A Ryzen Mini PC!

 For the longest time,Intel reigned supreme, all the way from thehighest power workstation and gaming rigs to thetiny power sipping chips that you'd find in anultra portable laptop. 

Fortunately for consumers, AMD got their crap togethera 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 isn't until very, veryrecently was super small PCs with their NUC or nextunit 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 NUCs. It's tiny it's light, and I have very high expectations, just like you have very high expectations of my segues to our sponsors. Like Vessi, Vessi footwearmakes comfortable shoes that are light and waterproof. 

Their new weekend shoecan be worn any day, anywhere, anytime, even on the weekend. Reserve yours today for $5 at vessifootwear.com/linustechtips. (upbeat music) Many these forums goal forthe DMAF5 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 VESA compatible mount, so you can pop one of theseon the back of your monitor. If you want like a, anAIO 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 plugged that puppy in. If you wanted to usethis as like a media PC, for example, this would be great. I have something very similar at home. It appears that there's leftand right click on here. 

Is this an air mouse too? 

- [Jake] I'm not sure, but it only comes. It only came for like the early backers. 

- Oh only the early backers get this? 

- [Jake] Yeah. - I'm actually I'm jazzed to try this because mine is super bulky. It's one from Sedeko and I haven't been able tofind an alternative to it yet. You also get a power brick, HDMI cable. That is a really short HDMI cable. 

That is a pinner HTMI cable. I mean, I guess it's good enough to go from a VESA mount to thebottom of the monitor, but that's about it, ladies and gentlemen. You get an equally Pitzerdisplay port cable. I'm bringing back pinner. 

You know that right?

 - [Jake] It's just cause you're a pinner. 

- Hey, there's no shame in being pinner. 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 getaccess to the internals, but let's, take a tourof the outside first. On the front, we've got our power button. 

We've got a HeadphoneJack, two type A USB three. Now this one, accordingto the Indiegogo page anyway, is 10 gig and this one's five gig but this one provides powereven 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 knowwhat the deal is with that. You've got a Type C running at 10 gig and then nothing on thisside, nothing on this side. I keep accidentally popping that top off. 

And then over on the back, we've got a couple more 10gigabit per second USB threes, display port HDMI, dualgigabit LAN and power in. Okay. So that gives us a total of one, two, actually, apparently thisfront 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 pfSense box. Although personally, I think I'd feel kind oflimited by something like this. Anyway, let's formally open it up now, you've got two clicky do duds right here and you just pop it off like that, that reveals, looks like we've got a SATA driveconnector right here. 

It's not immediatelyapparent to me exactly where that's gonna mount to ah! To the bottom of the lid. I have two SATA memory slots for dual channel DDR4, as well as an M.2 slot over here. Now what I can immediatelysee is the cooling solution and socket for the CPU, or rather, I should just say the BGA SATA point to the CPU. Reveal your secrets.

 - [Jake] Well we don'thave quite with you today. - Secrets. 

- [Jake] It's plunged inits probably not best. (laughs) - Reveal them. 

Why is this not coming off?

 Oh, I see. 'Cause there's probablysome clips or something for this back part here. Ah, ah. Hey, wow, that was awesome. Knock that screw rightinto the parts tray. That's an advanced droppingtechnique right there. Oh my goodness. 

(chuckles) Why? 

Is this screwed in from the other side. 

Why?

 Maybe I over complicated things for myself I bet I didn't see these screws because there was memoryin the way there they are. Way to go Linus, see, thewhole thing would have just popped off like that. I blame, I blame Jake. This seems to be a VRMheatsink of some sort. So let's go ahead and pop that puppy off. Here we go. Oh, interesting. Well, I mangled the Jesusout of that thermal pad, so that's cool. But yes, that is infact what that was for. 

So that's good. And you know what? Let's just pop the M.2 out who needs this thing to everdo that again anyway right?

 But am, 

- [Jake] We do (Jake laughs)- And but am okay Yeah, we haven't reallydone the video yet, so that's, challenging. Wow, why do they have these little rubbers on the M.2 stick here? 

I don't like rubbers on my stick. 

- [Jake] Does anyone? 

- Don't appreciate it exactly. Well, they have an operation for that. (Jake laughs) Let's give you the rundown here. 

It's available in two configurations with 256 gigs of storage and eight gigs of RAM for 429. That's early bird pricing those. We have no idea how that's gonna shake out to regular pricing or double that for, Ithink it's yeah, 529. Now we do have some concerns. This is a SATA drive. So it's M.2, but you can tell by thekey that that's a SATA M.2 not an NBVe drive. 

They have gotten that feedback though. And apparently the newerones are gonna be NBVe as for RAM, unfortunately theeight gig configuration ships with a single stick. So you're not running in dual channel, which means you kind of haveto go with the higher end one. 

If you want the full performance, speaking of full performance, as we all know rising benefits from higher memory speed in a big way. Unfortunately not only isthis 2,400 megahertz RAM, but we actually tried installingsome higher speed stuff that we had lying around at the office. And the bio seemed to stillbe locked to 2,400 megahertz. So we'll see how that works out for us when we do our performance testing later. Oh nice. So we got ax wifi. So that's wifi six in there. That's pretty sweet. 

