This is the X Plus Rival Mini PC and it
might be living up to that name because if all the bullish marketing is to be
believed on it, this might be rivaling the framework desktop that I just looked
at a couple weeks ago because in here is
the Ryzen AI Max 395 Plus chip or also known as
Stricks Halo which has become a beast for both gaming and AI large language
models. But I want to see what it's actually like before I make that decision.
Whoops. That is an incredibly strong odor that hit my nose. Smells like
cleaning material. Maybe maybe that means it's good then. I Who knows? It's
very bland marketing on the inside of the box, but in here, I think this is
Yep. These are all the cables we'll need. Let's take a look at our power brick here. It is 240 W power brick.
Looks like it includes one HDMI. Not
quite sure what spec it is. Neither is the website. We'll find out later. What
are these thumb screws? I don't really know what they go to. Instruction
manual. Instruction manual in case you didn't read it the first time. And here
it is. The star of the show. It's very light.
Oh, actually looks kind of cool for a
mini PC. It looks like a little bit more gamery than a traditional Nook does.
What am I hitting on the back here? Is this tab? Oh, this is where the M.2s
are, but I was trying to figure out what this little flappy tab is, but I think it's just to help you get it off there.
That's a little confusing. We'll put that to the side. And then the last thing in here seems to be a little bit
of a snack. Is this What is this?
Wow, that's charcoal. One moment, please.
Just cut that. The last thing in the box here is the stand, which maybe I need to
read the manual to figure out how this goes on. Does it just Oh, it kind of sits in there. And then is it really
just like Nope.
Oh, there's It says there's more pieces. Oh, there they are. There's a couple
more pieces. This is starting to make much more sense now. And then those two
thumb screws I found earlier. I'm starting to understand. It seems that
they go on like this. And then the mini PC would go in the middle. I'm not
actually going to set up the stand because I actually kind of like the look of it like this. Now, other than
arguably looking a little bit more gamery than the framework one, why do I
think that this is a rival to it? It's because again it's using the exact same
chip in here, but it's actually coming in at a starting price that is on par
with that computer, but it also includes some other features such as more IO
specifically on the front here. We've got a full-size SD card reader on the
front. Got a USBC, two USBAs, a headphone audio jack combination, and
then our power button. And the button on the front here cycles between three different performance modes, which again
on their website seems a bit conflicting cuz they appear to call it a different
mode depending on where you're looking, the BIOS, the website, or actually on
the computer itself. On the back side here, we've got three USBAs, an HDMI, a
DisplayPort, a USBC, a 2.5 gigabit LAN,
and another audio port. So, you actually get two, which is kind of cool. And then
a power port there for you to actually plug it in and get this thing going. The
HDMI on the back here and the DisplayPort. Also a little confusing. Like I
mentioned, in one spot, they say it's HDMI 2.1. In another they say it's HDMI
2.0. Let's hope we got the 2.1 cuz I
have no idea how to check that unless we actually plug it in and get a 2.1
display. and see if we can run it at the max bandwidth. On the back here though,
like I mentioned, this is the M.2 access. I want to open that up just to
see exactly what else we get back there. [music] And maybe we can access our
Wi-Fi card, which is Wi-Fi 7, by the way. There we go. There's our one SSD
that's installed already. And it looks like we have access for a second one right there. In this case, we have a
Wow. 2 TB included SSD. Another reason why maybe this is rivaling the
framework. You have to bring your own or buy one from Framework. The price you
see includes a two TB SSD. Can I access the Nope. I can't really access anything
else. Oh, damn. The Wi-Fi card is like right under here. Can't quite get to it
if you want to swap it out and upgrade it in the future. That's okay. I'm sure you can open the rest of this.
I just noticed that the thermal pad on the M.2 cover only covers like the first
half of the SSD. So, if you had a a fulls size SSD that maybe had like more
chips on this side, [music] it wouldn't be getting any of the cooling from this
heat sink. Something to take note.
Okay, framework, you've got a oneup on this one. This one's not as repairable.
Takes six screws removing the rubber feet to get at it. Oh my god, did I not
peel this enough? Is there more? Damn it, there's another one. Never mind.
Eight screws. Now, it's time for the grand reveal.
There it is. There's our fan right there. I'm going to unplug it just so I
don't break that cable. Tiny little fan just right over in the backside here.
I'm not really sure what that's cooling. Maybe just providing an extra little bit
of passive air flow along the back of the board. Dang it. I was kind of hoping
this was the side with the chip, though. Can't see much else from here, but there's that Wi-Fi chip with the antenna
kind of running up along the front here. Is there anything else that's of note?
Not really, cuz this is the back side of the board. I'm going deeper. Can't wait
for this to not boot when it's time to play games now.
