UM 690 Minis Forum can Game
**The Mini Forum 6900 HX: A Powerful Offering from Team Red**
For those who are not familiar with the term "Team Blue" and "Team Red," it refers to the rivalries between AMD (Team Blue) and Intel (Team Red). When it comes to integrated graphics, Team Red's XE graphics have been struggling to keep up with AMD's RDNA 2 technology. In this article, we'll explore the Mini Forum 6900 HX, a powerful desktop PC that boasts nearly twice the gaming performance of Intel's XE graphics in some scenarios.
**Powerful Performance**
When it comes to CPU performance, the Mini Forum 6900 HX is a beast. With its four P-cores and eight E-cores, it offers incredible processing power for applications like productivity, content creation, and more. According to Geekbench, the single-core score of the Mini Forum 6900 HX is slightly slower than that of an Intel Core i9-9900K, but its multi-core score is significantly faster. This means that the Mini Forum 6900 HX can handle multiple tasks simultaneously with ease.
**Integrated Graphics: Team Red's Strength**
For those who want to stay in the realm of Team Red, the Mini Forum 6900 HX's integrated graphics are a major selling point. With its RDNA 2 technology, it offers significantly better performance than Intel's XE graphics. This makes it an excellent choice for home theater usage and other applications where high-quality graphics are not necessary.
**A Home Theater Powerhouse**
For those who want to use their desktop PC as a home theater PC, the Mini Forum 6900 HX is an excellent choice. With its powerful CPU and integrated graphics, it can handle demanding tasks like Plex server setup, console emulation, and even native 1080p gaming. This makes it an ideal machine for anyone looking to create a comprehensive media center in their living room.
**A Great Machine for the Holidays**
The Mini Forum 6900 HX is a great gift idea for anyone on your holiday list. It's a powerful machine that can handle demanding tasks with ease, making it perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their desktop PC experience. Plus, its compact design and cooling system make it a great choice for those looking to save space in their home office or media center.
**A Solid Build Quality**
One of the standout features of the Mini Forum 6900 HX is its build quality. The machine's case is sturdy and well-built, with a standard fan that can be easily replaced if needed. The machine also comes with a range of ports, including 10 GbE USB-C, making it easy to connect peripherals and accessories.
**A Good Value**
In terms of price, the Mini Forum 6900 HX offers excellent value for money. With a starting price of around $500 for the bare bones kit, it's a fraction of the cost of a comparable desktop PC from Intel. Plus, the machine can be easily upgraded with additional RAM and storage to increase its performance.
**Linux Compatibility**
For those who want to run Linux on their Mini Forum 6900 HX, it's relatively easy to do so. The machine comes with a standard BIOS that allows for easy installation of a Linux operating system. Additionally, the machine's cooling system is designed to accommodate Linux installations, making it an excellent choice for those looking to dual-boot or run Linux full-time.
**Conclusion**
The Mini Forum 6900 HX is an incredibly powerful offering from Team Red. With its nearly twice the gaming performance of Intel's XE graphics and its four P-cores and eight E-cores, it offers incredible processing power for applications like productivity, content creation, and more. Its compact design, cooling system, and range of ports make it a great choice for anyone looking to upgrade their desktop PC experience. Plus, its excellent value and Linux compatibility make it an ideal machine for those who want to run multiple operating systems on their desktop PC.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe're in for something special today it's a mini storm Mini PC but this is not just any Mini PC it's a 6900 HX which is actually a mobile processor it's ddr5 and it has rdna2 so there's actually a lot to learn here with ddr5 and infinity fabric it may actually help us solve some Mysteries around Infinity Fabric and ddr5 with desktop am5 CPUs as it turns out but that'll be later for now I want to show you this because this is really hotly anticipated this has probably become my favorite home theater like Media Center PC streaming because of the rdna and everything else let's dive in and take a look foreign first up it's a mini computer let's take it out of the box it's from Minnie's Forum we've reviewed several things from minis Forum in the Box you've got a quick start manual and some other stuff you can buy this with memory you can buy this without memory as a Bare Bones kit ddr5 4800 is what it's spec for we're going to talk about the BIOS there's some there's some rough edges it's not Mini's forms fault I'll talk you through it it's fine there's just some things you need to know but yeah you can buy this as a bare bones or with an SSD and a pre-installed operating system if you're not into installing your operating system like if I said you need to make a Windows 11 