hey everybody its la inside ben and we’re taking a look today at another mini pc this one came in from pepper jobs it’s a newer company that reached out to me and this thing is kind of neat it doesn’t look or feel all that different than other mini pcs but they’ve done a couple of things on the engineering side that i think you all might find interesting they were able to squeeze a little more performance out of its n 4100 gemini Lake processor it’ll be exploring what makes this one a little bit different in this review but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure this came in free of charge from pepper Jobs however all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get to it now and see what this little mini PC is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware this should sell for around three hundred dollars give or take it’s got that quad core and 4100 Gemini Lake CPU built in four gigs of RAM and 64 gigabytes of emmc storage but it is all upgradable they do
have these little panels here that go on the bottom but I took them off so you can see what we got in here now I upgraded mine from four gigs to eight gigs because it only comes in single channel configuration when you get it and my advice on these little mini pcs is to always run them in dual channel because they’ll perform better so I was a little disappointed for a performance kind of oriented device that they didn’t include dual channel RAM it was a little finicky on the RAM as well so this Samsung ddr4 stick that I got in here was one they recommended I pair up with the included stick of RAM I’ll put a link down below to the one that I bought in case you’re looking at getting one of these things you will get much better performance when you go up to the eight gigs or at least run dual channel memory as I am here and then over here you’ve got an m2 slot for additional storage so if the 64 gigs isn’t enough you can pop in an M 2 SATA Drive here to expand it now you can’t upgrade the processor on this but they do have a very intriguing cooling mechanism inside that’s designed to prevent the computer from underclocking when it gets hot so what they’ve done here is they’ve put in a copper heatsink and a pretty nice fan that you can see from our extra channel tear down of the device and what this does is it keeps the processor running at its 2.3 gigahertz max speed all the time if you need that amount of horsepower so if you are playing a game or doing some advanced computations or whatever on your little mini PC it will be consistent all the time because they’ve basically turned off the
underclocking that many other devices running with this same chip tend to do the n 4100 can often be found in fanless computers and when you don’t have a fan the only way to cool the chip down is to slow it down on this one they gave it a cooling system so that slow down doesn’t need to happen and we’ll take a look and see how that impacts performance in a little bit now there is a ton of connectivity on this one and we’ll take a look at the back here first and I want to draw your attention to these three ports here because you can output three 4k displays at 60 Hertz simultaneously we tried it out a little bit earlier we connected up for 4k displays and each of them was running at the full resolution and at that 60 frames per second that was very impressive so you do have a display port out here you need to use a display port to DisplayPort cable for this I did try to use a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter first it didn’t like that so after I plugged in a DisplayPort to mini DisplayPort cable to my monitor everything was running fine after that you have HDMI here of course that will work fine with any HDMI cable and then you’ve got the USB type-c port here that will also output 4k video you do need to make sure that you get a USB type-c to display port adapter or a USB type-c to HDMI 2.0 adapter to get the full frame rate and resolution but again we were able to accomplish all of that and it was really impressive to see this many outputs on a little mini PC like this we haven’t seen that before the USB C port can also take in power so if you have a dock or something like that you could plug the dock in get video out over that cable have all the data going back and forth and actually power the computer
with a single cable so that was another neat thing see on this a full-service USBC port so good stuff there you got gigabit ethernet over here if you want to plug in the regular power adapter you can do that over there they of course include that in the box you get a headphone microphone jack there on the other side here you have another USB C port this is data only though and it’s USB 3.0 speeds but you do have another one there two USB 3.0 ports an SD card slot here if you want to augment that onboard storage power button is there nothing here on the front and on the side you’ve got venting for the fan and cooling system a BIOS reset and a Kensington lock so good stuff here on the connectivity for Shore let’s take a look now and see how this performs so we’ll kick things off with some web browsing and watching some video on my youtube channel we’ve got a 1080p video running at 60 frames per second no drop frames there a very nice experience for YouTube and probably Netflix and other streaming services as well we also visited the nasa.gov homepage and there everything sprung to life very very quickly it felt very snappy and responsive and everything was rendering as you would expect it to and it’s been really impressive to see how far these low-end processors have come it was a very good experience on this PC overall and you probably won’t see any of the throttling you might see if you really start pushing the limits on it and again we’ll test that out in a couple of minutes here and on the browser bench org speedometer test we got a score of sixty four point nine eight on the version 1.0 of that test thirty eight point two three on version two and you can see here it’s very competitive with the lower end Intel Gemini Lake J four thousand five Nook we looked at not too long ago that nook has clocked a little higher than this one and this is pretty competitive with it so that was pretty cool to see it’s also interesting to look at here how the chui G box did that was a mini PC we looked at about two or three months ago it was running the same processor as this one but it had no active cooling system just a metal plate for that processor to sort of dissipate heat from it didn’t do a very good job of that and you can see here the score is significantly lower on that chewy box given the fact that it’s not able to cool itself as well we’ll have more on in a few
minutes overall printing decent performance out of that web benchmark we also of course had very good performance on Microsoft Word it was rendering our newsletter template very quickly and very quickly rendering text when we were moving graphics around and stuff it really does seem like a pretty decent multi-purpose general use PC so let’s move on to some games now the fun stuff we’ve got rocket League running here lowest possible settings at 720p we were getting between 35 and 40 frames per second not bad for a mini PC this is another reason why you want to have that dual channel memory installed to get that performance we did try to turn it up to 1080p the results were not as good but it was very consistent at 720p as you can see here we also decided to load up GTA 5 given how well rocket League was running and believe it or not it actually did somewhat decently at 720p around 20 frames per second or so sort of playable there we then turned it down to 800 by 600 and we got about 30 frames per second give or take which isn’t bad again we turned all the settings way down but it’s unusual sometimes for these mini pcs to be able to run these games well at all so that was good to see and then we tried to push our luck and run the new version of doom on it that one did not fare as well about 9 to 12 frames per second at 720p with the lowest settings so I think if you can run something that’s within the performance profile of one of these Gemini Lake processors it’s going to do very well on here and it will be very consistent throughout your gameplay whatever you see the game doing initially is what you’re probably going to get throughout the entire gameplay session you’re running there we’re gonna look at some
