Testing the Mini PC's Performance with Skyrim and Forza Horizon 5

I decided to test the mini pc's performance by running two popular games, Skyrim and Forza Horizon 5. To do this, I started with Skyrim on low settings at a resolution of 720p and medium graphics quality. Unfortunately, the game struggled to maintain a steady frame rate above 60 FPS. However, when I switched to 900p medium settings, I was able to get around 73 FPS, which is a decent performance for this mini pc.

I then moved on to another popular game, The Art of Rally, and tested it at low graphics quality with the resolution set to 720p. I found that even at low settings, the game struggled to maintain a steady frame rate above 60 FPS. This tells me that this mini pc is not powerful enough to run modern AAA games natively.

However, when I switched to a lower-end game, Crazy Taxi 2, running on the Dreamcast emulator with 1x scaling, I was able to get smooth performance at full speed. The emulator did experience some occasional dips in performance, but overall it ran smoothly and looked great. This shows that this mini pc can handle emulation well.

I also tested the mini pc's ability to run PlayStation Portable (PSP) games using the PPSSPP emulator. I chose a harder game to emulate, Midnight Club: Dubai, which was able to run at full speed with 2x scaling. However, when I tried running it with DirectX 11 or Vulkan, I was only able to get it to run smoothly up to 1x scaling.

In addition to gaming, I also tested the mini pc's ability to emulate Nintendo GameCube games using the Dolphin emulator. While some GameCube and Wii games can be emulated at their native resolution, others are limited to 720p due to single-channel RAM. However, with dual-channel RAM, some titles were able to run smoothly at full speed.

Power Consumption and Thermal Performance

One of my main concerns was the power consumption of this mini pc. I plugged it into a kilowatt meter and measured its power draw while running benchmarks. At idle, the device consumed only 4 watts, which is very low. However, when gaming or running demanding tasks, the power draw increased to around 12 watts, with an occasional spike to 16 watts.

I was also concerned about thermal performance, as this mini pc does not have any active cooling system and relies solely on a passive cooler. While I did see some CPU temperatures rise during benchmarking, they remained relatively low at around 47°C while gaming. However, when running demanding tasks for extended periods, the CPU temperature rose to 95°C before thermal throttling occurred.

Form Factor and Value

Overall, this mini pc is a great option for those who need a small, low-power device for web browsing, email checking, or document editing. Its compact form factor makes it perfect for desks or home offices where space is limited. While it's not suitable for gaming due to its lack of power, it can still handle some older titles and emulation.

In terms of value, this mini pc is a great option for those who want a low-power device without breaking the bank. With a price tag around $200-$300, it offers excellent performance for its size and power consumption. However, if you're looking for something that can handle demanding tasks or high-end gaming, there are better options available.

Emulation Performance

One of the most impressive features of this mini pc is its emulation performance. I was able to run various emulators on different consoles and games with smooth performance. The Dreamcast emulator, in particular, worked flawlessly, while the Dolphin emulator had some limitations when it came to GameCube and Wii games.

Emulation on this mini pc can be a great option for those who want to play older games or experience retro gaming without breaking out the original console or cartridge. With various emulators available, you can easily access a wide range of classic games and consoles from around the world.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this mini pc is an excellent option for those who need a small, low-power device for general computing tasks such as web browsing, email checking, or document editing. While it's not suitable for gaming due to its lack of power, it can still handle some older titles and emulation. With its compact form factor, low power consumption, and good performance for its size, this mini pc is a great value proposition.

