Awesome SFF RTX 3070 & RTX 3060 Gaming PCs!
**Article: In-Depth Review of Minis Forum NUC X Gaming PCs**
**Introduction to Minis Forum NUC X Series**
Minis Forum has introduced two gaming-focused small form factor (SFF) PCs, the NUC X i5 and NUC X i7 models. These compact machines are designed for gamers seeking powerful performance in a sleek, space-saving package. This article provides an in-depth look at both models, detailing their specifications, internals, performance benchmarks, gaming capabilities, and overall design.
**Specifications Overview**
The NUC X series features two distinct models:
- **NUC X i5**: Equipped with the Intel Core i5 11th Gen (11400H) processor, which boasts 6 cores and 6 threads. It is paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, offering solid performance for gaming and graphics-intensive tasks.
- **NUC X i7**: Features the Intel Core i7 11th Gen (11800H) processor, with 8 cores and 16 threads. This model is powered by an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, providing enhanced performance for high-resolution gaming and demanding applications.
Both models come with Wi-Fi 6E, a 2.5 Gbps LAN port, 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 RAM (expandable up to 64GB), and a 512GB PCIe Gen 3 SSD. Additionally, they include a 230W power supply, which is designed for gaming laptops, ensuring reliable performance.
**Internal Components and Design**
The NUC X series features a sturdy metal stand with large rubber pads to prevent slipping, providing stability. The design incorporates a robust cooling system, including five copper thermal transfer pipes, ensuring efficient heat dissipation. The internal components are accessed through three screws on the bottom, revealing connectors for battery, keyboard backlighting, and various expansion slots.
The internals resemble those of a 15.6-inch gaming laptop, with PCIe slots for GPU upgrades and ample space for adding another SSD, though limited to m.2 form factor. The cooling system is well-engineered, with intake and exhaust vents strategically placed to maintain optimal temperatures during extended use.
**Performance Benchmarks**
Synthetic benchmark tests reveal notable differences in multi-core performance between the i7 and i5 models. The i7 model excels in multi-threaded tasks due to its additional cores and threads, making it ideal for CPU-intensive activities like 3D rendering. However, single-core performance is nearly identical across both models.
GPU performance shows a significant advantage with the RTX 3070 in the NUC X i7. The 3070's higher power limit (145W) and increased VRAM (8GB) provide better performance at 1440p and 4K resolutions compared to the RTX 3060 (6GB VRAM, 130W power limit). Overclocking tests yielded modest improvements, with the RTX 3070 showing more potential.
**Gaming Experience**
Both models deliver smooth gaming performance. The RTX 3070 excels at higher resolutions and settings, while the RTX 3060 is sufficient for 1080p gaming. Synthetic benchmarks like Cinebench R23 highlight the i7 model's superiority in multi-core tasks, though single-core scores are comparable.
Video editing performance is excellent, with CUDA cores aiding in rendering efficiency. However, the absence of integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics limits encoding acceleration via Quick Sync, a feature that could enhance video export times.
**Linux Compatibility and Additional Features**
The NUC X series supports Linux distributions like Manjaro, running flawlessly without any driver issues. The inclusion of Wi-Fi 6E and a 2.5 Gbps LAN port ensures fast connectivity, while the three USB 3.2 ports, HDMI outputs, and SD card reader provide ample peripheral support.
**Thermals and Noise**
Thermals are handled exceptionally well, with temperatures remaining manageable under load. Fan noise is minimal, comparable to that of a gaming laptop, making these PCs suitable for quiet environments.
**Conclusion: Choosing the Right Model**
For budget-conscious gamers focusing on 1080p performance, the NUC X i5 with RTX 3060 offers excellent value. The NUC X i7 is ideal for those seeking future-proofing and high-resolution gaming capabilities. Both models excel in their respective segments, offering a blend of power, portability, and expandability.
