Azulle Inspire Mini Barebones Pc Review i5 7200u
# Review of the Azul Inspire Mini Bare-Bones PC
## Introduction
Welcome back, guys! Today, we're taking a closer look at the **Azul Inspire Mini** bare-bones PC. This compact device is designed for those who want a powerful yet diminutive computing solution. In this review, we'll explore its components, setup process, performance capabilities, and more.
## Components and Setup
Upon unboxing the Azul Inspire Mini, you’ll find the following items:
- **The PC itself**: A sleek, compact device.
- **A media remote**: Perfect for controlling the system from a distance.
- **A 12-volt reamp power supply**: Ensures stable power delivery.
- **Two removable antennas for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth**: Enhances connectivity options.
- **A small bag containing extra screws and SATA adapters**: Useful for custom configurations.
As a bare-bones system, the Azul Inspire Mini doesn’t come with an operating system, onboard storage, or RAM. This means you’ll need to provide these components yourself. For this review, I opted for:
- **Ballistic DDR4 2400 RAM**: Reliable and fast.
- **A Kingston 64GB NVMe SSD**: High-speed storage solution.
- **An old Corsair 60GB SSD**: Used for additional storage needs.
The system supports both **12.5-inch SSDs** and **2.5-inch SATA SSDs**, making it versatile in terms of storage options. The assembly process is straightforward, requiring only four screws to secure the bottom cover. The unit’s design allows easy installation of the motherboard, RAM, and storage devices.
## Specifications
The Azul Inspire Mini offers several CPU configurations, including:
- **i3 7100U**: A cost-effective option.
- **i5 7200U**: The model used in this review.
- **i7 7300U**: For those seeking top-tier performance.
The system is equipped with an **Intel HD Graphics 620 GPU**, which handles integrated graphics tasks efficiently. The BIOS included in this device is surprisingly comprehensive, offering a wide range of settings for fine-tuning the system’s performance.
In terms of memory support, the Azul Inspire Mini can handle up to **32GB of DDR4 RAM**. It also supports both **M.2 2280 SSDs** and **2.5-inch SATA SSDs**, providing flexibility in storage solutions.
## Performance
After setting up the system with Windows 10 Pro 64-bit, we proceeded to test its performance across various tasks.
### Video Playback
- **4K Video Playback**: Tested using Kodi, the system handled a high bitrate 4K video effortlessly. The built-in Intel HD 620 GPU proved more than capable of smooth playback.
- **YouTube 4K Playback**: Using Chrome, we experienced seamless buffering with no drop frames once the content loaded.
### Gaming
- **Crisis (2010)**: Tested at 1080p medium settings, the system delivered decent frame rates despite occasional sound issues.
- **Overwatch**: At 720p low settings with 50% scaling, the game ran smoothly enough for casual play.
- **Skyrim**: Played at 1080p medium settings, it remained playable though not as fluid as on higher-end systems.
### Emulation
- **PS2, PSP, and GameCube Emulation**: Using frontends like **Big Box** and emulators such as **Dolphin**, the Azul Inspire Mini handled older titles with ease. Games like Tekken 5 (PAL) and Soul Calibur ran smoothly at full speed.
- **PSP Emulation**: Tested with God of War Chains of Olympus, the system delivered full-speed performance.
## Conclusion
Overall, the Azul Inspire Mini impressed me with its ability to handle **4K video playback**, **retro gaming**, and **emulation**. Its compact design and silence make it an excellent choice for a media center or home lab setup.
### Price and Availability
Pricing varies from **$260 to $450**, depending on the configuration. Since it’s a bare-bones system, you’ll need to provide your own RAM and storage. For more details, check out the links below:
- **Amazon**: [Link](#)
- **Azul's Website**: [Link](#)
## Final Thoughts
I highly recommend this device for enthusiasts looking for a compact, powerful PC solution. Its versatility in handling different tasks makes it a great investment.
If you have any questions or want to see specific applications running on this system, drop a comment below! Thanks for watching, and stay tuned for more reviews!