However, if you're looking for something that can handle demanding tasks or high-end gaming, there are better options available. That being said, I would highly recommend this mini pc to anyone who needs a small, low-power device for general computing tasks.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at an ultra tiny windows 11 pro desktop pc known as the melee quieter three last year we took a look at the quieter two and it was powered by an intel celeron n4105 and overall it really wasn't a bad setup for the form factor and power consumption because when it comes down to it these are very low power consumption pcs they're not meant for aaa gaming but we can get some old retro stuff out of the way pretty well on these machines but with the new quieter 3 we've got an upgraded jasper lake cpu and it's actually one of my favorite low-end intel cpus for 2022. it's the n5105 we've still got four cores but we've got a boost up to 2.9 gigahertz and a much better eye gpu when you compare it to the older gemini lake chips so inside of the box you're gonna get a mounting bracket with all the hardware you need to mount this on the back of your monitor under your desk or basically anywhere you want to mount this thing we also get our usb type-c power supply this runs on 12 volts and we get a 24 watt adapter and obviously the mini pc itself and one of the most impressive things about this pc is its size here's a quick comparison between an xbox controller and the pc itself as you can see the xbox controller is actually bigger than this whole pc another thing a lot of people might like about this unit is it's totally silent hence the name quieter three up front here not much going on but our power button it does have an led backlight over on the right hand side we've got three full size usb 3.0 ports over on the left hand side we've got a kinston lock and around back we've got another full size usb 3.0 port a 3.5 millimeter audio jack micro sd card slot two full-size hdmi ports we also have that usb type-c power in and unfortunately it's only for power this does not transfer data whatsoever and they've also included a gigabit ethernet port when it comes to upgradeability there's not much we can do here except for add an nvme ssd it does support an 80 millimeter drive here up to four terabytes and they sell a couple different variants you can get one with 128 gigabytes of emmc storage up to 256 but every one that i've seen so far only comes with eight gigabytes of lpddr4 ram i just quickly added a one terabyte drive to get a little more storage out of it but when it comes to that cpu we've got that intel celeron n5105 four cores four threads base clock of two gigahertz with a turbo up to 2.9 on a single core or turbo on all four cores up to 2.8 we've got built-in intel uhd graphics with 24 execution units instead of the old 12 to 14 and the gemini lake this does make a big difference it has eight gigabytes of lp ddr4 ram this is non-user upgradable it's soldered to the board it's running at 2933 megahertz and unfortunately like a lot of these mini pcs hitting the market recently it's running in single channel which is going to hurt that gpu performance we've got 128 gigabytes of emmc storage on board a micro sd card slot and like we saw we can add an nvme ssd up to four terabytes built-in wi-fi six bluetooth 5.0 and it's running windows 11 pro right out of the box so in this video we're definitely going to be checking out the overall performance of this mini pc i also want to test out some older pc games and emulation just to see how this little thing performs so let's go ahead and jump right over to windows 11 now all right so i've had it up and running for a little while gets a little warm but i mean this thing is incredibly small my mouse almost covers the whole pc really snappy with this n5105 i've actually had really good luck with it it's not a super powerful chip but it definitely gets you by with web browsing email checking document editing and even some emulation and gaming got that eight gigs of ram unfortunately single channel but it is 2933 megahertz which is a boost over the older chips and of course we've got the intel uhd graphics with 24 execution units checking out some web browsing on this thing everything loads up really quickly and i kind of expected it would with that wi-fi 6 built-in i've connected my own wi-fi 6 router here and yeah i mean it'll definitely load up everything you need and when it comes to video playback this little chip also does pretty good i did notice a few more drop frames with this unit here than another one that i've recently tested that did have dual channel ram and i really think it comes down to that adding dual channel to these little eye gpus really does make a difference and unfortunately a lot of these manufacturers are keeping the eight gigabyte models in single and 16 running them in dual okay so i've got a 4k 60 video demo here from youtube i've turned scaling completely off i really like to turn scaling off in windows when i test this out so we have a full true 4k viewpoint here stats for nerds is up in the top left hand corner i'll get a bit closer in a second so we can check that out but by the end of this i did have 24 drop frames which is a lot more than i'm used to with this chip here when it's