when I unbox the Mac Mini M2 on ShortCircuit recently I was pretty stoked
that you could get a Mac computer with that much performance for that little
money well this is the Mac Mini M2 killer when configured with twice the
amount of RAM and twice the amount of storage it's still currently cheaper
with more performance and of course double the other things I said earlier
it's called The Minis Forum um 773 and
it's really small it might even be smaller than the Mac Mini even wow look
at that oh it totally is it totally is smaller
wow this thing is Tiny sweet okay cool
cool let's get some bounce on there oh it's so small okay we'll put it over there there's some more box to unbox
here got our usual propaganda a slow boot
time may be caused by yeah yeah do not remove the CPU Cooler themselves that's
not a bad idea foam
power cable what is this oh it's a
little stand that's cute
yeah look at that that's so cute it's in
there nice oh well maybe not
maybe I am supposed to leave this in there I don't know whatever worry about
that later we've got the power brick of course because of the size no power
brick yeah that's something the Mac Mini has though hey look Mac Mini holy crap
this thing's bigger than I remember okay
there you go that's a lot smaller so if I put the power brick here
still smaller and you know what the funny thing is inside this Mac Mini
there's about this much empty space so yeah this you know the components in
here and in here it's kind of the same size it's definitely thicker
not by a huge amount but definitely a little bit got an HDMI cable that's
always a nice inclusion vase amount cool
what the is that oh af5 SATA cable
this thing has a SATA drive slot too yeah there we go okay cool it's just
like the world's cutest SATA cable he's so little
should be very careful with this though I don't want to lose it these must be
rubber feet there's like little little rubber doodads you
rubber feet already oh maybe I'll read the manual it's probably in there okay
improper disassembly may cause damage to the motherboard and CPU it could also
reduce the liquid metal ceiling tightness it doesn't say for disassembly
just improper so maybe if you properly disassemble it you still get your
warranty but I did know it had liquid metal that's cool oh yeah okay oh we got
disassembly instructions that's cool you have to remove these bottom rubber pads
and they tell you to do that if you have to take it apart because you could buy
this as a Bare Bones kit without any SSD or or RAM so you might actually have to
take this thing apart right when you get it and the fact that they include the
extra feet it's definitely a nice touch you've got the RAM slot and the SSD
right there accessible we will take this apart later don't worry about that they
kind of made it sound like in the documentation that there was going to be a slot you could slide an SSD into you
do have to take the bottom cover off to do so but the fact that you can fit that
in there as as well as being able to modify the storage as well as being able
to modify the RAM this is a lot of flexibility in this thing machine based
okay you are supposed to leave this little rubber thing on the base okay
cool I think we've gotten everything out of that but we can't holy crap look at
all that I O oh my God because it's got an external power brick there's going to
be a power jack 19 volt it's got 2.5 gig Lan which is awesome to see on a device
of this size and just devices nowadays in general we've got it looks like four
or five gig USB type A ports two HDMI 2.0 ports so you're not gonna be able to
do like 4K 120 not that the GPU and this could run games at that anyways 4K 60
you could do high refresh rate 1440p or 1080p
um there's a Kensington lock we've got lots of venting and then on the other
side usb4 which means in theory you
could use some Thunderbolt devices with this you might be able to get high
refresh rate 4K out of Thunderbolt it would depend on if the GPU supports it
I'm not 100 sure got a combo Jack for audio just a 3.5 mil standard we've got
10 gig USB type-c not Thunderbolt or
usb4 it looks like there's two reset
buttonholes one of the this is a clear CMOS it's not labeled so I'm not going
to stick anything in it but it is there it's a lot of i o for a
machine this small don't get me wrong the Mac Mini also has a ton of i o
especially if you spec the pro model which has four Thunderbolt ports but it
doesn't have 2.5 gig Land by default you have to pay to upgrade to 10 gig it does
have a headphone jack still that's good all right power cable power brick
I like that they include the short HDMI cables with this thing because it's kind
of designed to go on the back of your monitor and so you just you know you
kind of like that but if you have to do anything more than that
it's kind of inconvenient I guess most people have an HDMI cable and like most
computers don't come with them Apple let's turn it on but not before this
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skins check them out at the link below usually the crappy thing with small
computers is like it's got two USB ports you have to run a USB hub like this you
plug a keyboard and mouse in you still have two more type A ports and two type