installer USB and then copy drivers to the installer USB using another computer uh so that you can have working ethernet and Wi-Fi and that intimidates you then you probably should just order the version that comes with memory and storage because then everything will be pre-installed so in the Box you get your machine and this is actually physically pretty much identical if not exactly identical to the 5 60 I think it was that I reviewed before but remember mobile processor or dual HDMI well let's take a look at the ports at the rear we've got a 19 volt input there is a 120 watt power brick in the Box Yes 120 watts although I never saw 120 watts at the wall with our power meter we'll talk more about that in a minute two and a half gigabit Ethernet Lan dual stacks of five gigabit USB 3 at the back here so that's a total of four ports two HDMI ports at the front we have a port that is labeled usb4 spoiler alert I have this Cooler Master Thunderbolt enclosure which has a recent Thunderbolt chip this is actually I think the latest Maple Ridge chipset in here and it works perfectly yeah usb4 you know I rose by any other name would smell a sweet technically more or less is peace out express over this you know type c connector and so you can add external PCI Express devices via your type c cable so if you want to run an eegpu with this system you totally can and then you have more power budget for your CPU that's a thing yeah that's a thing and it mostly works pretty much okay with this amd's got to work on their drivers when it comes to Thunderbolt enclosures uh the six thousand and seven thousand series gpus is a little hit and miss and that is maybe down to the BIOS on this thing I could get it to work with fiddling with it but be aware that you might have to fiddle with it however a 30 60 in this enclosure and a 2070 were no problem there plug and play it works for a fresh boot up as well as a hot plug installation so just bear that in mind if you are going to do the egpu thing if you're interested enough in that maybe I'll put the Thunderbolt stuff in another video but know that it does work although it's not you know advertised as Thunderbolt because Thunderbolt has to be certified by Intel and this being an AMD solution they're never going to call it Thunderbolt but it does work see also the Wikipedia entry for Thunderbolt thank you Anonymous editor oh yeah in the Box power brick power cable a stand I won't stand for this a tiny HDMI cable so you can mount it at the back of your display a Visa mounting thing so you can mount on the back of your display an adapter cable this is so you can use a two and a half sated drive with your minis form an extra set of rubber feet why do you need an extra set of rubber feet well that's the same as the 560. you got to peel off the rubber feet sometimes the adhesive comes with the rubber feet sometimes not so you got to be careful I was able to to very carefully basically just use my heat gun and Heat this up a little bit and get it to peel off but your mileage may vary well let's talk about power and thermos so for our power testing we're using a kilowatt plug-in watt meter and at idle on the Windows desktop this thing uses under 10 watts it was 9 Watts in most scenarios that's pretty crazy at full load with CPU the CPU and the GPU loaded artificially the thing was using almost but not quite 90 Watts and that's the thing we really need to talk about because in the Bios the BIOS is a little Bare Bones we'll talk more about that later but the BIOS will let you configure the TDP of the CPU the 6900hx strictly speaking is a 45 watt CPU but the BIOS does give you the option to take it up to 65 Watts that is an overclock really sort of kind of technically but this bios doesn't rise to the level of like gamer enthusiasm there's nothing to load an XMP profile there's nothing to really uh do that kind of gamer stuff or the overclock stuff that you might expect from a normal desktop machine this is a laptop part it's not meant for the desktop we are using it in a non-laptop scenario and so when I went down the rabbit hole with the whole 65 watt CPU thing it's actually kind of counterproductive it would run mine would run I suspect probably not all of them will run you know if you order one it's like oh it's 65 Watts it does weird stuff yeah I could get mine to do weird stuff after it had been on for about an hour or so because at 65 Watts the cooling Solution that's in this seems to be overwhelmed by the 68.1 CPU and the 2400 megahertz rdna to 680m Graphics which is actually very nice we actually have to have a whole other separate conversation about how nice the graphics actually is however at 45 Watts things were a much better story and so I say that you know you're sort of doing yourself a disservice because if you run 3D Mark after the thing has been on and running for about a half an hour 45 minutes something like that because you know the fan is going to run kind of a lot you're going to get thermal throttling past 90 degrees C at least my unit seems to do that then uh when you're in that sort of thermal throttle 65 watt scenario your game performance is also going to fall off which is kind