hey everybody it’s la inside and we’re taking a look today at a new mini pc this is the b-link u-59 and this one is powered by an intel jasper lake processor and this is continuing the lineage of these low-powered inexpensive chips the prior generation was called gemini lake and we’re going to take a look at what this mini pc can and can’t do in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure this came in free of charge from vlink however nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewing or approving what you’re about to see before it was uploaded and all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own so let’s get into it now and see what this mini pc is all about now the price point on this starts at 279 dollars the base model comes with eight gigabytes of ram and 256 gigabytes of storage this one costs a little bit more than the base model and came with 16 gigabytes of ram and 512 gigabytes of storage now a little bit earlier we took it apart and as you can see you can upgrade the ram hours came with two sticks of 8 gigabytes for a total of 16.
The entry level version will have two sticks of four for a total of eight you definitely want to have that ram installed in pairs for the best performance that will put the machine into dual channel mode and then you’ll see a little heat sink there at the top that white thing that’s where the m.2 sata drive lives and you can upgrade that as well it does not appear to support nvme drives so you need to put in an m2 sata drive but you can upgrade it if you need more storage and as you can see as we slide things down here there is room for a two and a half inch sata drive as well so you can have one drive
installed in that m.2 slot and another one installed there on the back of the case and that would be a more traditional laptop two and a half inch sata drive and those are pretty inexpensive these days so you do have a good amount of storage that you can cram inside of this additionally you can upgrade the wi-fi that lives underneath the m.2 sata there and it comes with ac wi-fi on board but if you wanted to go to wi-fi six later you could very easily pull that card out and install a new one it does have an intel card installed on it now this one is running with the maximum ram configuration which is 16 gigabytes it does of course support ddr4 ram and the maximum memory speed is 2933 megahertz on the front here you’ve got a bunch of ports we’ve got two usb 3 ports along with a usb type c this type c port is full service so this will send display out 4k at up to 60 hertz it will also though take power in to power the device you could actually plug this into a docking station if it supports that and get everything going off that single port and of course the port will support data devices in addition to power and video so that was a nice surprise on there on the front here we’ve got a headphone microphone jack along with the power button you can clear your cmos memory by sticking a pin in the front portion there there’s nothing on the side here there is some vents for the fan which i’ll talk about in a minute you have gigabit ethernet here we tested this earlier and it
could run it a full gigabit it wasn’t getting held up at all you have two more usb 3 ports here along with two hdmi outputs and both of these will also support 4k at 60 hertz this chipset will support a maximum of three simultaneous displays running at 4k 60 if you want to do that then of course you got your power here if you wish to power it off its included power adapter the power adapter goes up to about 36 watts total i found in my testing on the device here it usually idles around 9 watts or so and when it’s going full board it’s running at about 15 watts give or take there is a fan on it it’s not very loud but you’re going to hear it and i found that the fan on this thing is constantly changing its speed based on what the processor is doing so you’ll hear that fan ramp up and then it’ll slow down and then it’ll ramp up again it might be annoying if you’re somebody who’s very sensitive to fan noise so just be aware of that but the fan overall is not loud it just changes its speed constantly depending on what you’re doing with the computer now what i want to do is get this thing hooked up to my display and we’re going to take a look at how it performs doing the basics and we’re going to have it connected to a 4k 60hz display so you can see exactly how it’ll do at its highest supported resolutions let me get that set up and we’ll be right back all right so we are booted up right now and i’ve got it running at 4k 60 as you can see here so we’re running at the maximum resolution out of one of those hdmi ports in the back and i thought we would start off with a real basic task here which is loading up the google
chrome web browser and heading over to the nasa.