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This article provides a detailed walkthrough of the Azul Inspire Mini PC, covering its components, setup, specifications, and performance. Whether you're into gaming, media consumption, or emulation, this review offers valuable insights to help you decide if it’s the right choice for your needs.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on guys ETA prime back here again today I have the Azul inspire mini bare-bones PC to take a quick look at so inside the box we get the PC itself a nice little media remote a 12-volt reamp power supply two removable antennas for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth a small bag with a few extra screws and some SATA adapters since this is a bare-bones system it doesn't come with any operating system any onboard storage or RAM you will have to provide your own I opted to use some ballistic or gigabyte sticks this is ddr4 2400 and I'm also using a Kingston 64 gigabyte m2 I had these laying around so I figured I'd put them to use in this machine this system also supports 12.5 inch SSD so I'm using a old corsair 60 gigabyte SSD I had my drawer it's very simple to put everything together it's only four screws on the bottom the bottom cover comes off you're gonna slide your MDOT two in and your RAM if you want to use a 2.5 SSD you can always do that it does come with a SATA cable and they say to power adapter it'll just go right in the bottom of the lid four screws will hold it in you put the cover right back on as Zul does offer a few different CPU configurations I opted for the i-5 7200 you at 2.5 gigahertz moving around to the front of the unit there's an IR receiver a USB type-c port a micro SD card slot a 3.5 millimeter audio jack a full-sized USB 3.0 port and the power button taking a look at the back we have our power in this is 12 volt 3 amp full size display port full size HDMI Gigabit Ethernet two USB 3.0 ports Kingston lock and a serial port there's also two antennas for the dual band AC Wi-Fi this is also a fan las' PC as you can see the heatsink is pretty massive it takes up a lot of the space on the top I haven't noticed this thing overheating at all and I don't think it's gonna with the size of this heat sink now starting to go over to the specs of the unit I have in my possession for the CPU I opted for the i-5 7200 you dual court does turbo up at 3.1 gigahertz but they do offer two other models one with an i7 7300 you and with an i3 7100 you the GPU is a built-in Intel HD 620 it will go up to 1.2 gigahertz in the BIOS and the BIOS is pretty comprehensive in this unit I'm very surprised to see that many options in a mini PC BIOS like I mentioned these are bare bone kits it will support up to 32 gigabytes of so-dimm ddr4 memory I just threw in 8 gigabytes of 20 400 megahertz ballistic ram for storage you have the option to use an m2 22 by 80 SSD or you could opt to use a 2.5 inch SATA SSD now I tried this with a mechanical drive but the power adapter just doesn't give enough juice to use a mechanical with this unit so with all this out of the way let's get into some performance I've installed Windows 10 on the SSD got everything up to date we're gonna test out some 4k video playback some steam games and some emulation so let's move over to Windows now and see how this thing performs right so I've installed Windows 10 Pro 64-bit as you can see we have the i-5 7200 you at 2.5 gigahertz this is a dual-core with 4 threads that's paired with 8 gigabytes of 20 400 megahertz ddr4 Ram we also have an Intel HD 620 GPU built in now it's time to test out some performance so I have a lot of stuff installed here I've installed steam I've installed a few non Steam games I got some emulators installed I got cody and that's what we're gonna be starting with Cody I want to test one 4k 60fps mp4 video that struggles on a lot of arm boards that I review here on this channel we're gonna be testing it in Kodi I have tested it with the built-in windows media player plays flawlessly 60 FPS 4k let's start up Cody and test this out now I just have a plain Jane bill to Kodi installed if you want to install a build you can always do that if you want streaming add-ons and things like that be my guest that will work flawlessly on this machine I want to test some video playback from an external hard drive I'm gonna be testing Big Buck Bunny 60 FPS 4k mp4 let's get right into it I test the same video file and a lot of single board computers and mini pcs that I test here on the channel and a lot of them struggle to run this perfectly but this Azul inspire is working fine I don't notice any stuttering at all I do have the FPS listening in the top left-hand corner and it's just working great now this video file is a much higher bitrate than let's say streaming 4k from Netflix or Amazon Prime so this little box will handle that also we're gonna move on to some YouTube 4k playback now I opted to use Chrome for this test here if you used Microsoft edge you might get a little better performance but it works fine with Chrome here