of rough for the memory kit that's in here it's 4 800 4800 is the stock performance everything is good but you can actually configure the BIOS to run it at 6 000. but you don't have a memory kit that can load the 6000 profile so if you need to juice the memory with extra voltage or anything like that it doesn't work the same way that you might be used to with the gamer motherboard where you just sort of turn that on it does give you a couple of knobs and tunables to do that but I don't think it really is in your best interest to buy the gamer memory and try to run it at six thousand I was able to tune the memory that I have and get it to run at six thousand but that's again if you're a gear head and you like fiddling with things and you want to do stuff like that you can get it to run a six thousand and it does positively impact the gaming performance for you know gaming performance in general if I pluck do maternal out of that you can get another almost 10 FPS at 1080 1080 10 FPS more what are we talking about gaming performance on this thing is actually shockingly good probably because of rdna too so with doom maternal you're getting about 60 FPS at stock settings 45 Watts for the CPU you know you've got your 2400 megahertz rdna too blah blah blah 1080p low 60 FPS I'm doing maternal on this really yeah really kind of nuts in it I know what you're wondering but will it work with my fancy 120 hertz TV and the answer is yes as long as you're on adrenaline uh from December 16th and onward now the cable quality and that sort of thing can make a big difference actually the HDMI outputs on this are a little bit weak sauce you're going to probably have to use the highest quality HDMI cables in order to get the job done but 10 bit YB ycyr 444 HDR working great on my OLED display and 120 hertz on no LED from something this liliputian oh very nice very very nice the integrated GPU of course can't keep up with that but hey it's not bad I'm kind of blown away by this I mean this is the 1600 HX it's you know it's a mobile CPU but the GPU built in 50 60 FPS almost in do maternal at 1080p medium low I never would have thought rdna 2 on a 6000 series CPU could get us to a reasonable gaming experience at 1080p Doom Eternal is super optimized it's not like that with every game but it is very very impressive ah we got a little bit of visual glitching here missing shadow that kind of thing but still not bad 45 FPS average on low it's basically playable there were a couple really minor visual glitches which may have just been down to driver issues or the game itself but uh you can use Fidelity FX you can use upscaling Technologies there is a lot of opportunity for improvement here but again there's no GPU in a tiny little box this is pretty good so we're talking about 67 to 69 FPS on Doom maternal as long as the thing is not thermal throttling and it's not super hot running the CPU at 65 Watts you will hit the thermal throttle after like 30 45 minutes running the CPU at 45 Watts instead of 65 Watts you will hit the thermal throttle after an hour or two and it actually seems to help a lot if you use the stand in the vertical configuration so that it it can breathe a little bit better it's a really interesting situation for our other games and our other game performance generally you could actually get pretty good performance at or near 1080p older games like GTA 5 they're going to run like butter at 1080p which is you know super impressive Even in our ddr5 4800 speed moving from ddr5 4800 to 6000 in synthetic benchmarks also helped significantly although how much it helped in you know game per game it kind of varied a little bit but it does seem to positively impact most games if you can run the memory a little bit faster for console emulation type stuff you know things like how fast was breath of the wild well it was above 30 FPS but it was less than 60 FPS and it depended a little bit on your system settings and you know sort of how you've tuned things and blah blah you could get really close to 60 FPS if you spend some time tuning it but I don't really want to show too much about that but because of the console emulation being so good for like PS3 and older Nintendo 64 and older and uh you know other uh other platforms that's why I say I think this really makes a good a good media PC I was actually curious about 4K transcoding as well so with 4K transcoding I can get about two streams with it you see AMD and open broadcaster are sort of working together with their new stuff and also this makes things available in Plex if you're using Windows as your host operating system for some reason I was having trouble using Plex on the Linux side of things to get everything to work just as well but on the Windows side of things with Plex uh transcoding two 4K streams to 1080p was generally trouble free and I say generally trouble free in that a couple of times some weird stuff happened but I wasn't able to reproduce it and that may have actually just been down to driver issues and not anything else it probably wasn't thermal throttling either because my temperatures looked good in normal scenarios the thing is hovering at around 70 degrees C uh