for the longest time Intel range Supreme all the way from the highest power
workstation and gaming rigs to the tiny
power sipping chips that you'd find in an ultra portable laptop fortunately for
consumers AMD got their crap together a couple of years ago bringing the world
ryzen a return to at least competitiveness on the consumer desktop
and even the high-end workstation but one area where Intel was on top that is
until very very recently was super small
PCS with their Nook or next unit of computing lineup which possibly changes
I can't get my hand on this today this
is what appears to be one of the very first AMD ryzen based Nooks it's tiny
it's light and I have very high
expectations just like you have very high
expectations of my Segways to our sponsors like Messi messy Footwear makes
comfortable shoes that are light and waterproof their new weekend shoe can be
worn any day anywhere anytime even on the weekend reserve yours today for five
dollars at vesseyfortware.com Linus Tech tips
Minnie's forum's goal for the dma F5 on
Indiegogo was like what a weird number like 13 500 or something like that they
ended up raising over 400 Grand so why
don't we do a quick unboxing and have a look at what we get inside so we've got a Visa compatible Mount so you can pop
one of these on the back of your monitor if you want like a an AIO look to your
setup we've got wow really apparently it
includes what appears to be a little Bluetooth keyboard so the receiver just
tucks into the back you plug that puppy in if you wanted to use this as like a
media PC for example this would be great I have something very similar at home it
appears that there's left and right click on here is this an air mouse too I'm not sure but it only comes it only
came for like the early backers oh only the early backers get this yeah I'm
actually I'm jazzed to try this because mine is super bulky this one from sedeko
and I haven't been able to find an alternative to it yet you also get a
power brick HDMI cable that is a really short HDMI cable that is a that is a
Pinner HDMI cable I mean I guess it's good enough to go from a vase amount to
the bottom of the monitor but that's about it ladies and gentlemen you get an
equally DisplayPort cable I'm bringing back painter you know that right it's
just because you're a Pinner hey there's no there's no shame in being pinned
you've also got a USB type a to micro b charging cable for that included
keyboard I kind of inadvertently showed you guys
how easy it is to get access to the internals but let's let's take a tour of
the outside first on the front we've got our power button we've got a headphone
jack two type a USB threes now this one
according to the Indiegogo page anyway is 10 gig and this one's 5 gig but this
one provides power even when it's sleeping but it used to be color-coded yellow like those normally are now it's
not so I don't really know what the deal is with that we've got a type c running
at 10 gig and then nothing on this side nothing on this side I keep accidentally
popping that top off and then over on the back we've got a couple more 10
gigabit per second USB 3s DisplayPort HDMI dual gigabit Lan and Power in okay
so that gives us a total of one two actually apparently this front USB
type-c can be used as a display output so that's three outputs and because it's
got dual Lan ports one of the use cases that they advertise for it is actually
as like a PF sense box although personally I think I'd feel kind of
limited by something like this anyway let let's formally open it up now you've
got two clicky dude ads right here and you just pop it off like that that
reveals looks like we've got a SATA drive connector right here it's not
immediately apparent to me exactly where
that's gonna turn out to ah to the bottom of the lid uh two sewed in memory
slots for dual Channel ddr4 as well as an m.2 slot over here now what I can't
immediately see is the cooling solution and socket for the CPU or rather I
should just say that BGA solder point to the CPU reveal your secret
well no I didn't quite have it removed there
secrets Clinton's probably not faster reveal
them why is this not coming off oh I see
so there's probably some clips or something for this back part here oh
hey wow that was awesome knock that screw right into the parts tray that's
some Advanced dropping technique right there oh my goodness
um why is this screwed in from the other
side why maybe I over complicated things for
myself you know what I bet I didn't see these screws because there was memory in
the way there they are way to go Linus
see the whole thing would have just popped off like that I blame I blame
Jake this seems to be a vrm heatsink of
some sort so let's go ahead and pop that puppy off there we go oh interesting
well I mangled the Jesus out of that thermal pad so that's cool but yes that
is in fact what that was for so that's good and you know what let's just pop
the m.2 out like who needs this thing to ever boot up again anyway right
okay yeah we haven't really done the video yet so that's uh that's
challenging wow why does it have these little uh rubbers on the m.2 stick here
I don't like rubbers on my stick don't appreciate it exactly well they have an
operation for that let's give you the run down here it's
available in two configurations with 256 gigs of storage average and eight gigs
of RAM for 429 that's early bird pricing though so we have no idea how that's
going to shake out to regular pricing or double that for I think it's yeah 529.