gov homepage as you can see on ethernet here it loads things up very quickly it renders very quick and this despite the fact that we’re running at 4k 60 here which should be a challenge for a mini pc like this but this one feels a lot zippier than the prior generation gemini lake chips we were looking at a year or so ago so all together from a web browsing perspective this feels really good and i think that’s kind of the target for this computer it’s really out there as a low-cost pc to do pc stuff like this not so much the high-end gaming or video production work and i would say probably not so much on the media streaming either which we’ll get to in a little bit now i also was able to get microsoft office up and running on here and we’ll load up a quick document and give you a sense as to how that works so we’ll pull this up real quick again we’re still at 4k 60 and as you can see everything is just very responsive as we’re working on this document here so for doing the basics i don’t think you’re going to have any trouble getting those basics done and even with eight gigabytes of ram you’re going to have plenty of memory uh to get a lot of these tasks completed here so i was pretty happy with its overall performance and we’ll pop into
this excel app here and see how that calculates and all in just a very good basic experience here with the b link and on the browserbench.org speedometer test we got a score of 92.1 that’s a pretty big bump over some of the other recent gemini lake computers that we reviewed here on the channel so there’s definitely some performance enhancements with this new generation of processor that is making it perform quite well even at this high resolution but not everything is perfect in this example we’ve got a 4k 60 frames per second video running from my youtube channel and we’ve got it kind of running in a window here and as you can see we’re getting a lot of drop frames as that video is playing back oddly though if i go full screen with it and then wait for the overlays here to disappear the performance increases significantly so as we i just let this thing kind of settle down now you can see it’s playing back much more smoothly and although we had a bunch of drop frames at the outset it’s able to keep up now that those overlays are off and if i just move the mouse here you’ll see that it starts slowing down again and having a hard time keeping up and i think what’s happening here is probably a driver issue this is a newer intel chipset and it’s possible the drivers are not fully optimized to work well with chrome i did download the latest drivers before i started working on this for the review and it didn’t make much of a difference here so it looks like this will probably improve over time the video playback will work fine full screen just not when you’re in a window there and i also had issues getting hdr
video to work on my two hdr equipped 4k televisions when i tried to switch it into hdr mode both tvs just went blank i even tried to get netflix working in hdr through its windows app that didn’t work either although i was able to get 4k video to output from it so this is probably not going to work at the moment at least as a home theater pc especially if you’re doing 4k video and i think there’s much better options for home theater playback devices out there now beyond pcs i would recommend the nvidia shield pro for the enthusiasts but even an xbox series s i think would be a much better choice given that it’ll do better with games in addition to all the media that you might want to play back on it but what i want to do now is see how this thing does as a gaming device so let’s take a look at some games that we did manage to get running on this low powered pc all right first up here is the witcher 3 and when we were doing a live stream nobody thought we could get this working at all this is running at 1024 by 768 and it got stretched out a bit here and we were doing about 15 frames per second at the absolute lowest settings definitely not playable i did though get gta 5 to boot up on this and we’re running this at 720p and at the lowest settings we were getting about 20 frames per second or so somewhat playable i guess but again not all that ideal with current triple a titles next up here is rocket league which sometimes can be a little more forgiving but at 1080p lowest settings we were getting about 20 to 25 frames per second you’d
probably get closer to the 30 mark maybe a little bit above 30 if you ran it at 720p but again not ideal however half-life 2 ran very nice on this but of course half-life 2 was a very old game this one was running around 70 frames per second at 1080p so this was a very playable experience but for the most part unless you’re doing super old games this is not going to be something i would recommend as a gaming platform but there are some things that it can do well on the gaming front namely emulation so this is wave race running on the dolphin gamecube emulator and this was a very good experience with this game and many other gamecube games actually runs at full speed here it looks and sounds great no worries there and i might even be able to tweak some of the graphic settings slightly and still keep a playable frame rate so that was good but not everything is going to run smoothly on this one so i always like to load up star wars rogue leader whenever one of these new chipsets comes out to see how it does on the dolphin emulator and as you can see here it’s somewhat playable but it does get its lag hits occasionally here so it’s not yet there for some of the super demanding games but i think a lot of the gamecube library will run quite nicely on this little computer unfortunately though playstation 2 did