when it went heavily loaded when it's not heavily loaded it's you know there's there's basically nothing there in terms of sound and what you can expect to hear it is audible when we're talking about more than 65 degrees C when it's less than 65 degrees C I was hard-pressed to even notice that it was on it was basically silent I mean the fan is on and if it's you know right next to your ear okay but if you get it set up on your desk and in the vertical configuration basically it's fine it's pretty much silent if you're gaming and you have any sound at all coming from your game you're not going to hear this tiny tiny square of Wonder so very impressive very impressive what what we are able to get out of a mobile CPU I mean technically the CPU launched in April but there haven't been a ton of machines other than laptops that came out with that and here all of a sudden there's an explosion of many PCs and other stuff that are based around the 6900 HX and I was sort of expecting that okay I'm not going to be impressed by this because I've got Hands-On you know am5 and all these other really high-end machines but this machine was surprisingly Snappy very responsive and very very capable uh in gaming scenarios so for home theater streaming from a more powerful machine Plex Media Server look check it out four terabytes of storage and a two and a half inch Drive in there yeah it's got a two and a half inch Drive Bay in the bottom that's not a problem it has an nvme slot this one came configured with a 512 gig nvme below that you have a mediatek Wi-Fi solution you know mediatek and AMD getting together uh for the amazing awesomeness it's a Wi-Fi 6E plus Bluetooth 5.2 solution actually worked really well with the Bluetooth home theater speakers that I have set up so that's really good because mediatek is a little bit of an unknown quantity when it comes to these kinds of chipsets mainstream and edge cases you know edge cases like Bluetooth audio okay it can do Wi-Fi but what about Bluetooth devices does it crackle as weird stuff happen everybody out there with Bluetooth peripherals knows exactly what I'm talking about for my use case and limited time with this machine I've only had it like a few days so far so good knock on wood so you may be wondering how does this stack up against something like the new Intel nux which with their Alder Lake P cores well the answer of course is in our geekbench scores and if we check yep as expected the Intel single core performance is a little bit higher than what we're looking at from our AMD system but our AMD system with its eight homogeneous cores it outscores the four plus eight configuration in our Intel Nook and at a lower PowerPoint as well but that doesn't tell the whole story I actually would recommend the 6900 HX because we're talking about almost twice the gaming performance in some scenarios versus the Intel XE graphics on this so for a home theater usage scenario and less information you know office worker drone for an office worker drone the Intel system is pretty nuts like even like a you know a low to mid-tier software developer for the web like basically just everybody but not about an application developer like oh I'm doing Android development yeah this is probably fine you're doing development for the web I'm using view.js well I've got some bad news this I5 it's probably fine for everything you're doing with this XE graphics and everything else but the 6900 HX with rdna 2 and that 100 watt performance yeah the single core score is a 6900 HX single core performance and the multi-core score I mean this is basically uh faster than a 9900k s in multi-core a little slower about the same in single thread and at approximately the 45 watt TDP scenario for this which I should point out when we're talking about running geekbench I'm not seeing anywhere near 90 Watts at the at the wall for this it's just those artificial Benchmark torture tests that you can get close to 90 Watts so you still got another you know 30 40 Watts Headroom for things like USBC charging and everything else so good job on the power spec Mini's form that actually works really well so in terms of which one should I buy in terms of you know team blue or team red team red gives you much better integrated Graphics rdna 2 Far and Away better than XE graphics and in simulation the whole nine yards works really well but four P cores and eight e-cors 12 cores in a package like this it's really hard to beat that when you're talking about CPU bounce stuff applications productivity etc etc the mini swarm price is also really good it's about 500 us for the Bare Bones kit and then you can just you know get the bundled memory and the bundled SSD and that kind of thing the price is for memory and SSD is just so all over the place it may be cheaper to get it from any form it may be cheaper to DIY it if you do DIY be aware that you're going to have to construct your own Windows 10 or Windows 11 installation USB in order to get the drivers on it uh because of the the mediatek adapter does the drivers for that they're not built into Windows 11 and the 2.5 gigabit wired Lan the drivers for that are not built into the windows 11 