we're going to 4k I'm going to turn on some stats for nerds and we'll get playing you no drop-frame so far and it looks beautiful so I am using a five gigahertz Network I got a pretty fast internet connection here it all really depends on how fast your internet is it'll buffer up but as soon as it's buffered you should get no drop frames at all while playing 4k with this unit now I was pretty confident it was gonna handle 4k playback on YouTube very well I mean this little chip is pretty powerful for what it is I am a hundred percent confident it will handle Netflix at 4k or Amazon Prime at 4k I'm not even gonna test it I know it will work now it's time to move on to some gameplay now this isn't specifically designed for gaming but you should be able to play some older games on here just fine and the first game we're gonna test out is crisis I know it's an older game but I love testing it still today unfortunately it's happened again I have no sound with crisis this usually happens what I'm running this game in Windows 10 sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't this time it didn't work I'm at 1080p medium settings FPS is listed in the top left hand corner handle in a pretty decently now you should be able to get a constant 60 if you put it at 720p medium settings even with explosions going on so it will handle this game next up I wanted to test one of my favorite games at the moment its overwatch we're at 720p low settings 50% scaling the frame rate is above 60 I don't recommend playing like this competitively but if you just want to mess around level up a little bit it's perfectly usable in this form I prefer playing overwatch at 1080p even at low settings 1080p with the scaling at 100% it looks great 720p 50% scaling I mean at least we're getting over 60 fps you could play through this here we have Skyrim this is an old game but it's a great game 1080p medium settings not quite at 60 but it's still playable like this if you're not watching the frame rate I'd say this should work pretty well high settings 720p with this box moving on to some emulation here I'm using big box as my front end we're gonna be testing ps2 PSP and GameCube we're gonna be using dolphin for GameCube first up let's try ps2 we're gonna test out Tekken 5 this is kind of my go-to game to test when I'm testing ps2 games using pcs X on any kind of x86 platform we'll get right into some gameplay here fps will be listed in the top left hand corner this is the PAL version of Tekken 5 so it's only gonna run at 50 pretty impressed that it's running it at full speed now there are going to be some games that are gonna run slower than others I usually test out Tekken 5 because it is kind of a hard game to run I haven't messed around with the settings much I just stopped the shaking on the screen no performance tweaks really this is the stock resolution this might even be able to go a little higher on the resolution to make it look a little cleaner but it seems to be handling it very well I'm going to be testing some GameCube emulation using the dolphin emulator we're still using big bucks here as our front end I'm gonna test out Soul Calibur - that is my go-to test for the GameCube emulator we'll see how this box handles hit FPS is listening in the top left-hand corner we're sitting steady at 60 I haven't seen it drop at all and I think it looks great yeah the performance on this little Azul is pretty great for emulation now if we can do ps2 and GameCube I'm sure we're going to be able to handle PSP fine and it's also gonna do Dreamcast really well using multi C move it on to some PSP emulation we're going to be testing God of War Chains of Olympus I'm pretty sure we're gonna get full speed out of this game here I do have the resolution of the PSP emulator set to 3x so it's gonna look really good it's gonna look a lot better than it did on our original PSP screen I'll load it up here pull up my FPS in the top left-hand corner and we're sitting at 60 if it handles god of war it's pretty much going to handle any other PSP game as long as it's compatible with the ppsspp emulator this is a really good performance so overall I'm pretty impressed with the performance of this Azul inspire now this is the i5 version they do make an i3 and an i7 version it handles 4k 60fps playback five lots of emulators thousands and thousands of old-school retro games are gonna work on here if you want to play some older steam games they're gonna work fine also I really love these mini pcs this is about the same size as a nook it's a little thicker because it's safe analyst design but it makes no noise at all if you're interested in picking one of these up I'm gonna leave links to Amazon and azules website price range on these are two hundred and sixty dollars to four hundred and fifty depending on the configuration then you got to remember these are bare-bones so you'll need RAM and storage I really appreciate you guys watching if you could hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you want to see anything else running on this unit let me know in