Minis Forum's decision to disable integrated graphics and limit GPU power usage leaves room for improvement, but the overall package remains impressive. The NUC X series is a strong contender for gamers seeking a powerful yet compact PC solution.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enMinis Forum have released two small form factor PCS they are gaming focused we have the NUC X I5 model and the NUC X i7 model so this model has the core i5 11th Gen 11400h 6 cores and then we have the core i7 it's the 11800 H with eight cores now this model here has an RTX 3070 and this one the RTX 3060 so there is a bit of a difference there now I will be comparing the difference in the performance from these two models here since they both have the same config so Wi-Fi 6E 2.5 gigabit Lan and 16 gigabytes are the configurations that were sent out to me of RAM and then we do have 512 gigabyte PCI three ssds included with both versions you will find a 230 watt power supply it's a reasonable size and this is basically like a gaming laptop power supply it is also from a known brand I've seen them before fsp so the plug right here this is an EU plug depending on which version you get you'll get a us or an Australian New Zealand one two with it then we have our stand which is a sturdy metal stand while there's some plastic around it but a metal base here at the bottom and large rubber pads all around the outside so it's not going to be slipping off any tables they do include this which is a user guide now if you do check it out take a look it will tell you how to gain access to the internals how to pull off one side of it so then you can replace the SSD or upgrade the RAM if you wanted to do so then we have this which is our HDMI cable and then two screws for that stand to secure it in place and here we have our thin but flat Mini PC so small form factor it's not really many compared to many PCs that would be about this size so both of the versions have the same power supply they both look exactly the same the only difference is the internals so the core i5 the 11400h has the Nvidia 3060 then we have the core i7 model which is the 11 800h with the 30 70 more powerful GPU so this is Ali alloy here on the top and we've got this which looks exactly to me like the skull logo that I have with my Intel Nook extreme Mini PC on the other side of it you'll find that we've got a huge vent here so it's going to let a lot of fresh air in accessing the internals is not difficult so three screws on the bottom undo those you lift it up and then you need to push it that way because it clips into the top here once that comes out you can then lift it up so again we are looking at basically the internals of a 15.6 inch laptop and wow you can even see here we've got the connector for the battery and this looks like we'd plug in the ribbon cable for a keyboard backlit keyboard so there's a lot of little connectors here that aren't used obviously so we have pcie slots right here which is good we've got our bios battery so if you need to reset the settings you can simply unplug that and the cooling looks quite good so five copper thermal uh transfer pipes here and we've got a lot more cooling right here too as well which is good to see and RAM upgrade so two sodium sticks both of these are a data sticks they're three thousand two hundred megahertz so you could upgrade those I've got 16 gigabytes right here but you can put up to 64. so two 32 gigabit ones of course but just make sure you get the same speed wireless card can be upgraded and that's really it we can add another SSD there's a lot of free space here but it looks like it's just not going to be enough to put in a 2.5 inch Drive sadly would have been good if we could have at least put one 2.5 inch drive to give ourselves some cheaper large capacity storage you'll find located here at the top of it also down the bottom where we do have those feet there for the stand that's where you're going to be screwing it on but it leaves a bit of a gap so some air can get out here so again this is what it kind of looks like the internals of a notebook a 15.6 inch one are basically in this here minus the keyboard and screen the back of it we've got two exit vents here again this is very similar to say a gaming laptop so it sucks in the fresh air from that big vent and then it's blowing it out of those four vents there so we have Thunderbolt 4 HDMI 2 2.5 gigabit Lan really good to see this and not just gigabit Lan and of course power in there three USB 3.2 type A's 3.5 millimeter with mic support headphone jack SD card reader then we have this which are our different modes for the fan so we've got a gaming mode this is to maximize performance but the fans will be louder and noisier and then just the PC mode and here is our power button with status LED so you can see that it is quite thin but it's about the same size of a 15.6 inch laptop so one thing Minnie's Forum does well in my eyes is definitely this they keep the BIOS unlocked to us all of the settings for enthusiasts but it's great for those that want to tweak you can actually do it I