installer at least as of basically q1 2023 yeah it's not a big deal to install Windows and get it up and running so my overall thoughts on this is an incredibly powerful offering from minis Forum it is more of an upgrade over the 500 series like the you know the minis Forum um 5 I wasn't expecting it's a mobile CPU I wasn't expecting this much of a performance uplift but we've gone from Vega to rdna2 and for everything that I'm doing in my living room this is really really awesome I really love this now I've got a more powerful Plex server for for four terabytes it's not going to do it for me in something like this but to be able to run four terabytes of media plus all the console emulation you can shake a stick at plus actually some native 1080p gaming I mean this is this is a great machine this is a great machine for the holidays it's a great machine to give your parents or having a guest room or to give a younger sibling somebody that's not ready for something you know the costs a lot well I mean you know you could probably get a used PC for Less I guess but but I digress overall mini form has done a really good job putting this together it's you know it's a plastic case it's put together you know but I'm looking at the Intel you know the fit and finish on the Intel is maybe a little better Manufacturing quantity that kind of thing but there's nothing wrong with the The Minis Forum build quality and fit and finish and the details that go into this the fan is even standard you can order the the cooling fan um off of the internet should something happen it's it's in the top you got to take out a bunch of screws to get to it but overall not bad on 10 gigabit USB type-c on the front I forgot to mention that fun times good job Minnie's forum let's get a quick look at the um 690 and whether this level one I'm signing out you find me in the level one forms bonus round if you want to put Linux on it join me in the Forum it's pretty easywe're in for something special today it's a mini storm Mini PC but this is not just any Mini PC it's a 6900 HX which is actually a mobile processor it's ddr5 and it has rdna2 so there's actually a lot to learn here with ddr5 and infinity fabric it may actually help us solve some Mysteries around Infinity Fabric and ddr5 with desktop am5 CPUs as it turns out but that'll be later for now I want to show you this because this is really hotly anticipated this has probably become my favorite home theater like Media Center PC streaming because of the rdna and everything else let's dive in and take a look foreign first up it's a mini computer let's take it out of the box it's from Minnie's Forum we've reviewed several things from minis Forum in the Box you've got a quick start manual and some other stuff you can buy this with memory you can buy this without memory as a Bare Bones kit ddr5 4800 is what it's spec for we're going to talk about the BIOS there's some there's some rough edges it's not Mini's forms fault I'll talk you through it it's fine there's just some things you need to know but yeah you can buy this as a bare bones or with an SSD and a pre-installed operating system if you're not into installing your operating system like if I said you need to make a Windows 11 installer USB and then copy drivers to the installer USB using another computer uh so that you can have working ethernet and Wi-Fi and that intimidates you then you probably should just order the version that comes with memory and storage because then everything will be pre-installed so in the Box you get your machine and this is actually physically pretty much identical if not exactly identical to the 5 60 I think it was that I reviewed before but remember mobile processor or dual HDMI well let's take a look at the ports at the rear we've got a 19 volt input there is a 120 watt power brick in the Box Yes 120 watts although I never saw 120 watts at the wall with our power meter we'll talk more about that in a minute two and a half gigabit Ethernet Lan dual stacks of five gigabit USB 3 at the back here so that's a total of four ports two HDMI ports at the front we have a port that is labeled usb4 spoiler alert I have this Cooler Master Thunderbolt enclosure which has a recent Thunderbolt chip this is actually I think the latest Maple Ridge chipset in here and it works perfectly yeah usb4 you know I rose by any other name would smell a sweet technically more or less is peace out express over this you know type c connector and so you can add external PCI Express devices via your type c cable so if you want to run an eegpu with this system you totally can and then you have more power budget for your CPU that's a thing yeah that's a thing and it mostly works pretty much okay with this amd's got to work on their drivers when it comes to Thunderbolt enclosures uh the six thousand and seven thousand series gpus is a little hit and miss and that is maybe down to the BIOS on this thing I could get it to work with fiddling with it but be aware that you might have to fiddle with it however a 30 60 in this enclosure and a 2070 were no problem there plug and play it works for a fresh boot up as well as a hot plug installation so just bear that in