c ports on the front okay it does have a Wi-Fi card in it that's good on the
specs page it just says m.2 2230 Wi-Fi
card slot but it doesn't specify what type of Wi-Fi card or if it even comes
with one clearly it does oh it's Wi-Fi see look at that would they ship this
with one stick for the 16 gig config on one hand that gives you the ability to
upgrade easily by just adding another stick but on the other hand you don't
have dual Channel memory which kind of sucks for performance well anyways the
CPU inside this thing is a ryzen 77 holy
numbers that's a lot of sevens ryzen 7 7735 HS with Radeon graphics so it's got
an rdna 2 GPU with 12 compute units it's
a 8 core 16 thread so it's pretty powerful configurable TDP from 35 to 54
Watts it's based on the tsmc six nanometer process it's got a 3.2
gigahertz base clock and I think it clocks up to like 4.75 there's a lot of
performance in this very very small package the configuration they sent us
must be the 16 gig 512 version which you can get on pre-order right now for 560
dollars The Bare Bones version with no storage and no RAM is 410 if you go to a
32 gig one terabyte 6 60 and then the
max spec 64 gig one terabyte is 790. in
comparison to an M2 Mac If You're Gonna Go 16 gigs of RAM 512 like this one it's
a thousand US Dollars that's without 10 gig networking and this thing is looking
pretty compelling if you don't need macOS I'm curious to see what sort of uh
TDP this thing runs at because it's a configurable TDP I suspect usually
Mini's Forum likes to Max them out all right so I started installing a game
Apex Legends because that seems like a game somebody could maybe play on this
thing the CPU is of course going to ramp up to decompress those files as they
come in from Steam right now we're downloading it like 70 megabytes a
second over Wi-Fi which is pretty great 40 CPU usage it's a little noticeable
like noise wise it's not something I would say is loud it sounds like a a
reasonable gaming laptop which I guess it it's it's kind of like the CPU of a
reasonable gaming laptop that doesn't have a GPU like it's not crazy loud like
if it was sitting on my desk next to me like this I would probably find it a
little bit annoying but if it was on the back of my monitor the noise goes away
you can't hear it at all when it's behind the monitor I guess that's what
they designed it for so Mission success for that if it was under your TV like as
a home theater PC which I definitely could see this being used for I don't
think you would have any problems at all but right next me
it's definitely audible it looks like this thing is configured to use a Max of
45 Watts this chip can go up to 54. I
don't know if there's a BIOS option we'll have to check for that but uh I
mean at in this 45 watt state it's reasonably not too loud it's only
at you know 75 76 degrees on uh the hottest
core it's very managed it's not thermal throttling oh yeah I forgot to mention
the RAM is ddr5 which is great let's try a speed test on the SSD it is 300 gigs
of 480 used maybe not the the best case
scenario for testing the drive but it is a more realistic scenario to test a
drive-in when it's you know got some usage then then when it's empty because
it's going to be faster when it's empty but this is fast it's Gen 4 so I'm glad
that they actually put a Gen 4 SSD in the Gen 4 slot that's great speed test
is done we're getting around five gigabytes a second read three and a half
gig right the random iops on this drive
you know 400 500 000 read 700 000 right
this is a very good drive that they put in here I'm not sure what it is we'll
see when we take it apart but very good let's try pass mark
I saw for a second the CPU package power went up to 57 Watts holy is not
doing that anymore it's probably because it was doing a floating Point test and
that can really push the CPU 64 Watts
only I thought the max was 53 AMD what the
hell almost 120 watt power brick I guess
there's other things you could plug into this thing that would use power like if
you Plugged In Like A you're charging your phone at 10 watts that's another 10
watts of power you know you got some LEDs on there there's a fan in there that's going to draw some power but it
definitely has Headroom 24 000 in pass Market the single threaded
score is worse than an M2 you got 3 500 in pass mark on this thing and M2 is
around 4 000 single threaded not a huge difference but definitely something you
would notice however even though they're
both eight cores the Mac Mini does not have hyper threading and it also has
kind of like performance cores and efficiency cores whereas this is all the
same cores we're getting 25 000 multi-threaded score a Mac Mini is
around 15 000. so there's a lot more CPU
horsepower in this thing especially if you're doing anything multi-threaded just for sure let's run cinebench almost
thirteen thousand which puts it close to
a first gen 16 core threadripper a 7700k
is less than half the overall speed it's
only a four core so that makes sense per core
it's about as fast as the 7700k seriously impressive chip we're gonna
game at 1080p 60. this monitor is only HDMI 1.4 and despite 1.4 technically
being able to do 1080p 120 hertz it's not giving me that option