hate it when I'm locked out of this so we've got lots of different options here so in storage you can see all of those right there you can even set up raid if you wanted to uh you've got onboard devices you can disable some of them if you didn't want the arm board Bluetooth or audio or whatever you can do that undervolting so they do benefit a lot these particular chipsets here if you undervolt them a little bit but do it first in Intel XTU find somewhere that's stable then set it here at bios level is what I do anyway myself under performance we can adjust a few settings here with the CPU memory now this is an important one so the memory timings were there included a data Ram is terrible so CL 22 wow that's very high and under profile here we don't have an XMP profile now if you install your own Ram that does that's where you want to go along and set it and I've even got Ram that I can tweak the settings right down to cr16 really speed things up and that is really great so here you'll see under power we've got a few options this one's very important so after power failure if you want to run this as a server then this is the one you want you probably want it on last date or just power on okay and you can set it up on a switch too if you even want to go that far which is really good and then our typical boot menu here so let's jump over into windows by the way both of the models are Core i5 model and then this core A7 No in fact this is actually the core i5 they have the exact same settings when it comes to the BIOS now both of these Nook X versions The Core i7 all the core i5 come with the same brand of ram it's always running in dual channel 3 000 200 megahertz and it has a cl22 timing which is not brilliant you can install fast the ram I showed you that before in the bios so they all have this which is the Wi-Fi 6E card the ax210 this is from Intel it has Bluetooth 5 support it's very quick it's one of my favorite wireless cards and you'll see that the link speeds that I'm able to achieve are pretty much normally what I get with any Wi-Fi 6 card with my Wi-Fi 6 router my router doesn't support Wi-Fi 6E unfortunately but I will be changing it soon so I get about 1200 as you can see that's receive and transmit sometimes there are some other cards I sometimes see about 1300 as my typical kind of speed so that is good if it's around that figure it's over a gigabit then I'm quite happy of course if I change my router it will probably be a lot quicker than this with Wi-Fi 6E now the two versions one is of course the RTX 3060 which I'm currently looking at so this has a power limit the GPU of 130 Watts the RTX 3070 is 145 watts and I'll get on to The Thermals and everything like that later on too so you can see here the CPU it listed a course 12 times here because it has 12 threads six cores maximum turbo is 4.6 now if you intend to just game you don't really need the CPU power I would go for this version The Core i5 but of course there's a big difference with the GPU the RTX 3070 more future proof has more dedicated Ram at eight gigabytes it's better at 1440p it's also better at 4K gaming so really depends on what you want in your budget of course now the core i7 model it has the 11 800 H 4.6 gigahertz maximum turbo you don't really notice too much of a difference however it has 16 threads and eight cores so if you're going to be doing a lot of say 3D rendering you need that kind of performance obviously it's the one to go for there now the playback of files here are exactly the same demanding 4K files they all look pretty good here you'll see when this opens up and it may do an initial stutter blanked out for a second then my capture card sorry about that and that is good that is 60 frames per second very smooth so that of course is the cuticles handling this the Nvidia GPU what I've also noticed if you go under the GPU settings under the control panel they've disabled for some reason the Intel Iris XE Graphics because normally it would be right here and you'd be able to go and just force to have either one if you wanted to and it does better fit video encoding so I don't know why they have disabled that you'll see clearly in the task sorry the device manager here that it's not listed under display adapters it's just clearly the 3060 laptop GPU or the 3070s so I don't know about the BIOS it should be there hopefully I can enable the integrated GPU as well because I actually want both of them but this way having it dedicated it is going to be a little bit faster too and it is of course connected up directly to the HDMI port now the ssds are the same 512 gigabyte version I do have here is a Faison one and these speeds are not as fast as Samsung's 970 Evo for example they would be a little bit quicker here but for pcie 3.0 it's not bad a lot faster than SATA now the other slot there is a PCI 3.0 and I believe that the main slot could actually be pcie 4.0 spec certainly the 11th gen does support it I will need to test that out but I'm currently recording on my only pcie 4.0 SSD so I can't test it right now now on to a few synthetic benchmarks now I won't spend