mind if you are going to do the egpu thing if you're interested enough in that maybe I'll put the Thunderbolt stuff in another video but know that it does work although it's not you know advertised as Thunderbolt because Thunderbolt has to be certified by Intel and this being an AMD solution they're never going to call it Thunderbolt but it does work see also the Wikipedia entry for Thunderbolt thank you Anonymous editor oh yeah in the Box power brick power cable a stand I won't stand for this a tiny HDMI cable so you can mount it at the back of your display a Visa mounting thing so you can mount on the back of your display an adapter cable this is so you can use a two and a half sated drive with your minis form an extra set of rubber feet why do you need an extra set of rubber feet well that's the same as the 560. you got to peel off the rubber feet sometimes the adhesive comes with the rubber feet sometimes not so you got to be careful I was able to to very carefully basically just use my heat gun and Heat this up a little bit and get it to peel off but your mileage may vary well let's talk about power and thermos so for our power testing we're using a kilowatt plug-in watt meter and at idle on the Windows desktop this thing uses under 10 watts it was 9 Watts in most scenarios that's pretty crazy at full load with CPU the CPU and the GPU loaded artificially the thing was using almost but not quite 90 Watts and that's the thing we really need to talk about because in the Bios the BIOS is a little Bare Bones we'll talk more about that later but the BIOS will let you configure the TDP of the CPU the 6900hx strictly speaking is a 45 watt CPU but the BIOS does give you the option to take it up to 65 Watts that is an overclock really sort of kind of technically but this bios doesn't rise to the level of like gamer enthusiasm there's nothing to load an XMP profile there's nothing to really uh do that kind of gamer stuff or the overclock stuff that you might expect from a normal desktop machine this is a laptop part it's not meant for the desktop we are using it in a non-laptop scenario and so when I went down the rabbit hole with the whole 65 watt CPU thing it's actually kind of counterproductive it would run mine would run I suspect probably not all of them will run you know if you order one it's like oh it's 65 Watts it does weird stuff yeah I could get mine to do weird stuff after it had been on for about an hour or so because at 65 Watts the cooling Solution that's in this seems to be overwhelmed by the 68.1 CPU and the 2400 megahertz rdna to 680m Graphics which is actually very nice we actually have to have a whole other separate conversation about how nice the graphics actually is however at 45 Watts things were a much better story and so I say that you know you're sort of doing yourself a disservice because if you run 3D Mark after the thing has been on and running for about a half an hour 45 minutes something like that because you know the fan is going to run kind of a lot you're going to get thermal throttling past 90 degrees C at least my unit seems to do that then uh when you're in that sort of thermal throttle 65 watt scenario your game performance is also going to fall off which is kind of rough for the memory kit that's in here it's 4 800 4800 is the stock performance everything is good but you can actually configure the BIOS to run it at 6 000. but you don't have a memory kit that can load the 6000 profile so if you need to juice the memory with extra voltage or anything like that it doesn't work the same way that you might be used to with the gamer motherboard where you just sort of turn that on it does give you a couple of knobs and tunables to do that but I don't think it really is in your best interest to buy the gamer memory and try to run it at six thousand I was able to tune the memory that I have and get it to run at six thousand but that's again if you're a gear head and you like fiddling with things and you want to do stuff like that you can get it to run a six thousand and it does positively impact the gaming performance for you know gaming performance in general if I pluck do maternal out of that you can get another almost 10 FPS at 1080 1080 10 FPS more what are we talking about gaming performance on this thing is actually shockingly good probably because of rdna too so with doom maternal you're getting about 60 FPS at stock settings 45 Watts for the CPU you know you've got your 2400 megahertz rdna too blah blah blah 1080p low 60 FPS I'm doing maternal on this really yeah really kind of nuts in it I know what you're wondering but will it work with my fancy 120 hertz TV and the answer is yes as long as you're on adrenaline uh from December 16th and onward now the cable quality and that sort of thing can make a big difference actually the HDMI outputs on this are a little bit weak sauce you're going to probably have to use the highest quality HDMI cables in order to get the job done but 10 bit YB ycyr 444 HDR working great on my OLED display and 120 hertz on no LED from something this liliputian oh very nice very very nice the integrated GPU of course can't keep up with that but hey it's not bad I'm