Dang it. I really wanted to see it. I want to see how it's being cooled
because one of the biggest differences between this and the framework is the
cooling system. On the framework, you had a full 120 mil fan that had a pretty
chunky heat sink. On this one, I It's a lot thinner, so I wanted to see what
it's cooling. No, please let me add it.
Oh, wait. Hold on. Nope. That's the power button.
Damn it. [laughter]
So close. Come on. Yeah. I'm not sure what it is, but I want to I don't want to go too much deeper just in case I
want to still turn this thing on. I technically don't need to actually see what the cooling system is. Labs did do
some numbers to see how hot it gets. To the surprise of no one if it's this thin
and a lot, you know, less cooling than the framework. It actually didn't
perform as well in terms of cooling. And I mean to be fair, I don't think this
one is designed to be as opened up like I just did uh compared to the framework
for example. I guess unless you need [music] to like actually repair something in there, but nah, I wanted to
take a look and now I've been disappointed. Other than cooling, one of
the major differences between this and the framework desktop is that this one
starts with 96 gigs of RAM, whereas on the framework side, if you want to get
the 395 chip, it starts at 64. This can
be configured all the way up to 128 just like the framework desktop, but it needs
to be soldered in order to reach those crazy speeds of 8,533
MHz. It actually can't do that, but that's
what this website advertises. It only goes up to 8,000. I'm not sure where
they pulled that number from. We looked in the BIOS with Labs and they couldn't
figure it out. False advertising. I don't know. Maybe it can. I want to
power this thing up though and see how it does in gaming. Not after I game this
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today. Let's power this baby on. But before, look at the RGB. Wow. When you
look at it straight on like that, it actually is quite dominating. Okay, here we go. Let's turn it on.
It is really quiet if it is on. Oh yeah, there you go. It booted. Holy cow. At
least on boot, it is extremely quiet. Did I plug the fan back in? [laughter] I
think I did, right? Oh.
Ah. Once we're in Windows, the fan decides to kick in. You know that
demanding task. Windows. It's pretty loud. How many fans does
this thing have again? I think there's three because that's what the marketing
says. And because I didn't get the other side off, I couldn't actually confirm
that. I think I see at least one fan through the top grill right here. And
then there was that back fan. Let's see how loud it is then when we actually
start getting into some real games here. Okay, let's open up our task manager
here. I want to see just how many gigs of RAM is being Oh, there you go. Okay,
so 32 gigs of RAM is being allocated to our GPU and then we have 64 gigs of RAM
being dedicated to our CPU. Just like the framework, this one can be
configured in the BIOS. And with this model, you can go all the way from half
a gig of RAM up to 48 gigs of RAM. So, it's not quite the three quarters that
framework allowed you to go, but I mean, if you put 48 gigs of RAM on this GPU,
you have more VRAM than a 5090. So, running large language models that could
fit entirely in RAM, for example, will theoretically be much better on this
device than some of those higherend cards. I mean, obviously big asterisks,
big asterisks based on the type of model and exactly how fast it is and
everything, but it gives you an idea of exactly how much VRAM you can give this
puppy. I want to do some gaming on it with the stock config, which is the 32
gigs. Let's do I did Cyberpunk with the framework. So, let's do Cyberpunk again.
>> Boo. >> What do you mean, Boo? >> I wanted Rivals.
>> You want Oh, you wanted Rivals on the Rival. Guys, we can't play Rivals on the
Rival. It's not part of our test suite. >> We are testing it though. We're trying
to >> You're testing it and I can't play rivals on the rival.
>> Oh, that fan is definitely picking up. Can you hear it?
>> I want to hit the power button or the light button on this and check the
modes. Okay, so we've got like a rainbow wave. Ooh, red. Oh, yellow. Does it just
do all rainbow? What's the next one? Off. Okay, very cool. Ooh, look at that.
Oh, I was talking to John from the Labs. Apparently, you can't configure this
other than just this button right here. It's just a bunch of presets that you
hit and you find one that you like. We're going to go with unicorn barf. All
right, let's give it a go. Yeah, I'm cyberpunk. 1440p basically everything on
high and ultra. Average is 46 in this
area. Let's get to like a Oh crap, I've never played cyberpunk before. Am I not
like a robot? I thought I could live fall damage. Well,
we're almost to the point where I can start killing people and then I'll tell you what the FPS is. Okay. Oh, 1% lows.
When it was loading there was like 20 FPS, 30 FPS now. 40 FPS average roughly.
You know, I think if you're like a PS4
gamer, this is right up your alley. It just costs a lot more than a PS4. I
think we should probably go down to 1080p though. I feel like that's where this thing will really shine. It's a
little bit better. Our average is around 50. Probably get it up to 60 if we did
some more tweaking with the actual settings, which in that case then I
would call this totally playable. 60 FPS. We touched it there for a second.
Do I keep my FPS average when I start killing people?
