Checking Out the Minisforum UM560: A Pint-Sized Powerhouse!

[Music] i've got the minis forum um 560. this is a dark rock tr4 pro cpu cooler this is the entire computer this is the cpu cooler it's six core 16 gigabytes of ram it has a two and a half inch bay as well as nvme if you've been following level one for a long time you know that there are many many many many many many computers at level one you might say we have a mini fetish for minis so this is one of the the machines from the venus series actually if you haven't seen many form you should check them out they sent this over so that i could take a look at it there's a ryzen 5625u 6 core 12 thread cpu in here 16 gigabytes of memory that is upgradable storage is upgradable everything else is pretty much upgradeable this is normally a notebook cpu or apu really because it's got integrated uh video but in this configuration it's in a nice little mini computer actually has two and a half gig lan dual hdmi out five gig usb two and a half gig lan you've got a combination video and power delivery port yes that is usbc but there's also two usbc on the front you can have up to four display outs with this four 4k out also included in the box get this nifty little sideways stand so that you can do something like that extra rubber feet a visa mounting option yes this is a bracket that will hold this on the back of your monitor you know if your monitor has a visa stand got a usbc usb c cable the header for our two and a half inch drive which we're going to put in there in a minute and then a very short hdmi cable so this is useful if you're doing the the visa mount on the back of your monitor then you can just run this and you're good to go uh that might be easier if i showed you this is a garbage tier lg monitor this is like what you get for 100 bucks it's your office supply store it has vga and two hdmi no display port because again lg garbage tier if you are using one of these machines for a secondary machine or a computer in your guest bedroom or something to give your grandparents or whatever you mount the visa mount you can screw it in right here which is normally meant for you know secondary stand but this monitor has its own stance so this monitor will be sitting like this there's nothing in the visa holes in the back of this so you actually mount the mini computer right there and then boom this is an all-in-one and it comes with a really super short hdmi cable so you've got a little cable that runs from here down to there and you're good to go the other nice included thing in the box is this 65 watt power adapter this is nicer than your laptop power adapter this is the new ga in you know sort of ultra compact power brick 65 watts usbc usb c to usb c on that this is pretty much perfect the only thing that they could have possibly done better in terms of a power adapter was one that would break out and give you a usb hub or something so that you could have one usbc cable to this thing and then on this thing you might have a usb port or two for wired ethernet or something like that but i'm just thinking creatively here don't mind me now working on it stupid easy you just pop all the rubber bits off the bottom pop the bottom off boom there's your memory there's your storage there's room for two and a half inch drive right there the correct orientation for the drive there's a little divot on the bottom plastic here the bottom metal plastic thing and then boom your two and a half inch drive is in there it's good to go you need this thing that slides onto the drive and then connects right there on the motherboard right next to the nvme now there's no fans or fiddly bits on the inside for this to get caught in and it has a nice cool little rubber thing so remember what the level one pro tip is you can tape this to the bottom of that there and you won't ever lose it because when you need it it's already inside the computer you've probably already thrown the box away forever ago and i don't need that and then you need it i know i've been there now the really awesome thing about this design is that even though it's got kind of a lot of usbc ports it still has four type a ports two usb two and two five gigabit usb so not too bad now mini swarm has a couple of different configurations you can get this bare bones and as your own memory and storage you can get this uh you know pre-installed with memory and storage in a couple of different configurations windows 11 comes on it so you've got some options for you know whatever you choose to do that's applicable to your situation so let's get this thing booted up and do some uh do some benchmarking now since this thing has integrated wi-fi and bluetooth where do i think this has the best application i think this makes an excellent home media interface this thing's actually powerful enough to be your home server especially if you add a little bit more storage to it okay redundancy would be a little bit nice but if you have backups and that kind of thing you could use this in your media center it's quiet enough that it's not going to be out of place in the living room it's got a lot of horsepower you can do you know console emulation if you have older console games that you have on your hard drive somehow you can play those on this that's great older pc games you know you've got the bluetooth mouse and keyboard maybe that you use from the couch in the living room that'll work really well for this but also steam in-home streaming this apu is a vega 8 and vega it's older it's uh not the fastest you know our dna there are apu's out there that have rdna but this is also really inexpensive for what it is so is it underpowered in that regard not really it's still plenty fast enough for the kinds of things that you would want to do on a 6 core machine it can push 4k 60 video no problem so that means that if you've got you know the highest in 6900 xt in your desktop machine and you want to stream to your living room machine at 4k 60 this thing will do that also with a two and a half gig lan means that if you do add you know four terabytes of local storage for media moving media on and off of this is going to be really really fast because two and a half gig it's not one gig it's nice it's nice to see that two and a half gigs basically mainstream at this point so for the living room i think that's where this machine belongs or a secondary machine or like a kid's room pc something like that if you feel like you need something with more horsepower well minis forum has other machines and other configurations that are a little bigger and will use a little bit more power but that you can even add pcie graphics to if you choose to down the road i reviewed another one of these machines where you can just sort of transformers more than meets the eye and deploy it with an add-in gpu even you know you want to do a 30-90 that's pci express 16 pci express 3.0 by 16 if you want to do that so you got you got options i'm going to list level one this has been a quick look at the um 560 from minis forum love what they're doing over at mini forum you should check them out there's a link below definitely click that i'm wendell i'm signing out and you can find me in the level one forum if you picked up one of these or you have thoughts or you did a project with one of these show us in the forum love to see that kind of stuff and if you have an idea for something that you'd like me to i'm sort of messing around with envy and jellyfish right now so engagement challenge if you're using ambient jellyfish or you have been for a long time and this as a client that's really powerful that also interfaces with steam and everything else let me know cause like back in the day i was using myth tv and myth tv had all of these integrations and all these plugins for myth tv you could get to things like your snes emulator and your playstation emulator and the tv and live tv as an application plus your media plus your books plus everything else well that's kind of not in vogue the same way anymore i'm not really sure what's current but with the uh changes on the horizon from the various streaming platforms diying it oh it's at the top of my list anyway that's enough rambling for now i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums [Music] you

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 14,511

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: 2KU41mOZWww

Length: 8min 28sec (508 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022