the comments below and I'll try my hardest to get another video made next week I'll get a few ideas here and there and I'll just put another video together like always thanks for watching youhey what's going on guys ETA prime back here again today I have the Azul inspire mini bare-bones PC to take a quick look at so inside the box we get the PC itself a nice little media remote a 12-volt reamp power supply two removable antennas for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth a small bag with a few extra screws and some SATA adapters since this is a bare-bones system it doesn't come with any operating system any onboard storage or RAM you will have to provide your own I opted to use some ballistic or gigabyte sticks this is ddr4 2400 and I'm also using a Kingston 64 gigabyte m2 I had these laying around so I figured I'd put them to use in this machine this system also supports 12.5 inch SSD so I'm using a old corsair 60 gigabyte SSD I had my drawer it's very simple to put everything together it's only four screws on the bottom the bottom cover comes off you're gonna slide your MDOT two in and your RAM if you want to use a 2.5 SSD you can always do that it does come with a SATA cable and they say to power adapter it'll just go right in the bottom of the lid four screws will hold it in you put the cover right back on as Zul does offer a few different CPU configurations I opted for the i-5 7200 you at 2.5 gigahertz moving around to the front of the unit there's an IR receiver a USB type-c port a micro SD card slot a 3.5 millimeter audio jack a full-sized USB 3.0 port and the power button taking a look at the back we have our power in this is 12 volt 3 amp full size display port full size HDMI Gigabit Ethernet two USB 3.0 ports Kingston lock and a serial port there's also two antennas for the dual band AC Wi-Fi this is also a fan las' PC as you can see the heatsink is pretty massive it takes up a lot of the space on the top I haven't noticed this thing overheating at all and I don't think it's gonna with the size of this heat sink now starting to go over to the specs of the unit I have in my possession for the CPU I opted for the i-5 7200 you dual court does turbo up at 3.1 gigahertz but they do offer two other models one with an i7 7300 you and with an i3 7100 you the GPU is a built-in Intel HD 620 it will go up to 1.2 gigahertz in the BIOS and the BIOS is pretty comprehensive in this unit I'm very surprised to see that many options in a mini PC BIOS like I mentioned these are bare bone kits it will support up to 32 gigabytes of so-dimm ddr4 memory I just threw in 8 gigabytes of 20 400 megahertz ballistic ram for storage you have the option to use an m2 22 by 80 SSD or you could opt to use a 2.5 inch SATA SSD now I tried this with a mechanical drive but the power adapter just doesn't give enough juice to use a mechanical with this unit so with all this out of the way let's get into some performance I've installed Windows 10 on the SSD got everything up to date we're gonna test out some 4k video playback some steam games and some emulation so let's move over to Windows now and see how this thing performs right so I've installed Windows 10 Pro 64-bit as you can see we have the i-5 7200 you at 2.5 gigahertz this is a dual-core with 4 threads that's paired with 8 gigabytes of 20 400 megahertz ddr4 Ram we also have an Intel HD 620 GPU built in now it's time to test out some performance so I have a lot of stuff installed here I've installed steam I've installed a few non Steam games I got some emulators installed I got cody and that's what we're gonna be starting with Cody I want to test one 4k 60fps mp4 video that struggles on a lot of arm boards that I review here on this channel we're gonna be testing it in Kodi I have tested it with the built-in windows media player plays flawlessly 60 FPS 4k let's start up Cody and test this out now I just have a plain Jane bill to Kodi installed if you want to install a build you can always do that if you want streaming add-ons and things like that be my guest that will work flawlessly on this machine I want to test some video playback from an external hard drive I'm gonna be testing Big Buck Bunny 60 FPS 4k mp4 let's get right into it I test the same video file and a lot of single board computers and mini pcs that I test here on the channel and a lot of them struggle to run this perfectly but this Azul inspire is working fine I don't notice any stuttering at all I do have the FPS listening in the top left-hand corner and it's just working great now this video file is a much higher bitrate than let's say streaming 4k from Netflix or Amazon Prime so this little box will handle that also we're gonna move on to some YouTube 4k playback now I opted to use Chrome for this test here if you used Microsoft edge you might get a little better performance but it works fine with Chrome here we're going to 4k I'm going to turn on some stats for nerds and we'll get playing you no drop-frame so far and it looks beautiful so I am using a five gigahertz Network I got a pretty fast internet