only 15 watts so it is overall a good I think a good  processor I can't even believe I'm saying that about a core I3 so the maximum turbo is 4.4 the  only real weakness of it is it does not have the iris XE Graphics that's one of the things that it  will be good if it had it but you know they're never going to give that to a core I3 now when  you take a look at our Ram it is in dual Channel and of course it is very quick it is running at  4.8 gigahertz which is fantastic so we're getting some extra performance there which will still Aid  the UHD graphics and I've confirmed this also too with HW info that yes it runs at that speed and  it's definitely in dual channel so that's going to help out now the SSD not fast so this is one area  that Chewie decided okay we'll cut Corners we'll put in an SSD that's you know not amazing but  it's better than say to three speeds it's about you know three times faster that's really it the  good option is you can expand upon the storage so you can add the with the cable included an  extra 2.5 inch drive and if you Source another one of those cables and figure out how to mount  it inside you could actually add two 2.5 inch drives and I don't really know why chewy hasn't  included an extra cable and the bracket well I kind of do actually cost wise again just to keep  the price down a little bit so if you look at the device manager there's nothing really interesting  in here apart from I can show you that there it is the ax 201 it's a good Wi-Fi chip I'm a fan of it  I think it's great the transfer speeds are over a gigabit and even though it's only got gigabit  Lan and not 2.5 gigabit which would have been nice it's still quite quick and yes you can upgrade it  unfortunately so you can see the processor there the core I3 1215u actually really good so Windows  here I won't bother showing you things like okay document spreadsheets performance all that sort  of stuff because everything is really quick and actually multitasking is surprising me it's not  bogging down how the other previous gen like 11th gen core i3s would be that bog down they'll get  slow they get a bit choppy Now video playback I'll just play a file here Sony swordsmith I only just  plays for a few seconds it's actually Flawless very good not a problem and this jellyfish file  540 megabits per second 4K again really good so if you wanted to use this Mini PC this core box  as a media player it's going to be perfect I think for that now just to show you here that I did run  cinematch R23 so multi-core score there again for a core I3 this is a phenomenal score but because  of the power of it mostly they've upped that and you know it's got the eight threads in total so  it's almost pretty much like the quad cores from before with the four cores eight threads so these  listen good performance there and I really do like what I'm seeing 4K video editing isn't something  that I would ever think about doing on a core I3 because I would just go no no that hasn't got the  cause hasn't got the power why would I even bother but with a basic 4K edit like this in  Adobe Premiere Pro this is the latest version two by the way it's all right and there's sometimes a  little bit of lag but again it kind of feels like a core i5 or even a core A7 from the 11th or 10th  10th gen intels it really is that good I'm really quite impressed with it again the power limit  that they've set is certainly helping out so the timeline there is only set to a quarter playback  resolution and that's probably all I would leave it at it sometimes drops a few frames you see  but overall yet the performance here is good I am impressed so what I want to do is the typical test  I do here export it we'll see how long is it going to take to encode now I will go with the YouTube  4K preset so it's not a demanding bit rate but it should be hopefully under a minute we'll find  out okay so it is women of footage here now it's going to be slower than what it normally is and  that is because it does not support Hardware encoding this chip well according to Adobe  Premiere Pro it's not going to support it so it's software only so that's going to slow it down it  won't be using the UHD Graphics unfortunately at all here so start on our timer here and export  it will be slow and what I'll do now is is I'll just skip ahead and show you the final result  of how long it takes to encode one minute of footage with the 4K YouTube preset there we  go it is about to finish up now and it is taking over two minutes here so approximately you could  say two minutes and eight seconds that's very slow but for a core A3 to be expected however if it was  using Intel quick sync and the hardware encoding it would probably be I would say it would be under  a minute for core I3 I'm still impressed that it can edit and encode 4K video these kind of speeds  all right this is just crazy and in a good way look at this with the core I3 I never thought  in my life I would be saying this I'm playing GTA 5 at 1080p medium settings normal kind of  settings that is with the presets at look at this 60 frames per second at 1080p I I can't  believe this this is a core I3 that's why I say it's not really like a core A3 this to me is like  a core i5 11th gen Core i5 kind of performance so looking very good just a quick preview at  gaming so yes it can do a little bit just lower the resolution lower the settings older titles  and look at this even cyberpunk 2077 the lower setting preset 720p I would not try 1080p it's  just going to be like 10 frames per second or 14. it's not quite what I would classify as playable  I have seen it up to 30 frames per second at the moment with all those NPCs in there to render uh  it's around you can see about what 23 24 frames per second so a little choppy a little laggy but  still this is absolutely amazing for a core I3 to be able to well play this and do this now there  are some scripts out there I believe that you can tweak those settings to try and lower things down  even more so maybe with a few tweaks you could even get a game like cyberpunk 2077 at 720p to  round around 30 frames per second on average it's absolutely amazing and how is it able to  do this well that's because of the two performance cores mostly and because of that really fast ddr5  RAM and the power limit of 28 Watts that Chewie has set fan noise and our thermals very good on  the core box so the fan noise Chewie's using a fixed RPM you do hear it just a little but it's  not offensive it's not what I would call loud and it's a constant RPM so it doesn't fluctuate and  that's good in a way too so quiet good thermals and it only gets up to about 81 degrees maximum  is all I have seen now for some odd reason it does tell me an HW info that yes it did trigger thermal  throttling and I don't know why it's down there maybe they'll set the throttling Point quite low  um it's probably because of the higher power limits which you can see if I just scroll down  here that it's set power limit one 28 Watts power limit to 45 which is well above what  most people would be running with this core I3 1215u then if you're looking to run Linux  yes it does work now the test USB pen drive that I've booted up here is of the Linux mandaro this  Dro and I really don't have any problems with it they've been so good lately using  the open source drivers so Wi-Fi is working Bluetooth everything really and that's great  well I can happily report after using this now for a couple of days and what I've seen with  the performance that it's actually a very good Mini PC I feel for the price point and what is  offered so we get that USB 4 spec you do have Wi-Fi 6E gigabit Lan you can install extra hard  drive in fact you could probably even install a second 2.5 inch drive if you can get hold of  that cable the SATA and the little power cable I think AliExpress is probably your best bet for  that but the only thing is it's probably going to be loose and floating around in the inside  there so the performance for a core A3 is not what you'd expect the core i3s that I'm used to uh the  older generation ones which are just two cores for Threads in pretty low clock speeds and they  normally don't even turbo at all but this one is not bad at all you can even go as far as editing  4K video playing GTA 5 at 1080p really quite good thermal is good fan noise uh is excellent  It's just there a little bit you hear it it's not completely dead silent but it's not bad edit oh  and then of course you can run three displays out you've even got 8K support power delivery  support run an external GPU so really I think for the price point it's not a bad deal at all when  you get that fast ddr5 Ram which is another thing that I think a lot of people uh would like and of  course it is 16 gigabytes worth you can't upgrade it however so this is where we get into the cons  no upgrades really apart from adding extra ssds so you can't for example go along and say Hey I  want to put a different wireless card in I want to upgrade the RAM to 32 gigabytes it's just not  possible there so that's the downside to it but otherwise I mean it's got a decent build to it not  bad a little bit bigger than others but then the cooling and what is on offer is quite good so well  done chewy this is certainly better than what I've seen with your tablets and your laptops I think  many PCs if you continue like this probably a good segment for them to really start getting into\n"