the industry has been simultaneously moving in two very interesting
directions this year on the one side core i9 and threadripper showed us the
performance that can be accomplished if you don't sweat minor details like power
consumption and heat output but on the other side of things NVIDIA
has tweaked the efficiency of their pascal gpus to the point where this
pint-sized pc well 5.7 pints to be precise harbors a
full gtx 1080.
the desk mini is a really good looking little machine at 2.7 liters it is
surprisingly compact like the whole
product including the large external power brick is the same size as the box
of a mini itx motherboard and despite
its gaming pedigree the black brushed aluminum and powder coated steel design
is understated and professional looking it won't be a centerpiece in your RGB
doubt gaming den but it will blend seamlessly into basically any
environment now being a bare bones kit we've got to open it up to install a few
things before we even think about booting it up and what are we greeted by
this is the secret sauce an entirely new
motherboard standard developed by asrock called micro stx
it features a pretty good assortment of standardized i o including one 3.1 type
c port free of the type a variety plus
audio out audio in and Ethernet and our
board has an lga 1151 socket room for a
couple of sodium slots that we populated with 32 gigs of ddr4 memory from a pacer
and the most interesting part the mxm
slot for the uninitiated mxm is a pci express
x16 standard for the super low profile
graphics cards that are generally used in high-end laptops
so our desk mini came with none other than a fully featured desktop grade gtx
1080 installed man that's impressive considering how
small this thing is the back side of the motherboard tray is
dedicated to storage we went with a single samsung 960 pro m.2 SSD but you
could actually install up to three high-speed NVMe drives and two two and a
half inch drives for slower bulk storage oh and there's also a 2x2 Intel wireless
card back here so now the plan was to pair our gtx 1080 with the best consumer
gaming CPU an Intel core i7 7700k
with knock to us slim high performance nhl9i heatsink
but this is where we hit our first snag with the desk mini
cooler compatibility unfortunately the dc in jack housing
interferes with any square cooler so
while we did briefly try out the 7700k
using Intel's anemic stock cooler it thermal throttled to the point that we
wouldn't recommend it so we swapped it out for a regular i7 7700
even after that change though our cooling woes weren't quite over with the
fan curve set to its default of silent the CPU was getting up to a toasty 75
degrees doing basic things like installing programs
not that comfortable a quick trip back to the BIOS did fix
this problem but it introduced another
now we aren't blaming asrock for Intel's lame-o stock cooler but since we don't
have great aftermarket options it kind
of doesn't matter who's to blame when we're stuck with a system that's
annoyingly loud especially while gaming when the GPU fan joins the chorus and
join the chorus it did gaming wise this
thing is an amazing little beast it
performs almost ish pretty much like a full-sized desktop
with a full-sized gtx 1080. the GPU
didn't reach its full boost potential compared to a founder's edition running
in the same 24 degree office but it's
safe to say that this machine is capable of handily driving modern aaa games
maxed out at 1080p those same games at
1440p with some details turned down and
in some titles 4k gaming is even achievable i mean check this out
butter smooth unfortunately at
1600 us dollars for the bare bones gtx
1080 kit the desk mini is far from cheap
to put that into context that's three hundred dollars more than a slightly
faster not to mention water cooled and overclockable Corsair one and over five
hundred dollars more than a similarly spec'd diy pc
so why well it seems to be due to business decisions at NVIDIA
not asrock price gouging at this time
mxm cards are only available to notebook
system integrators or through shady sellers on ebay but we were able to find
enough listings to confirm that it's the video card being priced at double its
desktop equivalent that's making stx gaming machines unaffordable right now i
would like to see this change in the future this is cool but i'm not sure if
i want to get my hopes up because it's actually rumored that NVIDIA is planning
to end support for mxm altogether
something that would seriously hurt this exciting new form factor so hey guys
maybe let them know if you're with me and you don't want to see that happen
for now the more sensible models are the 1060 and 1070 ones which should have the
added benefit of running cooler and quieter while they deliver top tier
gaming performance without ruining the aesthetic of your room or
these ones really caught alex's eye the upcoming quadro models that should chew
through cad or 3d modeling tasks without ruining the professional look of your
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