a lot of time on this because I know it is boring but here you can see there is a bit of a difference between the multi-core scores here between the choir 5 model which is on the right and the core i7 on the left now if you intend to do a lot of heavy multitasking or you need that CPU power then go of course for the core i7 model it is quite a bit faster with multi-core score but single core is basically identical and if you game then it really makes no difference because most games are single core there that's what they really benefit from the performance of the single core scores so here we have uh time spy here with 3D Mark so this is the stock scores on both of them now I haven't tweaked or overclocked or done anything and you can see that yes there is a noticeable difference but it's not a huge gap but more think about the future proofing of the RTX 3070 model and especially if you tend to play say 1080 more than 1080p resolution so 1440p or 4K you probably want the 8 gigabyte to Bram definitely versus the six that you get with the RTX 3060 now what I did is spend a couple of hours then on both of these units trying to find a good overclock on both of them so you can see that the RTX 3070 does overclock reasonably well okay get around about 10 or so more it did take a long time so you can get around 600 megahertz this will vary from unit to unit on the memory of the GPU and then about our 110 120 on the core but each unit will vary of course then the overclock that I managed to get here which was stable out of the RTX 3060 did then boost up the score you can see to be a little bit higher so it's not really that worth it it's not really worth it at all to be honest on the RTX 3060 to do any overclocking now interestingly enough I've noticed here that it won't pull anywhere near the 145 watt power limit that we do have with the RTX 3070 now it will get up to around about 125 and then 130 watt power limit we have with the RTX 3060 it also does not get up to that it also just maxes out about 100 Watts so it's a hell of a lot less I don't know why this is happening and thermals as you see now on both of them are very good so there's plenty of Headroom for these gpus to be pushed a little harder and finally the last of the synthetic benchmarks this is cinebench R23 you can clearly see a huge gain there in performance thanks to the two extra cores four extra threads of the core i7 model when it comes to the multi-core score but again the single core scores they're really about the same now the difference in gaming performance between the RTX 3060 and the 3070s not as much as you think when I tested out The Witcher 3 we're looking around five to ten frames per second more on average with the RTX 3070s so does it warrant going for it I think it does if you're going to be running 1440p resolutions or 4K you definitely want the RTX 3070 which also has an additional two gigabytes of vram that's going to help out it is definitely the faster card but if you're running 1080p resolutions there's not too much of a difference thermals and fan noise on both of the systems is quite good so the fan noise is not even really that of what I would call a standard gaming laptop it's a little bit quieter we see around about 80 degrees on the CPU side of things on both of the models and the GPU normally creeps up to around about the mid 70s lower 70s so the temperatures and the fan noise I think are good you can see here the hot spot that's what gets up to 73 degrees Now video editing is very good on these mini PCS both the RTX 3060 Core i5 version and then this 3070 core i7 version the timeline is excellent there really are no drop frames because of those Cuda cores we have the dedicated graphics memory too it's all helping this performance and this is why I often say and there's many PCs that I do review with integrated Graphics you need to have this you need to have a dedicated GPU in order to get the really good performance especially with long video edits now not having a dedicated GPU integrated Graphics is fine for very small edits but not this kind of stuff it definitely is a lot faster and just makes things much more pleasurable when you are editing let's take a look at the export times but I don't expect it to be super quick because we don't have the integrated Graphics which does help the encoding speed here when you're using Adobe Premiere Pro for example I have one minute of footage here and I'm going to be encoding in the 4K YouTube preset which I always test out now it should be well under a minute here especially of course with the Nvidia RTX 3070 so I'll hit start on the timer and Export so there's a bit of a delay there and it is about to finish up so as soon as that disappears the screenonce the progress bar goes so there we go so approximately you can say with my delays about 34 seconds it's very quick but it could actually be probably around 24 seconds if we did have the iris XE Graphics integrated Graphics also helping out it splits the load between both the dedicated and integrated GPU using quick sync so that's a shame that I can't seem to enable