kind of blown away by this I mean this is the 1600 HX it's you know it's a mobile CPU but the GPU built in 50 60 FPS almost in do maternal at 1080p medium low I never would have thought rdna 2 on a 6000 series CPU could get us to a reasonable gaming experience at 1080p Doom Eternal is super optimized it's not like that with every game but it is very very impressive ah we got a little bit of visual glitching here missing shadow that kind of thing but still not bad 45 FPS average on low it's basically playable there were a couple really minor visual glitches which may have just been down to driver issues or the game itself but uh you can use Fidelity FX you can use upscaling Technologies there is a lot of opportunity for improvement here but again there's no GPU in a tiny little box this is pretty good so we're talking about 67 to 69 FPS on Doom maternal as long as the thing is not thermal throttling and it's not super hot running the CPU at 65 Watts you will hit the thermal throttle after like 30 45 minutes running the CPU at 45 Watts instead of 65 Watts you will hit the thermal throttle after an hour or two and it actually seems to help a lot if you use the stand in the vertical configuration so that it it can breathe a little bit better it's a really interesting situation for our other games and our other game performance generally you could actually get pretty good performance at or near 1080p older games like GTA 5 they're going to run like butter at 1080p which is you know super impressive Even in our ddr5 4800 speed moving from ddr5 4800 to 6000 in synthetic benchmarks also helped significantly although how much it helped in you know game per game it kind of varied a little bit but it does seem to positively impact most games if you can run the memory a little bit faster for console emulation type stuff you know things like how fast was breath of the wild well it was above 30 FPS but it was less than 60 FPS and it depended a little bit on your system settings and you know sort of how you've tuned things and blah blah you could get really close to 60 FPS if you spend some time tuning it but I don't really want to show too much about that but because of the console emulation being so good for like PS3 and older Nintendo 64 and older and uh you know other uh other platforms that's why I say I think this really makes a good a good media PC I was actually curious about 4K transcoding as well so with 4K transcoding I can get about two streams with it you see AMD and open broadcaster are sort of working together with their new stuff and also this makes things available in Plex if you're using Windows as your host operating system for some reason I was having trouble using Plex on the Linux side of things to get everything to work just as well but on the Windows side of things with Plex uh transcoding two 4K streams to 1080p was generally trouble free and I say generally trouble free in that a couple of times some weird stuff happened but I wasn't able to reproduce it and that may have actually just been down to driver issues and not anything else it probably wasn't thermal throttling either because my temperatures looked good in normal scenarios the thing is hovering at around 70 degrees C uh when it went heavily loaded when it's not heavily loaded it's you know there's there's basically nothing there in terms of sound and what you can expect to hear it is audible when we're talking about more than 65 degrees C when it's less than 65 degrees C I was hard-pressed to even notice that it was on it was basically silent I mean the fan is on and if it's you know right next to your ear okay but if you get it set up on your desk and in the vertical configuration basically it's fine it's pretty much silent if you're gaming and you have any sound at all coming from your game you're not going to hear this tiny tiny square of Wonder so very impressive very impressive what what we are able to get out of a mobile CPU I mean technically the CPU launched in April but there haven't been a ton of machines other than laptops that came out with that and here all of a sudden there's an explosion of many PCs and other stuff that are based around the 6900 HX and I was sort of expecting that okay I'm not going to be impressed by this because I've got Hands-On you know am5 and all these other really high-end machines but this machine was surprisingly Snappy very responsive and very very capable uh in gaming scenarios so for home theater streaming from a more powerful machine Plex Media Server look check it out four terabytes of storage and a two and a half inch Drive in there yeah it's got a two and a half inch Drive Bay in the bottom that's not a problem it has an nvme slot this one came configured with a 512 gig nvme below that you have a mediatek Wi-Fi solution you know mediatek and AMD getting together uh for the amazing awesomeness it's a Wi-Fi 6E plus Bluetooth 5.2 solution actually worked really well with the Bluetooth home theater speakers that I have set up so that's really good because mediatek is a little bit of an unknown quantity when it comes to these kinds of chipsets mainstream and edge cases you know edge cases like Bluetooth