so I think we're just stuck at gaming at 60 hertz there's probably a way to make
it work but this is ShortCircuit not long circuit so I need to just we must
just tread on I'm getting like 60. we're
at absolute lowest settings I do have texture streaming on but this game still
looks pretty good at low settings so if I stare at the ground 120 yeah let's go
if there's anything on screen it's 60 to 70 which is totally totally playable
um at 1080p but again this is like a
it's like an APU it's not dedicated graphics I wasn't expecting this to
to knock my performance socks off
but it's it's enough to play a game like this this probably looks better than it
does on Xbox okay
don't at me Xbox people PS5 probably
looks better oh this is in Russian holy okay anyways
um low settings I do have FXAA on still I'm getting stuttering because the Ping
is so high I'm connected to a community server but again between 100
120 to 150 FPS like this is come here
come here get knifed yeah I don't know I didn't buy
he got me totally can play CS go on this thing is it pretty capable Esports
gaming machine if you just had it at your TV can totally do that I'm sure
it's enough even to to do some like basic video editing it just feels Snappy
when we were using that Pico PC that Linus did an LTT on
obviously way less powerful than this thing and a lot smaller but it was in
you could say man you could you can use this for for web browsing you can use
this for word processing trying to play a 4K YouTube video it did work but it
was stuttery this system has so much
power that you could use this for most
pretty much pretty much anything anything basic and it doesn't feel slow
it's got a Gen 4 SSD that makes it boot fast it makes programs launch fast
it's got enough GPU power it's got lots of CPU power I mean 4K videos like
there's nothing who cares it's it's kind of sad to have crab Rave with no
I'm using no audio this would be a sick home theater PC especially because you
can put a bigger drive in it it's got that 2.5 inch Drive slot which let's uh
let's check out now so we have their instructions for doing this this should
be pretty pretty easy oddly enough they included extra these feet in case you
need to take it apart but they don't give you extra of these little ones they're both stick on so
oh Jesus that thing just got destroyed all of the sticky came off I don't know
you could position feet in a manner where you don't have to take them off to
take it apart especially as a product that does sell as a Bare Bones kit it
seems like nobody really thought about wow you know people are going to take
this apart why don't we just make it so they can take it apart and not have to peel off one-time use sticky things
there's also Clips on the bottom here anyone that takes this thing apart of
their house is gonna have a small screwdriver they probably have something they could pry in there to unclip the
little Clips it's just when it's such a easily serviceable thing with you you
got your SSD you got your RAM there it seems like they could have just put a
tiny bit more effort into making it just a little bit easier to open it's not
hard but I mean you could break these clips pretty easily they're tiny and
once it's broken and it never really goes back together properly which kind
of sucks
it has a heat sink on it or like a heat spreader it's very hot in my hands
Kingston Gen 4 512 gig it's like an oem
drive it's not it's probably not something you could super easily buy but it's probably
pretty similar to their other ssds it doesn't look like it has a dram cache
just has a bunch of nand on there and as suspected just a single stick of ramp
would be cool to see dual Channel memory if you buy a 32 gig or 64 gig I suspect
it will be dual Channel memory ddr5 8 gig dimms are kind of hard to come by so
I kind of can see it it also does give you that easy upgrade ability to just
add one more stick in rather than having to buy two new sticks if you were to go
from 16 to 32 gigs but you are leaving a little bit of performance on the table
for sure it's got like a metal frame and I think the whole metal frame will
come out of the plastic I mean they probably have a special tool in the
factory for this look it's nothing worse than the
Purolator guy would do okay
oh
noise we did it Reddit wow look at that cooler
holy it's got two giant heat pipes
there's a set of fins over there and a
set of fins over there where does the air come from this must suck air through
a heat sink like the intake is a heat sink and then blow the air back out
through another heatsink it's kind of cool it's not sexy like the inside of a
Mac Mini but it is very very dense sweet
little piece of kit overall I think it's not going to be a
crazy gaming rig you know whatever but if you're just playing Esports titles or
you want to run a Plex Media Server or something like that off of this home
theater PC it's a serious amount of CPU horsepower
serious amount of i o and uh it's
reasonably upgradable I really like this thing
so if you like this video maybe check out that Mac Mini unboxing that thing is
also super cool kind of in a bit of a different way but it is still affordable
compared to other Macs get subscribed bye