Hey, they took the gamers nexus approach to thermal compound. You can't have too much. So don't even try. I have no idea whichscrews go where anymore. This is quite disassembled. Now we get our first look at the Ryzen 5 3550H, APU that's installed in the system. Now don't let AMD confusingnaming scheme mislead you here, even though this is a 3000 series Ryzen, it is not Zen 2 it isunfortunately Zen plus. Don't feel bad though, if you didn't know that right off the hop, I too was bamboozled. 

The fact that I thoughtthis was Zen 2 was one of the main reasons that I was so excitedto check this thing out. So it's not seven nanometers. It's 12 nanometer everythingis PCI express of Gen 3, and all of that good stuff. With that said, this is stillan utterly unique product. And one that I really wanted to look at just because it'sfinally an AMD alternative to Intel's NUC lineup. Now we can go ahead and putthis puppy back together. With it mostly reassembled.

 All that remains is to popin some dual channel memory so that we're giving it, its best chance possible as well as throw in some more storage that we've got room for allof our, games about warfare, that's very modern and all that, all that kind of good stuff. So we'll pop that in there. Now, one of the thingsyou might have noticed about that cooling solution as we were looking at it was that it's pretty darnrobust 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 Minisfirm has gone. 

Now we're still not expecting it to compete with a Zen 2 based CPU. And Asus actually has some sort of NUC competitors based on Zen 2, that are probably gonna beat the stuffing out of this thing. But I wanna give it a shot anyway, just because hey, firstout of the gate, 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 Nuc like, Hey, 

can we call them that Nuc likes? 

That's not bad. That's not bad it's a Nuc like running Radeon graphics. 

Now Intel actually dida Nuc with AMD graphics in it a while back, but this is different. And unfortunately not as powerful. These are Vega eight graphics and they are clocked ataround 1200 megahertz. And our expectations are basically that we should geta pretty solid experience in esports titles. But beyond that, probablynot that amazing. While performance as we expected, it's not, 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 (Linus chuckles) the suggested TDP from AMD seems to be working out pretty good. 3.36 gigahertz at a 100%load across all course, 60 and 67 points puts us right in range of a mobile skylight core i7. So that's pretty respectable, but well behind even aquad 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 nota gaming oriented product, but, Scott Radeon graphicscompared to Intel onboard 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 anywherefrom around 30 to 40 FPS. Not bad. 

- [Jake] So like game console territory. 

- Yeah. Look at that. Oh yeah. I mean, obviously it's not amazing, but like if you'd showedme this, like, 10 years ago I'd have been like, of course just cause it'squiet doesn't necessarily mean that the thermal performance is good. 

So I wanna take a look atwhat our CPU temps are like when we're hitting it hard. Okay. That's respectable 80 degrees. I mean, obviously it'snot like my favorite thing in the world to have aCPU running at 80 degrees, but it's not like your watercooling the thing in here. And given how quiet it is, not bad, not bad Minisforum. Is that how you'resupposed to pronounce it? 

- Minis, I don't know. - I don't really know They can play Valorant, I'llbe pretty happy with that. Okay. 

- [Jake] Looks like itsplaying valorant to me 4k (Jake laughs)- Wait what? Shut up. 

- Client FPS. Here we go, graph 

- [Jake] Show both, show both.- Show both, alright. Well, why not both? Okay. What are we looking-- - What?

- Client FPS? 

50 to 60 FPS Valorant 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 computersplugged into the thing. Nope. That's it.

 That's pretty good for onboard graphics. 

- [Jake] I mean thesettings are probably pretty oh, is there a render resolution maybe? 

- Let me check. Let me check back-- 

- [Jake] Even the settings arelow people play esports games at low settings to get better performance. 

(Linus mumbles) - Okay yeah, it's pretty low. It's pretty low

 - [Jake] That's whatmost people use anyways. - Let me just see ifmaybe it's like rendering at 50% res or what not it doesn't seem to be.(Jake mumbles) - Okay. That's pretty cool. 

What was the thing 500 bucks? 

Sure. Now for fun, let's trysome media Encoding. Now, one of the ways we could do this is fire up handbrake or FFN peg. But the reality of it is mostpeople 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 behind Plex is yourip your favorite blue rays or DVDs or whatever the case may be. 

You throw them onto a NASor 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 hisaccount signed in here. He is firing up his phone and let's see how hardthis puppy's getting hit. So Plex Transcoder is askingfor about 22% on video and about 20% on audio. It's running nice and nice and quiet. 

- [Jake] It should be playing-- - And what is this? Is this 4K - It's original quality 4K. So the only thing that'sTranscoding is audio. - That's fantastic. It's actually kind of crazyhow heavy audio is hey. Look, I didn't realize untilI started running Plex, how video is like nobig deal in some cases in this case, it's becausethe 4K video stream is actually just directly streaming because a Jake's phone hasbuilt a decoding for that. But it's the audio thatyou actually have trouble with in some cases. So this is, this is freaking awesome. - Oh, no way. Oh, it looks terrible. 

Something that's not happy. - That's horrendous. - Come on give it a sec. Oh, there we go. - It's back to a 100%. There's no way. No, you're done. You're out. - All right it can't handle a 4K. Oh, well. Oh, it's no, 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 - Oh- 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 doprobably one 1080p Transcode. 

- And then maybe one 720or something like that. But I wouldn't count on it. Still for an all rounder little machine. I'm impressed as heck by this thing. Of course I'd be more impressed if it was Zen 2, but fortunately, we're gonna be checking out something like that very soon. Make sure you guys are subscribed. Because Asus has an absolutelykiller Nuc likes coming that are gonna be Zen 2 based. 

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