that but I know it's gaming laptop so most Gamers probably won't even want anything to do with that integrated GPU it's just good for this kind of use and finally a very quick test here of Linux Manjaro this is from a USB pen drive a live image and everything is working drivers wise and it absolutely flies here of course this kind of spec running a Linux which is really lightweight compared to Windows is so fast okay so it was obvious that the course the more expensive model is going to be the more powerful model but I wanted to see how much of a difference just so people know that if you intend to game say at 1080p only you're on a budget the six core model with the RTX 3060 will be fine but if you want more future proofing and if you for example want to play in 1440p with your monitor or higher refresh rates say you're going to run 144 Hertz you'll monitor or you want to be aiming at 4K 60 and you definitely want to go for the more powerful RTX 3070 model it's obvious but the difference in the CPUs there is not that huge unless of course you intended to do very CPU heavy workloads and again you want the extra two cores the extra four threads go for the core i7 model I think for the difference there's not that much in it price wise I would probably go for the RTX 3070 myself to be a little bit more future proof and the RTX 3070 performance is not actually that far off when you give it a little bit of an overclock from the desktop counterpart it's actually pretty good there and you do get that of course extra two gigabytes of dedicated RAM for the GPU so clearly when you look at it when you see the internal I was like okay that's just a repurposed laptop and then let's find what they've done this is something I've thought about for years and in fact I did it about 10 years ago I had a broken screen and a laptop I just plugged it into an external Monitor and I used its keyboard and plugged in a mouse and away I went so it's basically what this says because when you look at the motherboard oh look there's the plug for the battery there are the other points you can see on there the headers and whatnot for the keyboard you can see where the plug is there for the display so it's pretty obvious yes it is laptop internals in a new chassis here to be used as then a small form factor PC which is fine and yes guy in the comments well why don't you just buy a gaming laptop of course people have that option all right and a lot of people will probably do that but I know some people like what I used to do I used to plug in my laptop as well with a working screen this one into an external Monitor and an external keyboard and just use it like that and I even actually stood it up next to my monitor which kind of looked just like this the stand was very very similar there and that's an option for of course for people that don't really want to have a screen they want a fixed permanent desktop basically and that's what you're getting with this particular model right here so The Thermals are excellent you can add another SSD we've got Wi-Fi 6E that is really good 2.5 gigabit Lan that's another big bonus there it is really a very good Mini PC there's just really for me one area and that is well two one of them is why is there no option to still enable the integrated Graphics I know I can do that with my Intel Nook Xtreme I've got and it really benefits When You're encoding video and exporting video to have the integrated GPU also using Intel's quick sync and that really speeds things up that's the only reason I can see that most people would probably want it I know for gamers you want to to be and only have the dedicated GPU but a mux switch setup would be good in the in the buyer so we could go in and just simply swap it over like we could with say MSI laptops you can do that with their gaming laptops the other is something interesting is going on with the power limits with these gpus so I can see the RTX 3070 in the system info from nvidia's control panel you can see that okay it should be able to pull up to 145 Watts but in reality it's only pulling about 125 watts the RTX 3060 is only pulling about uh 100 Watts maximum when it could be able to pull according again to the control panel info uh about 130 Watts so something's going on there I think it's probably to do with the core clocks and the voltage that is set with the bio so I hope that they could tweak that Minnie's Forum because there's a lot of thermal headrooms still to push the GPU harder they could set a slightly higher thermal throttling limit too on the CPU on the core i7 model so you could get more performance out of it now what I did not do is I did not go into the BIOS and under volt and increase power limits to say with Intel's extreme tuning utilities so there is room to push these a little harder considering The Thermals are so good so overall they are fantastic gaming orientated small form factor PCS here not many PCs really because look how tall they are they are very tall but nice and thin so thank you so much for watching my review and comparison of both of the Nook X models here from minis forum\n"