connection here it all really depends on how fast your internet is it'll buffer up but as soon as it's buffered you should get no drop frames at all while playing 4k with this unit now I was pretty confident it was gonna handle 4k playback on YouTube very well I mean this little chip is pretty powerful for what it is I am a hundred percent confident it will handle Netflix at 4k or Amazon Prime at 4k I'm not even gonna test it I know it will work now it's time to move on to some gameplay now this isn't specifically designed for gaming but you should be able to play some older games on here just fine and the first game we're gonna test out is crisis I know it's an older game but I love testing it still today unfortunately it's happened again I have no sound with crisis this usually happens what I'm running this game in Windows 10 sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't this time it didn't work I'm at 1080p medium settings FPS is listed in the top left hand corner handle in a pretty decently now you should be able to get a constant 60 if you put it at 720p medium settings even with explosions going on so it will handle this game next up I wanted to test one of my favorite games at the moment its overwatch we're at 720p low settings 50% scaling the frame rate is above 60 I don't recommend playing like this competitively but if you just want to mess around level up a little bit it's perfectly usable in this form I prefer playing overwatch at 1080p even at low settings 1080p with the scaling at 100% it looks great 720p 50% scaling I mean at least we're getting over 60 fps you could play through this here we have Skyrim this is an old game but it's a great game 1080p medium settings not quite at 60 but it's still playable like this if you're not watching the frame rate I'd say this should work pretty well high settings 720p with this box moving on to some emulation here I'm using big box as my front end we're gonna be testing ps2 PSP and GameCube we're gonna be using dolphin for GameCube first up let's try ps2 we're gonna test out Tekken 5 this is kind of my go-to game to test when I'm testing ps2 games using pcs X on any kind of x86 platform we'll get right into some gameplay here fps will be listed in the top left hand corner this is the PAL version of Tekken 5 so it's only gonna run at 50 pretty impressed that it's running it at full speed now there are going to be some games that are gonna run slower than others I usually test out Tekken 5 because it is kind of a hard game to run I haven't messed around with the settings much I just stopped the shaking on the screen no performance tweaks really this is the stock resolution this might even be able to go a little higher on the resolution to make it look a little cleaner but it seems to be handling it very well I'm going to be testing some GameCube emulation using the dolphin emulator we're still using big bucks here as our front end I'm gonna test out Soul Calibur - that is my go-to test for the GameCube emulator we'll see how this box handles hit FPS is listening in the top left-hand corner we're sitting steady at 60 I haven't seen it drop at all and I think it looks great yeah the performance on this little Azul is pretty great for emulation now if we can do ps2 and GameCube I'm sure we're going to be able to handle PSP fine and it's also gonna do Dreamcast really well using multi C move it on to some PSP emulation we're going to be testing God of War Chains of Olympus I'm pretty sure we're gonna get full speed out of this game here I do have the resolution of the PSP emulator set to 3x so it's gonna look really good it's gonna look a lot better than it did on our original PSP screen I'll load it up here pull up my FPS in the top left-hand corner and we're sitting at 60 if it handles god of war it's pretty much going to handle any other PSP game as long as it's compatible with the ppsspp emulator this is a really good performance so overall I'm pretty impressed with the performance of this Azul inspire now this is the i5 version they do make an i3 and an i7 version it handles 4k 60fps playback five lots of emulators thousands and thousands of old-school retro games are gonna work on here if you want to play some older steam games they're gonna work fine also I really love these mini pcs this is about the same size as a nook it's a little thicker because it's safe analyst design but it makes no noise at all if you're interested in picking one of these up I'm gonna leave links to Amazon and azules website price range on these are two hundred and sixty dollars to four hundred and fifty depending on the configuration then you got to remember these are bare-bones so you'll need RAM and storage I really appreciate you guys watching if you could hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you want to see anything else running on this unit let me know in the comments below and I'll try my hardest to get another video made next week I'll get a few ideas here and there and I'll just put another video together like always thanks for watching you\n"