not fare as well i was only getting about 50 performance on burnout 3 here i tried a bunch of different configuration settings as you can see things aren’t looking too good on screen here either so i think the gamecube is probably the max that you can achieve on emulation but that does mean there’s still a lot of stuff below the gamecube that you can run like the playstation 1 and the nintendo 64 and all of the other consoles of the 80s so there’s a lot that you can play on here but all of it is going to be older stuff unless you stream games from a server let’s take a look at how game streaming performs on this so this is no man’s sky running through the nvidia geforce now service it was running at a full 60 frames per second we were connected to ethernet of course which is the best way to experience this gaming service i have my xbox controller connected up via bluetooth and beyond the usual little bits of lag you feel when you’re streaming games it actually felt like a very nice console like experience it was running really really nicely here so i think game streaming whether you’re doing it from a service or from a more powerful pc in your home is definitely something that you might want to check out on this and on the 3dmark cloudgate benchmark test we got a score of 4577 and that puts this one close to where we saw the pentium golds performing about two years ago so the price is going down but
performance is going up and that’s always something that’s great to see on the 3d mark time spy test which is a much more demanding benchmark we got a score of 206 and although that’s a very low score it is better than one of the more recent gemini lake refresh chips we looked at recently and that was on the gmk nuk box which was a another little mini pc that we took a look at and on the 3d mark stress test we got a score of 99.6 percent and you can also see the temperature that the computer was running at when that test concluded and what this indicates is that you won’t see a significant drop in performance when the computer is placed under load for a long period of time it doesn’t mean it’s going to run all that fast but it’s going to run at the same consistent performance and i think that might be important depending on the type of work that you’re doing on it again you got the fan that’s going to be kicking on and off all the time but that fan is apparently keeping this computer cool enough to operate consistently now we’re going to take a look at some nerdier topics now but before we do i just want to sum things up for the general consumers that are watching this is a very good general purpose pc for doing the basics like web browsing and microsoft office and that sort of thing if you’re gaming i think an xbox series s or a used xbox one console is probably going to be a better choice if you are looking for media playback for home theater i think at the high end the nvidia shield pro is still the best way to go if you’re looking at
something more affordable a roku a fire tv or some other android tv device in or around the 50 or less price point will i think do a better job than this will but i think for computing purposes this is a good value and a nice performing one for the price point i want to dive very quickly into the bios here because i know a lot of you will be interested as to what settings are available to you here you’ve got a lot that you can tweak here including its thermal configuration as you can see you can really dive into things mess things up or improve them if you will so use this at your own risk but there is a ton of things that you can configure on here which is always nice to see and if you’re looking to go beyond windows we found linux to run really nicely on this device we were able to get everything detected properly right out of the gate that includes wi-fi bluetooth audio the video at 4k60 also worked perfectly on this and actually it felt a little zippier on linux than it did in windows to be honest and i’m sure you can optimize things even further to get it functioning exactly how you want so this is a nice fun project computer and what’s great is that you can put so much ram in it that you could probably have it run as a nice general purpose server for the home i’m thinking like docker containers and that sort of thing so i think it will do well there on the geekbench benchmark test we got a single core score of 627 and a multi-core of 2076 so that should give you an idea as to the kind of processing power you have at your disposal if you’re looking to run a plex server this will do well at that because it does have an intel processor and it supports intel quick sync which plex really likes for
hardware transcoding so you probably can get i think four or five simultaneous 1080p hardware transcode sessions going on this one it should perform quite well in that regard it’s not going to serve you know 50 people but it will do a household or a small group of friends so altogether i think this is a fun alternative to a raspberry pi just because you have so many more resources available inside of it and you can even have a linux hard drive and a windows hard drive on here because you do have the ability to put two storage options on board so i continue to be impressed with every revision of these low end intel chips and the jasper lake is no exception to that b-link has implemented it quite well here and i’m looking forward to seeing what else we see running with this chipset in the future this is windows 11 compatible at least that’s what the configuration tool tells me and if you want to get it off your desk they even give you a little visa mount in the box so you can stick it behind your monitor so all in a nice little pc here and i think worth the money if you are looking for a fun project pc that’s going to do it for now until next time this is lon seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters hot sauce and video games brian parker chris allegretta tom albrecht thomas anfang jim tannis and handheld obsession if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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