Thank you for the great review Boss. Slowly but surely this tiny boxes keep getting faster and better , the integrated gpu it's awesome. Conectivity is great and performance it's great too. I know in a few years this tiny boxes with integrated gpu's will be able to play any game at max settings at 1080p and beyond. I like them a lot 🙂

I honestly wonder, if in certain situations, one of these wouldn't beat a laptop (if you are going somewhere where power and a spare screen are not an issue).

Nice review! Thanks team.

fantaskarsef:

I honestly wonder, if in certain situations, one of these wouldn't beat a laptop (if you are going somewhere where power and a spare screen are not an issue).

Then there is the mouse and keyboard to carry as well. Also, considering the price (for which you are paying extra for it to be so compact at $750). You have to ask if it's worth the hassle, especially when a laptop will have very similar specs very soon for around half of that price.

fantaskarsef:

I honestly wonder, if in certain situations, one of these wouldn't beat a laptop (if you are going somewhere where power and a spare screen are not an issue).

I can think of 3 situations: 1. These devices are great for media centers, of which, often have very poor airflow. Give it a place where it has room to breathe and it might perform better. Ideally, a BIOS update would help unlock a little more potential. 2. I'm sure this would under-perform if you connected this to a 4K display. Seems like most laptops with this are 1080p or 1440p. 3. APUs are heavily dependent upon RAM speed. Every few 100MHz makes a difference.

The igpu is a good step forward !

schmidtbag:

I can think of 3 situations: 1. These devices are great for media centers, of which, often have very poor airflow. Give it a place where it has room to breathe and it might perform better. Ideally, a BIOS update would help unlock a little more potential. 2. I'm sure this would under-perform if you connected this to a 4K display. Seems like most laptops with this are 1080p or 1440p. 3. APUs are heavily dependent upon RAM speed. Every few 100MHz makes a difference.

agree except @ 4k where the purpose is htpc & 4k streaming where it will do perfectly fine gaming not so much

tunejunky:

agree except @ 4k where the purpose is htpc & 4k streaming where it will do perfectly fine gaming not so much

Agreed, it would handle 4K streaming just fine, though I was just stating in general why it would perform worse than a laptop of the same chip.

This is cool. I love these things. Nice board, temps seem fine, so buyer should get some good longevity out of it.

Back in 2017 I thought these boxes were almost ready for 1080p gaming, but no they weren't. Finally, 1080p gaming is here!

Thank you for the review. I am surprised that one of the most important features of this device has not been tested, namely HDMI ports themselves. I haven't seen this information in the review. Four HDMI ports suggest media powerhouse device. This device claims to support 8K/60 video signal. If so, this means that HDMI 2.1 ports must support FRL signalling protocol from HDMI 2.1 spec and at least 32 Gbps output for 10-bit 4:2:0 chroma image, or so called FRL4. But, 8K/60 works even better over 40 Gbps link (X box X) or FRL5 and still better over 48 Gbps (RTX3000/4000, RDNA3) or FRL6. Could you, please, try to test the link speed of HDMI ports? Rembrandt APUs and RDNA2 GPUs support FRL protocol but RDNA2 GPU supoort 40 Gbps signal, so 8 Gbps less than full port. This can be easily done with 2019 or 2022 LG 4K OLED TV. Those TVs contain HDMI diagnostic menu that could be displayed on screen and tell us about all video features, from link bandwidth, to HDR, to DSC, to colour spaces, pixel clocks, audio formats, etc. Every mini-PC and on-board graphics on PC motherboards need to be tested for HDMI andt/or DisplayPort version.

@Tekkie welcome to guru 3d ! And the test you suggest seems interesting I hope we get an update ! 🙂

Excellent review. Thank you! At the end of the review, you showed a screenshot of the BIOS set at 35W. Were the benchmark tests run with the BIOS in the 35W setting? How much of a performance improvement would you expect from running the tests at 45W power limit? Going from 35W to 45W is something like a 28% increase in power available to the CPU. Obviously, this will also increase the already notable fan noise.