What? It's called the tank PC, right? Okay, sorry. This is the Ace Magic M18
Pro Plus, a mini PC that is boasting a
very powerful processor in this bad boy,
128 GB of RAM, and
it kind of comes in a cute little package. Let's open it up.
Feels like a tank, you know?
Look how cute it is. It kind of looks like it's either a cyborg or that's its
nose. That's actually how you can change the power profile of the device. We'll
get into that in a little bit. We got to see what else is in the box, though.
Oh. Okay, well, hopefully the device is built better
than the box is. Oh, here we go. All of our cables. Holy
mother of god, that is a big power brick. Holy cow, that is a 300 W power
brick. Thing's chunky. As for the rest of it, whoop,
we get our manual, we get our C13 power cord, and we have our HDMI cable. Now,
some of you guys might be wondering who the heck is Ace Magic. Well, they've
actually been in the game for a little bit. And this isn't their first tank PC,
or at least PC in the tank series that kind of uses a similar chassis to this.
And you can tell that when you open the manual for this device. If you look very
closely on the back IO there, let's play spot the difference, kids. Do you have
three HDMI ports and three display ports on this one? No. They're reusing a
similar designed chassis and then just reusing the old manual from the other
devices. There's actually some more errors in here. I don't want to go over
all of them because I don't care if the manual's wrong. If the device works, it's probably okay,
right? Let's finish doing an exterior tour before I tell you all of the specs
in this bad boy. On the back here, we have our 3.5 mm combo audio jack, our DC
power, which again, that big power brick goes into. You have four USB 3.2 Gen 1
ports, so those are 5 GB a second ports. We have two HDMI 2.1s, two 2.5 gig LANs,
which are covered up here. I'll explain why in a second, and a DP 2.0 port, and
then a Kensington lock if you really don't want people stealing this thing.
On this side, you got apparently a contact support number. I kind of want to call that.
And then we've got tips for faster setup, avoid Wi-Fi or LAN, connecting
might trigger long updates. Our Labs team was very confused when they saw
that sticker, and that's actually what the stickers over the Ethernet ports are
as well. This shipped with a pretty old version of Windows, and the reason it
tells you that is because obviously when you first plug a Windows computer in and
you're going through the initial out of box setup, it will download those updates in the background, and it can
take a very long time. I think they're kind of just like, ah, skip it. Just get
into Windows first before you update, which does actually help speed up the
initial setup phase. On the front here, I kind of talked about it before, you
have this knob that can let you toggle between the three power modes on this
thing. We have two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, so these are 10 GB a second. We have one
USB 4 port, which can do 8K displays, that means, or 40 GB a second as well. A
full-size SD card reader, and again, another combo audio jack. And on this
side, they've just got a bunch of stickers. Top, it's just a bunch of
ventilation. It's a good thing it's got a lot of ventilation because in this is
actually the same chip in the Framework and that X Plus Rival device I looked at
earlier. So, it was the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 chip. That's 16 cores, 32
threads, boost up to 5.1 GHz. And this configuration is the only configuration
you can buy, but it has 128 GB of RAM at
8,000 megatransfers per second. Now, if you're familiar with the AI Max Plus
lineup from AMD, you know that that RAM is not upgradeable, which is another
lying point in the manual, because I believe it's on this side.
They say that there's a RAM upgrade in there. As you can see, there's not. But
what there is, there is another M.2 in
there. So, you can add expandable storage or swap yours out, but there's
not just one.
OH, LOOK AT THAT. THERE'S THE ONE THAT'S included and a third one. And then at
the very back there, there's our Wi-Fi card. So, if you needed to swap that one
out for whatever reason in the future, oh, it's a it's a seven. So, yeah, you
probably won't even need to swap this one out not for a while at least, but
quick access to the SSD, man. And actually, it's going to be kind of hard
for you guys to see, but this kind of thick black plastic piece right here,
that is the 80 mm fan. That's the intake. It's a pretty thick boy. I don't
know how it's going to sound. 80 mm fans tend to have kind of a more annoying
sound or something like that. I really hope it doesn't sound like that when we
power this on, but we're just going to have to find out.
Other than that, that's basically the entire device. It's pretty light, but
again, I think most of the weight is in the power brick, so that makes
sense. Should we fire this thing up and just get gaming on it? I think we
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It's because we connected IT TO LAN.
ACTUALLY, WE'RE NOT CONNECTED TO LAN. ACTUALLY, HOW IS IT DOING updates then?
It's probably on Wi-Fi, maybe. By default, it's in the silent mode and they also have a balanced and
performance mode. The silent mode makes this draw 70 W, the balanced is 100 W,
and the performance is 140 with a big asterisk there cuz I'm going to go over
that. Labs found some weird numbers, but let's turn it to balance. I was kind of
expecting something that like happen, okay?