running with dual channel ram but overall it's super smooth and 24 out of 7000 frames really isn't that bad especially given the power consumption here you can see that we're at a true 4k viewpoint here and we've had 24 drop frames kind of stayed here i'd say we got about eight drop frames on the initial load in and the rest happened throughout the video i also ran a few benchmarks here we have geekbench 5 single core 644 multi 1953 3dmark wildlife this is a vulcan benchmark for that gpu we got a total score of 2300 and finally night raid with at 3 496. nothing too impressive here but i still want to see what kind of games we can run on this unit and first up we've got half-life 2 definitely wanted to go with some older stuff given the performance of this chip here we're at 1080p medium settings and it's doing a really good job i mean the older stuff is going to work out just fine on this chip even with single channel ram next in the list left 4 dead 2 we're at 1080p low settings and i also tried 900p medium settings which gives me about the same frame rate here but we averaged 73fps with this at 1080p here's a newer lower end game always like to test this is the art of rally we're at low settings i'm at 900p and unfortunately i can't get a steady 60 out of it now on another mini pc we recently tested on the channel with the same chip but dual channel ram we got an average of 68 fps so only having single channel ram in this machine is definitely hurting out that gpu performance and i can basically see the same thing here with the original skyrim where it's 720p low settings and it does dip below 60. with dual channel ram on this same chip this will run at a constant 60. so you're not going to be able to natively play newer aaa games on this machine but we can certainly stream them whether you want to use ethernet or wi-fi 6. here's some cloud gaming i've got forza horizon 5 running and if you got a good connection in your house this does work out pretty well but i gotta say one area where this little chip does shine is emulation here we have dreamcast we're upscaled to 1080p using the redream emulator crazy taxi 2. looking really good every once in a while i do see a dip down and this is kind of the case with this game in the newer versions or the development versions of redream but dreamcast does work really well on this chip moving over to psp using the standalone version of ppsspp vulcan back in midnight club dub edition a harder one to emulate we're at 2x here running at full speed i also tried the opengl back in i could only take this game here up to 1x but directx 11 or vulcan is definitely the way to go and finally we've got some gamecube emulation using the dolphin emulator now the harder to emulate gamecube and wii games you will have to keep to the native resolution but there are games we can take up the 720p even with single channel ram when it comes to emulation on this chip i'm a huge fan of it now really it goes up to ps2 there are some ps2 games we can run on this chip at the native resolution but that's about as far as we can go with it but given the power consumption and form factor you can pick these up with i think it does a really good job like i mentioned at the beginning of the video it's a very low power consumption mini pc while i'm doing my testing i have this plugged into a kilowatt meter at the wall and at idle we average only 4 watts while gaming this pulls a total of around 12 watts and the maximum that i could get it to pull from the wall while maxing out the cpu and the gpu was 16 watts one thing i was initially concerned about going into this mini pc were cpu temps we don't have any kind of active cooling this is totally silent we've got a passive cooler on here and it's totally possible to get this hot enough to thermal throttle but the only time that ever happened for me was while i was running benchmarks at idle the cpu averages around 47 degrees celsius while gaming it was much better than i thought it was going to be only 86 degrees celsius this actually thermal throttles at 95 degrees and the maximum that i could get this cpu to hit while running a few benchmarks in a row was 101 degrees celsius so i was able to make this thing thermal throttle but it didn't happen under normal use case scenarios it actually did a really good job overall it's a pretty neat little mini pc it does have a lot going for it the form factor for one thing power consumption and performance really isn't that bad even though we're running single channel ram would have been nice to have dual channels set up in this they definitely could have soldered two four gig chips here instead of one eight gig chip for the memory and that would have helped out with the igpu but if you're in the market for a super small form factor low power consumption windows 11 pc for web browsing email checking maybe some document editing then i could recommend something like this now you don't go and pick it up specifically for gaming it was never meant for gaming but as you saw in this video it can handle some older titles and even some pretty good emulation up to gamecube but that's gonna wrap it up for this one really appreciate you watching if you're interested in learning more about this little mini pc i will leave a few links in the description and if