It's not the type of game I'd play. Anyways, let's boot something else up. This thing's not quiet. It's kind of
annoying, actually. And it doesn't even feel like it's moving that. Oh, there's
actually a decent amount coming out the back, which is fine, but I would expect these to be like an intake or something
or or another exhaust. We're actually getting two gigabit download, which
according to the marketing, it said that two and a half is twice as fast as one.
Matt's a little hard, I guess, cuz it's supposed to be one two and a half times
faster, not two times faster. But hey, won't criticize them too much. I wanted
to make sure I was in the turbo mode, so I hit the button. I love that it just
pulls up this image. So, that's probably eco.
Unless that's eco. And that's turbo. I'm not really sure.
It doesn't give me anything else other than that. I'm going to hope that red is
turbo. My download slowed down. Red was
stop. Actually, that also that click on that button is the worst feeling click
I've I think I've ever felt on a desktop computer. Okay, my bad. You don't need
to yell at me just because I was insulting you. While I wait for CS2 to
download, we can go over the lab's results. in 1080p amongst all of our
games. We decided to test it both in the balanced and performance mode against
the framework desktop. And in the performance mode, it was on par, but in
some games it was about a 2% worse performance across the board, whether it
was like F1 uh 24 or Allen Wake 2. And
then in the balance mode, it definitely suffered a lot more than the framework
desktop. We also did try ray tracing because it's capable of ray tracing. I
would not recommend it. I mean, I didn't recommend the framework in ray tracing
either. As soon as you turn rater tracing on, the frame rates basically get cut in half and you're getting like
a 30 FPS in Cyberpunk. And then in 1440p, again, same story. It seemed on
par with the framework in the performance mode and then the balance mode, which was worse, but that's kind
of expected if you're toggling between the two modes. The result that I'm the
most interested in is the thermals. Mainly because this thing is loud as
heck when it's right beside my head. And it kind of shows. At least in our F-124
test, it struggled compared to the Framework desktop. It got up to 84° and
averaged 82. And it averaged way hotter than the Framework while drawing less
power on average, which not a good thing. I didn't mention it earlier, but
this chip is actually basically locked at the 120 watts that it advertises.
Whereas the framework was able to clock a little bit higher if it felt that it
needed it and it could go further. And again, man, this thing is getting real
loud again. And I'm trying to talk and it's interrupting my thinking. And same story in Cinebench. It was averaging way
hotter while drawing less wattage. It's probably because it is a way thinner
cooler. Saying that though, it is still a performative little machine. When we
did some of our Blender renders, it actually managed to keep up with the
framework in some tests. It was a little bit behind, but again, that's probably
due to it maybe overheating and thermal throttling. In our multi-core test, it
was again just slightly behind the framework desktop in the performance
mode. But the single core performance was identical, which is what I would hope because they're the exact same
chip. In our Photoshop test, this is where this thing really shines through.
In the Photoshop, it actually outperformed the framework by just a
tiny bit. My CS2 is downloaded. I don't care about Photoshop. I have gaming to
do. Got everything on high settings. 1080p. 1% lows. It's hard to see with
the mini map. What is that? 80. Hey, hey, hey, hey. I'm Stop it. Stop. I 1%
lows seem to be settling in at about 80 with our average being 150. Doesn't seem
to be as good as the framework desktop. But again, I wonder if that's because of
a heat issue. I don't know. This is CS2, right? I don't if it's overheating in
this game, bro. Oh, dude. Triple. Oh,
quad feed. I'm reloading. Okay. It's very distracting, though. I think if I
had headphones on, I could get over it. But this thing is This sucker's loud.
But just because it's loud, does that mean it's not worth it? Well, it depends
on what you get it for because depending on when you refresh the page or which
device you open the website on, the price seems to change. At the time of
filming this, we've seen it for $1480 starting at this config and $1,700 for
the 128 config, which again is cheaper at that top-end model than the framework
was, but according to our Labs, you get a little bit less performance. I think
the $300 saving that you get is worth the performance difference, but I think
it depends on what your use case is. If you're going to go for something that is more of a productivity workhorse,
whether that's LLMs where you need the VRAMm or I don't know, minor esports
gamings like a LAN event or something, I think this thing is pretty worth it. But
I wouldn't buy it from that site. I'm sorry. X Plus, while we were filming, we
found an Alibaba listing for a device that looks surprisingly familiar to this
one. And it starts at $1,250
for this config. And I think if you can buy it at that price, holy cow, this
might be the cheapest way to get into the Stricks Halo family, and even the
128 gig version is about $1,600.
In that case, I would go for it. But let me know what you guys think down below.
If you guys enjoyed this video and want to see what I was talking about when comparing this to the Framework, go
check out the Framework desktop that I unboxed. It actually had a front face
that you could configure with a bunch of tiles, and I put Lionus on there. That's
really cute.