Performance. Ooh, it's red now. Okay.
It does change the color, but do you notice what it also does? It resets the
RGB. So, when I turn it, you can see that it likes the RGB does like a little
skip. It's like restarting whatever its its
cycle is. Uh that sucks. You can't customize the RGB,
man. This is like the most basic basic of controllers in here. But, we might as
well game, right? Let's do some gaming. Unironically, I think this thing looks
pretty cool. Like, I think if you rocked up to a LAN with this thing, they'd be
like, "Whoa, what is that? That's kind of cool." Plus, it's pretty portable.
I don't know. Do I have anything signed in? I have no games. Oh, I have
Cyberpunk. Let's go.
That was the Terminator. That wasn't Cyberpunk.
Ooh, it's starting to ramp up, baby. And
whoo, IT'S TAKING OFF. I'M IN CYBERPUNK 1440p
with everything basically on high with some things being ultra. No ray tracing,
no frame gen. Let's see what kind of gaming experience we can get out of
this. Oh, boy. High and ultra might be a little much for this.
We're at like 40 in the 1% lows, 50
average. Okay. I am going to dial these settings just a tiny bit. We're going to
do settings. I'm going to do medium settings. No resolution scaling. We'll
keep everything on medium to high. No ray tracing again. Still 1440p. Oh,
that's much better. Yeah, our average is about 60 to 70 now. 1% lows are at about
50. I think if you did a little bit more tweaking on a per game basis, you could
probably get this to be a pretty stable 1% lows in the 60s. Maybe playing at
1080p instead of 1440p, but this is a
pretty demanding game. We all know Cyberpunk's pretty demanding. I'm gaming on a tank. I will say I have not been
gaming that long. In fact, I'm just in the title screen right now. That fan is
not quiet. It's not quite as whiny as I thought it might have been with an 80 mm
fan, but I can tell it's moving a lot of air.
It's It's It's going. Just for audio sake, I am going to I think close the
game while I read off the Labs results. For our Labs testing results, we
compared it against the Framework Desktop since those are both using the same chip and they both have similar
amount of RAM. And in this case, they configured it to have 32 GB of RAM on
the GPU. If you remember with the 395 chip, just like the Framework, you can
actually go into the BIOS and configure how much RAM is being allocated to the
onboard GPU. So, in our test, we tested 32 GB on both of them, so that way it's
kind of comparable. And as for the tank, it performed slightly worse across our
tests. In the games, for example, it was a couple FPS lower both in the average
and the 1% lows. In our Puget Bench tests, basically the same thing, little
bit worse than the Framework Desktop. Where this thing does win though, is in
temperature. Meaning it gets hotter. Higher number means better, right?
Sorry, that was terrible. It also is a hotter device than the Framework because
again, that Framework has a 120 mm fan. It's a much bigger fan than this one.
Where this device did win though, was it did actually have a higher max clock
speed. The problem was Labs noticed it would only boost to that for 1 to 2
seconds before it would clock down much
lower. In terms of the wattage, that's where it would peak at the 140 W like I
mentioned earlier, but then it would clock down and just hold 120 W basically
flat across the board. If you take one of these graphs for example, where you
can see that the Framework is able to boost higher for longer, depending on
the length of the task, the Framework Desktop is probably going to be your
best bet. But if it's a very, very long task, they both slowly start to converge
towards each other and almost end up in the same performance realm. But if you
were looking for relatively shorter, higher clock speeds, the Framework
Desktop wins out over this thing. So, if it performs worse than the Framework
Desktop, it should be cheaper, right? Well, it is on sale. At the time of
recording this video right now, it's $2,600
>> US dollars. That is a ton of money for a small form factor PC. The MSRP though
for this thing is $3,300, which
that's pretty brutal. I would never buy this at MSRP. I think it might be worth
investigating for yourself if you can get it at that sale price. A couple
things to keep in mind though. AceMagic not necessarily known for their amazing,
fantastic, top-of-the-line support or long-term support for their devices,
whereas Framework so far has kind of proven that they're at least around for
a couple of years at this point. So, maybe they're going to help you a bit
more. I guess it really depends on your use case. If you're someone that's just
wanting to get that 395 chip at the maxed-out spec, yeah, hey, this might be
for you because it is cheap for that chip. But if you're
someone who wants like a small form factor gaming PC, it might be worth
spending the extra couple hundred bucks to buy it from a reputable brand, like
Framework for example. Framework disclosure, I forgot to do that at some
point or someone else or just build your own
small form factor PC. RAM is expensive though, so
it's up to you. If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out the other two videos that I've done with this exact same
chip. One was that Framework Desktop, another was called the X Plus Rival.
That one kind of had more of a game-y aesthetic. The Framework was more of a
gentleman's computer.