benchmarks now begin exploring some of the thermal performance on this as well on the 3d mark cloud gate test we got a score of three thousand five hundred and sixty that actually does better than the J 4,000 five Nook did primarily because we have a quad core processor in here that can handle the physics test better than that dual core nut can do but nonetheless it’s performing better in some areas than that one did and then against that chewy G box with the same Gemini Lake processor the pepper jobs here does much better as you can see and I think that’s due to the fact that it has a very effective cooling system and on the 3dmark fire strike stress test which measures how well the computer can do under load for an extended period of time we got a score of 98% there as you can see you can also see the temperatures that were measured on the processor 62 degrees Celsius in one hundred and forty three point six degrees Fahrenheit compare that to the chewy gbox again with the same processor without the active cooling that one got a failing grade of ninety point seven percent ninety seven percent is passing and you can see it’s running a lot hotter as well so it’s really trying to keep that processor from getting too hot again by slowing it down and I decided to explore this a little bit more with a few more tests just to see exactly what was going on with this thing so what you’re seeing on screen right now is the chewy g box running a little stress test called
power Max and what this does is it just runs the processor at a hundred percent just to see what it might do to the computer in the process and the G box started off just fine but about twenty seconds in it stepped down to 1.6 gigahertz from a max of 2.3 gigahertz now on the pepper jobs here we ran the same exact tests and it never throttled down it went up to 2.3 and it stayed there for as long as we were running the test it just didn’t stop it kept going at that consistent clock speed and that’s because in the BIOS on the system they have prevented it from engaging that underclocking and then of course the cooling system is able to keep the processor at a consistent temperature so we did measure the processor temperature it stayed steady at 62 degrees Celsius throughout and it was pretty consistent and nothing crashed and over an extended period of time the system was able to continue doing what it was doing without any ill effects so I think they’ve done a nice job here with the cooling system to keep that processor running at its maximum potential and now what you’re looking at here is a kilowatt that was measuring power consumption when we put the computer under load it was maxing out at around 10 watts or so for the entire system and then when it was idle we were seeing about four to four and a half watts of power usage so it does step down when it’s not under load so it’s not always going to be running the processor at that higher power consumption now the fan noise on this machine is not bad it’s certainly going to be noticeable in a very quiet room but I think if you are using it in a home theater environment for example and it’s set across the room from you you probably won’t hear it the fan doesn’t come on all that often it’s only
when the computer is under load that it does switch on and one of the things we notice when we were capturing some of the game footage was that the laptop we were using to capture that footage had a louder fan than we were hearing out of the pepper Jobs PC the case will warm up quite a bit so just bear that in mind but overall a pretty quiet fan but it is something you will hear if you are sensitive to fan noise especially if you’re in a completely quiet room so it won’t be as quiet of course is a fanless PC but again not bad we also ran Kodi to do some more home theater tests the jellyfish test file here ran successfully that is a 140 megabit 4k file heb see the Gemini Lake ships can decode that in hardware that ran fine we hooked it up to the home theater receiver we were able to have it successfully switch our TV into 24p which is a important thing for me I was able to do that no problem that also was able to pass lossless audio to the receiver so that was good just know though that it doesn’t support HDR so that might be a deal-breaker for some of you 4k home theater buffs out there but it is good especially at 1080p and with HEV C files so that was a good thing and one last thing to check out here and that is Linux we’ve got in boon to 18 point one zero running here booted up just fine like it does on most of these Gemini Lake devices we play with the Wi-Fi work the Bluetooth
worked the audio works the video seems to be working fine and overall a decent Linux experience I think so if you wanted to run an alternative operating system on here you can it does come with a Windows license of course so you have Windows built in but you could of course maybe install Linux on the SSD or use an external drive or something like that seems to work just fine here and the performance is just as good here as it was in Windows no sluggishness and overall a very decent Linux performer and certainly a performing device on windows as well and I have to say I’m just pleased with this overall because there’s been a focus here on making it run better it’s not a gimmick they cool it down better so they can run it at its full potential all the time versus only 20 or 30 seconds on some of the other ones we sometimes play with and that makes a difference here I think this will do very well as a Plex server for example other tasks where you’re just putting it under constant load should do better as well the cooling system seems to be just the right fit for the processor to keep it running at that performance level all the time again we didn’t see any issues with it in our testing both in the benchmarks but also in just general use and it’s just a cut above what we’ve seen from other pcs you might be looking at that are powered with this chipset so definitely give it a look when it’s available
worldwide which should be very shortly I’ll put a link down below in the video description as to where you can find one of these things and I’m pretty pleased with it so far I’m gonna try to maybe in a future video run a Plex server on this one too just to get a feel for that this does support Hardware transcoding in Plex so if you’re looking to do some media serving with something like this this might be a good pic as well again because it’s performance will stay consistent all the times I think we’ll probably do a little bit more with this one in the weeks to come let me know what you thought down in the comments below I hope to have covered all of the things that you might be looking for but if I missed anything do ask and we will probably do a few follow ups or have something on my weekly wrapup show to answer some of those additional questions until next time this is LAN Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold level supporters Chris Allegretto the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht a new zoo very in Cali an Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as $1 a month head over to land TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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