now we do have some concerns uh this is a SATA drive so it's m.2 but you can
tell by the key that that's a SATA m.2 not an NVMe Drive they have gotten that
feedback though and apparently the newer ones are going to be NVMe as for RAM
unfortunately the 8 gig configuration ships with a single stick so you're not
running in dual Channel which means you kind of have to go with the higher end
one if you want the full performance speaking of full performance as we all
know ryzen benefits from higher memory speed in a big way unfortunately not
only is this 2400 megahertz RAM but we
actually tried installing some higher speed stuff that we had lying around at the office and the BIOS seemed to still
be locked to 2400 megahertz so we'll see how that works out for us when we do our
performance testing later uh so we got ax Wi-Fi so so that's Wi-Fi
six in there that's pretty sweet hey they took the gamer's Nexus approach to
thermal compound you can't have too much so don't even try I have no idea which
screws go where anymore this is this is quite disassembled now we get our first
look at the ryzen 5 35
50h Apu that's installed in the system
now don't let AMD's confusing naming scheme mislead you here even though this
is a 3000 Series ryzen it is not Zen two
it is unfortunately Zen plus uh don't feel bad though if you uh didn't know
that right off the Hop I2 was Bamboozled the fact that I thought this was Zen 2
was one of the main reasons that I was so excited to check this thing out so
it's not seven nanometer it's 12 nanometer everything is PCI Express gen
3 and all of that good stuff with that
said this is still an utterly unique
product and one that but I really wanted to look at just because it's finally an
AMD alternative to Intel's Nook lineup now we can go ahead and put this puppy
back together with it mostly reassembled All That
Remains is to pop in some dual Channel memory so that we're giving it its best
chance possible as well as throw in some more storage so that we've got room for
all of our you know games about warfare that's very modern and all that all that
kind of good stuff so I'll pop that in there now one of the things you might
have noticed about that cooling solution as we were looking at it was that it's
pretty darn robust by default AMD specs
this particular CPU for 15 watts TDP but
it can be configured to up to 35 and that is apparently the route that
Minnie's Forum has gone now we're still not expecting it to compete with a Zen 2
based CPU and ASUS actually has some
sort of Nook competitors based on Zen 2 that are probably going to beat the
stuffing out of this thing but I want to give it a shot anyway just because hey
first out of the gate all right got our screen capture working which involved
poking around in Radeon software a little bit but yes Radeon software
that's right my friends it's a Nook alike hey can we call them that nooka
likes that's not bad that's not bad it's
a nooka-like running radio on Graphics Now Intel actually did a Nook with AMD
Graphics in it a while back but this is different and unfortunately not as
powerful these are Vega 8 graphics and
they are clocked at around 1200 megahertz and our expectations are
basically that we should get a pretty solid experience in Esports titles but
beyond that and probably not that amazing while performance as we expected
it's not you know jaw dropping or anything to their credit it's not loud
like that's very reasonable for a Mini
PC and check this out the whole strategy
of more than doubling the uh the suggested TDP from AMD seems to be
working out pretty good 3.36 gigahertz at 100 load across all course 1667
points puts us right in range of a mobile Skylake core i7 so that's pretty
respect but well behind even a quad core
like desktop CPU from that generation a
little unfortunate but maybe we'll make up some ground in let's say rocket
League I mean obviously this is not a gaming oriented product but you know
Scott Radeon graphics compared to Intel on board so
1080 texture detail high performance World detail high quality most stuff
turned on but not everything okay sure yeah let's see let's give it a shot
right okay so we're getting anywhere from around 30 to 40 FPS not bad so like
game console territory yeah
honestly it's not amazing but like if
you showed me this like you know 10 years ago I'd have been like
of course just because it's quiet doesn't necessarily mean that the
thermal performance is good so I want to take a look at what our CPU temps are
like when we're hitting it hard okay that's respectable 80 degrees I mean
obviously it's not like my favorite thing in the world to have a CPU running
at 80 degrees but it's not like you're water cooling the thing in here and
given how quiet it is not bad not bad
minis for them is that you're supposed to pronounce it Minnie's I don't know I
don't really know they can play Valerian I'll be pretty happy with that okay
looks like it's playing Valor to me at 4K wait what shut up client FPS here
here we go graph show both show both all right both why not both okay what are we
looking at what client FPS 50 to 60 FPS
Valor 4K hold on get over here Brandon
we're gonna have to do a quick check we're gonna have to do a quick check
here for alternate computers plugged into the thing
nope that's it that's pretty good for
on-board graphics I mean the settings are probably pretty oh is there a render
resolution maybe let me check let me check that even if the settings are low
people play Esports games at low settings to get better performance okay
yeah it's pretty low it's but that's what most people use anyways let me just
see if maybe it's like rendering at 50
res or what no it doesn't seem to be wow
okay that's pretty cool what was this thing 500 bucks sure now for fun let's
try some media encoding now one of the ways we could do this is fire up
handbrake or ffmpeg but the reality of
it is most people aren't doing that so let's take something else most people
aren't doing running a Plex server at home and let's put it through the paces
there so the idea behindplex is you rip your favorite Blu-rays or DVDs or
whatever the case may be you throw them onto a Nas or a little box like this and
then from anywhere whether it's on a computer on your TV or on a phone you
can access it kind of like your own little personal Netflix so Jake actually
has his account signed in here he's firing up his phone and let's see how
hard this puppy's getting hit so Plex transcoder is asking for about 22
percent uh on video and about 20 on
audio it's running nice and nice and
quiet it should be plain and what is this is this 4K it's original quality 4K
so the only thing that's transcoding is audio that's fantastic it's actually
kind of crazy how heavy audio is hey like I didn't realize until I started
running Plex how you know video is like
no big deal in some cases in this case it's because the 4K video stream is
actually just directly streaming because uh Jake's phone has built-in decoding
for that but it's the audio that you actually have trouble with in some cases
so this is this is freaking awesome oh no
oh it looks terrible something is not happy that's horrendous come on give it
a sec oh there we go it's back to 100 there's no way no you're done you're out
all right it can't handle the 4K oh well oh it's oh it's it's dying time for a
1080p transcode test 4K was ridiculous
it's playing it hasn't buffered it might be building up a buffer
and then maybe it'll relax a bit I don't know yeah there it is it's chilling out
a little bit now well that's fantastic so it's enough to
do probably One 1080p transcript and then maybe one 720 or something like
that but I wouldn't count on it still for an all-rounder little machine I'm
I'm impressed as heck by this thing of course I'd be more impressed if it was
Zen 2 but fortunately we're going to be
checking out something like that very soon make sure you guys are subscribed because ASUS has some absolutely killer
nooka likes coming that are going to be Zen 2 based today's video was brought to
you by drop.com the massdrop X Sennheiser open back hd58x Jubilee
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guys enjoyed this one though and you're looking for some more Mini PC content
maybe check out our ghost candy Nook review it's in a very different price
bracket but it's also in a very different performance bracket because you can put a full-size graphics card in
the thing