audio okay it can do Wi-Fi but what about Bluetooth devices does it crackle as weird stuff happen everybody out there with Bluetooth peripherals knows exactly what I'm talking about for my use case and limited time with this machine I've only had it like a few days so far so good knock on wood so you may be wondering how does this stack up against something like the new Intel nux which with their Alder Lake P cores well the answer of course is in our geekbench scores and if we check yep as expected the Intel single core performance is a little bit higher than what we're looking at from our AMD system but our AMD system with its eight homogeneous cores it outscores the four plus eight configuration in our Intel Nook and at a lower PowerPoint as well but that doesn't tell the whole story I actually would recommend the 6900 HX because we're talking about almost twice the gaming performance in some scenarios versus the Intel XE graphics on this so for a home theater usage scenario and less information you know office worker drone for an office worker drone the Intel system is pretty nuts like even like a you know a low to mid-tier software developer for the web like basically just everybody but not about an application developer like oh I'm doing Android development yeah this is probably fine you're doing development for the web I'm using view.js well I've got some bad news this I5 it's probably fine for everything you're doing with this XE graphics and everything else but the 6900 HX with rdna 2 and that 100 watt performance yeah the single core score is a 6900 HX single core performance and the multi-core score I mean this is basically uh faster than a 9900k s in multi-core a little slower about the same in single thread and at approximately the 45 watt TDP scenario for this which I should point out when we're talking about running geekbench I'm not seeing anywhere near 90 Watts at the at the wall for this it's just those artificial Benchmark torture tests that you can get close to 90 Watts so you still got another you know 30 40 Watts Headroom for things like USBC charging and everything else so good job on the power spec Mini's form that actually works really well so in terms of which one should I buy in terms of you know team blue or team red team red gives you much better integrated Graphics rdna 2 Far and Away better than XE graphics and in simulation the whole nine yards works really well but four P cores and eight e-cors 12 cores in a package like this it's really hard to beat that when you're talking about CPU bounce stuff applications productivity etc etc the mini swarm price is also really good it's about 500 us for the Bare Bones kit and then you can just you know get the bundled memory and the bundled SSD and that kind of thing the price is for memory and SSD is just so all over the place it may be cheaper to get it from any form it may be cheaper to DIY it if you do DIY be aware that you're going to have to construct your own Windows 10 or Windows 11 installation USB in order to get the drivers on it uh because of the the mediatek adapter does the drivers for that they're not built into Windows 11 and the 2.5 gigabit wired Lan the drivers for that are not built into the windows 11 installer at least as of basically q1 2023 yeah it's not a big deal to install Windows and get it up and running so my overall thoughts on this is an incredibly powerful offering from minis Forum it is more of an upgrade over the 500 series like the you know the minis Forum um 5 I wasn't expecting it's a mobile CPU I wasn't expecting this much of a performance uplift but we've gone from Vega to rdna2 and for everything that I'm doing in my living room this is really really awesome I really love this now I've got a more powerful Plex server for for four terabytes it's not going to do it for me in something like this but to be able to run four terabytes of media plus all the console emulation you can shake a stick at plus actually some native 1080p gaming I mean this is this is a great machine this is a great machine for the holidays it's a great machine to give your parents or having a guest room or to give a younger sibling somebody that's not ready for something you know the costs a lot well I mean you know you could probably get a used PC for Less I guess but but I digress overall mini form has done a really good job putting this together it's you know it's a plastic case it's put together you know but I'm looking at the Intel you know the fit and finish on the Intel is maybe a little better Manufacturing quantity that kind of thing but there's nothing wrong with the The Minis Forum build quality and fit and finish and the details that go into this the fan is even standard you can order the the cooling fan um off of the internet should something happen it's it's in the top you got to take out a bunch of screws to get to it but overall not bad on 10 gigabit USB type-c on the front I forgot to mention that fun times good job Minnie's forum let's get a quick look at the um 690 and whether this level one I'm signing out you find me in the level one forms bonus round if you want to put Linux on it join me in the Forum it's pretty easy\n"