I may be married to Ivonne but it's Christine who's been on my mind for the
last 10 years a project Christine that
is at CES 2014 Razer unveiled an idea
that would completely change how we build computers and I was amazed who
wouldn't be a modular high- performance mineral oil cooled chassis Hardware
upgrades as easy as plugging in a USB device maybe even easier but Christine's
promises were as empty as they were enticing and every subsequent attempt
we've seen at this kind of modularity has ultimately failed even from some
very big names which makes it all the more surprising that a smaller
manufacturer kadz who sponsored today's video is making a big move into the
space with an absolutely tiny modular
computer called The kadas Mind workstation their approach is both
similar but also different from what we've seen before remember Google's
Project Ara the philm that could be assembled from building blocks to help
you get the perfect device for your needs or how about Moto mods those ones
actually made it to Market in the form of upgrade modules for your phone like
speakers battery packs and gam pads and
they probably bear the most resemblance to what kadas is doing here you start
with a solid core Computing device and then create an ecosystem of enhancements
for those who need it let's take a closer look then at the Mind we've seen
small computers in the past but I don't think we've ever SE seen something quite
so selt this thing is small like about
three times the volume of my phone small but they still manage to cram a 12 core
Intel processor in here it Peaks at up to 55 watts and is paired with 32 gigs
of 5200 megga transfer per second lpddr5
a 1 TB WD SN 740 MBM SSD and believe it
or not a battery it's only 5.55 wat
hours which if you're familiar with laptops you'll know isn't very big but
the idea isn't that you're going to run this thing away from the wall for an
extended period of time rather it's so you can pop it into sleep mode take it
with you wherever you need to go and then pick up right where you left off up
to 25 hours later it also doubles as a
handy battery backup should you ever experience a power outage giving you
time to save your work and shut down safely along the rear of the device
we've got our IO which some might find a
little disappointing both USBC ports
support 65 WTS of power delivery in but
only one of them runs at 10 GB per second with the other stuck at USB 2.0
speeds for displays both the USBC ports
support DP alt mode and there's an HDMI 2.0 Port as well then there's two usba
10 gig ports all of which is pretty good
actually for a miniature PC so why the
sad face no Ethernet which is kind of a
bummer on a workstation however speaking of bums the
real party is on the bottom watch this
you can pop this little tab off down here just like that for one of the
easiest m.2 storage upgrade processes that I have ever seen and right next to
it is the Mind link high-speed connector
and the first mind it linked must have been mine because the mind dock that
plugs into it solves pretty much all of
my complaints adding 2 and 1/2 gig networking a metric whack of HDMI and
USB ports 3 and 12 mm combo Jack and an SD card reader the dock also has a
fingerprint reader for Windows hello and a volume knob that kind of reminds me
the ones on Logitech keyboards oh and they threw in speakers for good measure
too bad the whole thing is let down by a proprietary
interface what I would normally say except it's a little less proprietary
than you might think the Mind link connector is basically just a Juiced up
PCIe by8 gen five connector with some
thoughtful additions first up it's much more compact than a standard PCI slot
and for another it's much more robust the slots that you see in a desktop PC
are going to be rated for dozens or at most hundreds of Cycles but kadas
expects people to use this interface potentially multiple times per day for
years at a time so their target was 10,000 Cycles so then I can do this
right wow the magnets really help make
it easy to abuse also their connector allows future products to suck more
juice or even blow it I'm talking up to
200 watts in either direction much more
than the 75 Watts that you'll get over a typical PD connector oh and did we
mention that it's hot pluggable yeah I mean it is a bit of a downer that this
thing has no Thunderbolt 4 when the chip does support it but if I was going to
plug a GPU into this thing I would rather have the extra bandwidth not to
mention the lower latency of the Mind link anyway of course they Envision an
ecosystem with more than just GPU enclosures they are working on that in
addition to their dock but also a studio style display and this twoin one tablet
thing I'm not sure about that last one but the Mind Graphics is kind of a
no-brainer and we've asked them to publish their pinout which could make
this interface a significant upgrade over oculink where eight lanee is
possible but four is the norm not to mention easier for the community to
embrace than XG mobile which is also by
8 PCIe and hot pluggable but completely
closed and very expensive speaking of I
did a video about hot plug PCIe some years ago and it turns out that despite
having been part of the standards making a hot swap PCI Express device is pretty
difficult and ripping a cart out of a running system can cause anything from
weird Behavior to a full-on crash or even Hardware damage so how is kadz
doing it the answer unfortunately is
substantially more complex than we can get into but here's at least a rough
rundown when your PC boots up the system takes note of all the components
installed and allocates memory to properly serve all of those devices no
device no memory allocated since this is all done by the UEFI BIOS before booting
into Windows a board or operating system that is not prepared to dynamically
allocate new memory regions two new devices is well it's not going to be
pretty there's also the hardware side of things while your GPU might have all the
pins to fit in a 16x slot not all of those pins may be used and if the pins
don't connect correctly or in the right order it can cause a short or an
initialization error that can damage the hardware or data so clearly this
requires many precautions so for this reason even if kadas did publish their
pin out hot swapability of Homebrew accessories would be very difficult but
with their own gear kadas managed to nail
it let's see it in action let's start with the mind with two displays
connected to it there those two
perfect oh crap the peripherals are connected to the dock well you know what
fine you guys saw the two displays light up let's go ahead and connect the other
two see how long this
takes come on hot plug PCI you can do it
I saw a flicker I saw action hey there we go not too
bad why don't you put on crab RVE cuz it's got speakers in it and
stuff that's the max volume which honestly isn't very loud but to their
credit they don't distort at that level so you'll have devices that'll go way
louder than that but they sound like garbage past 60 70 80% whereas these
sound good all the way up to 100 considering how little it's doing right
now C PE temperatures are a little on the high side at 56° on the package
but to its credit it's also quite quiet
so it seems like they haven't really ramped up the cooling system now let's
see how it Gaines unfortunately kad's egpu dock is not out yet but some
enterprising individuals are using that super easy storage upgrade slot to put
an m.2 to oculink adapter in it then
running an oculink egpu like this one from GPD which I mean
should work but we don't have one of those you know
what that is a surprisingly wide Sound
Stage seriously though the graphics performance is
terrible yeah we're getting 60 FPS but
oh my God look at it we're at minimum boys oh okay medium
is not happen and maybe we'll fa better in cyberpunk
realistic yeah okay it works of course this is not the point of
a device like this the point of a device like this is the cool interface which by
the way contains more than PCIe also DisplayPort and USB and let's check
just how hot pluggable is it oh right I don't have a keyboard and mouse one
second one second no no I got this i got
this oh wait for
it that is very hot pluggable I'm
actually amazed check this out boom
we're on the dock I think Windows is give it a sec give it a sec I believe
whoa look at that undeniably very cool
sponsorship aside then this is Far and Away the most refined attempt at a
modular ecosystem that I have ever seen
But it comes at a price I understand that quality engineering costs money but
the kadas mind isn't cheap so All That Remains is to see how the market will
respond if this looks like a solution for you check out the link in the video
description to get a kadz mind of your
own and using the links in the description below put in coupon code LTT
mind to get a $100 off a kadas
mind if you guys enjoyed this video why don't you check out our video on the
Razer Tomahawk a modular Nook Style
concept that was co-produced with Intel a few years back