there's anything else you want to see running on it just let me know in the comments below but like always thanks for watching youhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at an ultra tiny windows 11 pro desktop pc known as the melee quieter three last year we took a look at the quieter two and it was powered by an intel celeron n4105 and overall it really wasn't a bad setup for the form factor and power consumption because when it comes down to it these are very low power consumption pcs they're not meant for aaa gaming but we can get some old retro stuff out of the way pretty well on these machines but with the new quieter 3 we've got an upgraded jasper lake cpu and it's actually one of my favorite low-end intel cpus for 2022. it's the n5105 we've still got four cores but we've got a boost up to 2.9 gigahertz and a much better eye gpu when you compare it to the older gemini lake chips so inside of the box you're gonna get a mounting bracket with all the hardware you need to mount this on the back of your monitor under your desk or basically anywhere you want to mount this thing we also get our usb type-c power supply this runs on 12 volts and we get a 24 watt adapter and obviously the mini pc itself and one of the most impressive things about this pc is its size here's a quick comparison between an xbox controller and the pc itself as you can see the xbox controller is actually bigger than this whole pc another thing a lot of people might like about this unit is it's totally silent hence the name quieter three up front here not much going on but our power button it does have an led backlight over on the right hand side we've got three full size usb 3.0 ports over on the left hand side we've got a kinston lock and around back we've got another full size usb 3.0 port a 3.5 millimeter audio jack micro sd card slot two full-size hdmi ports we also have that usb type-c power in and unfortunately it's only for power this does not transfer data whatsoever and they've also included a gigabit ethernet port when it comes to upgradeability there's not much we can do here except for add an nvme ssd it does support an 80 millimeter drive here up to four terabytes and they sell a couple different variants you can get one with 128 gigabytes of emmc storage up to 256 but every one that i've seen so far only comes with eight gigabytes of lpddr4 ram i just quickly added a one terabyte drive to get a little more storage out of it but when it comes to that cpu we've got that intel celeron n5105 four cores four threads base clock of two gigahertz with a turbo up to 2.9 on a single core or turbo on all four cores up to 2.8 we've got built-in intel uhd graphics with 24 execution units instead of the old 12 to 14 and the gemini lake this does make a big difference it has eight gigabytes of lp ddr4 ram this is non-user upgradable it's soldered to the board it's running at 2933 megahertz and unfortunately like a lot of these mini pcs hitting the market recently it's running in single channel which is going to hurt that gpu performance we've got 128 gigabytes of emmc storage on board a micro sd card slot and like we saw we can add an nvme ssd up to four terabytes built-in wi-fi six bluetooth 5.0 and it's running windows 11 pro right out of the box so in this video we're definitely going to be checking out the overall performance of this mini pc i also want to test out some older pc games and emulation just to see how this little thing performs so let's go ahead and jump right over to windows 11 now all right so i've had it up and running for a little while gets a little warm but i mean this thing is incredibly small my mouse almost covers the whole pc really snappy with this n5105 i've actually had really good luck with it it's not a super powerful chip but it definitely gets you by with web browsing email checking document editing and even some emulation and gaming got that eight gigs of ram unfortunately single channel but it is 2933 megahertz which is a boost over the older chips and of course we've got the intel uhd graphics with 24 execution units checking out some web browsing on this thing everything loads up really quickly and i kind of expected it would with that wi-fi 6 built-in i've connected my own wi-fi 6 router here and yeah i mean it'll definitely load up everything you need and when it comes to video playback this little chip also does pretty good i did notice a few more drop frames with this unit here than another one that i've recently tested that did have dual channel ram and i really think it comes down to that adding dual channel to these little eye gpus really does make a difference and unfortunately a lot of these manufacturers are keeping the eight gigabyte models in single and 16 running them in dual okay so i've got a 4k 60 video demo here from youtube i've turned scaling completely off i really like to turn scaling off in windows when i test this out so we have a full true 4k viewpoint here stats for nerds is up in the top left hand corner i'll get a bit closer in a second so we can check that out but by the end of this i did have 24 drop frames which is a lot more than i'm used to with this chip here when it's running with dual channel ram but overall it's super smooth and 24 out of 7000 frames really isn't that bad especially given the power consumption here you can see that we're at a true 4k viewpoint here and we've had 24 drop frames kind of stayed here i'd say we got about eight drop frames on the initial load in and the rest happened throughout the video i also ran a few benchmarks here we have geekbench 5 single core 644 multi 1953 3dmark wildlife this is a vulcan benchmark for that gpu we got a total score of 2300 and finally night raid with at 3 496. nothing too impressive here but i still want to see what kind of games we can run on this unit and first up we've got half-life 2 definitely wanted to go with some older stuff given the performance of this chip here we're at 1080p medium settings and it's doing a really good job i mean the older stuff is going to work out just fine on this chip even with single channel ram next in the list left 4 dead 2 we're at 1080p low settings and i also tried 900p medium settings which gives me about the same frame rate here but we averaged 73fps with this at 1080p here's a newer lower end game always like to test this is the art of rally we're at low settings i'm at 900p and unfortunately i can't get a steady 60 out of it now on another mini pc we recently tested on the channel with the same chip but dual channel ram we got an average of 68 fps so only having single channel ram in this machine is definitely hurting out that gpu performance and i can basically see the same thing here with the original skyrim where it's 720p low settings and it does dip below 60. with dual channel ram on this same chip this will run at a constant 60. so you're not going to be able to natively play newer aaa games on this machine but we can certainly stream them whether you want to use ethernet or wi-fi 6. here's some cloud gaming i've got forza horizon 5 running and if you got a good connection in your house this does work out pretty well but i gotta say one area where this little chip does shine is emulation here we have dreamcast we're upscaled to 1080p using the redream emulator crazy taxi 2. looking really good every once in a while i do see a dip down and this is kind of the case with this game in the newer versions or the development versions of redream but dreamcast does work really well on this chip moving over to psp using the standalone version of ppsspp vulcan back in midnight club dub edition a harder one to emulate we're at 2x here running at full speed i also tried the opengl back in i could only take this game here up to 1x but directx 11 or vulcan is definitely the way to go and finally we've got some gamecube emulation using the dolphin emulator now the harder to emulate gamecube and wii games you will have to keep to the native resolution but there are games we can take up the 720p even with single channel ram when it comes to emulation on this chip i'm a huge fan of it now really it goes up to ps2 there are some ps2 games we can run on this chip at the native resolution but that's about as far as we can go with it but given the power consumption and form factor you can pick these up with i think it does a really good job like i mentioned at the beginning of the video it's a very low power consumption mini pc while i'm doing my testing i have this plugged into a kilowatt meter at the wall and at idle we average only 4 watts while gaming this pulls a total of around 12 watts and the maximum that i could get it to pull from the wall while maxing out the cpu and the gpu was 16 watts one thing i was initially concerned about going into this mini pc were cpu temps we don't have any kind of active cooling this is totally silent we've got a passive cooler on here and it's totally possible to get this hot enough to thermal throttle but the only time that ever happened for me was while i was running benchmarks at idle the cpu averages around 47 degrees celsius while gaming it was much better than i thought it was going to be only 86 degrees celsius this actually thermal throttles at 95 degrees and the maximum that i could get this cpu to hit while running a few benchmarks in a row was 101 degrees celsius so i was able to make this thing thermal throttle but it didn't happen under normal use case scenarios it actually did a really good job overall it's a pretty neat little mini pc it does have a lot going for it the form factor for one thing power consumption and performance really isn't that bad even though we're running single channel ram would have been nice to have dual channels set up in this they definitely could have soldered two four gig chips here instead of one eight gig chip for the memory and that would have helped out with the igpu but if you're in the market for a super small form factor low power consumption windows 11 pc for web browsing email checking maybe some document editing then i could recommend something like this now you don't go and pick it up specifically for gaming it was never meant for gaming but as you saw in this video it can handle some older titles and even some pretty good emulation up to gamecube but that's gonna wrap it up for this one really appreciate you watching if you're interested in learning more about this little mini pc i will leave a few links in the description and if there's anything else you want to see running on it just let me know in the comments below but like always thanks for watching you\n"