How They Fixed Mini PCs - Beelink GTR7 Review

what if you just didn't need a giant Tower and instead you could use a little system just like this and still do things like run all of your office apps as much as you want and also this little mini PC has an 8 core processor that will Turbo over 5 gigahertz it can play popular Esports titles without needing a dedicated GPU because of the new integrated Graphics it also has features like two two and a half gig ethernet ports Wi-Fi two nvme PCA Gen 4 slots and a whole host of other features that really beg the question why do you need a giant desktop anymore so let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from sdh and this is the b-link GTR 7. now on sdh we've done independent reviews of the GTR 5 the GTR 6 and now this gtr7 I can say took all the feedback that we had from the previous gen units and made something that is absolutely special so in this video we're going to take a look at the hardware because there's a lot of innovation here we're also going to show you some some things that work and don't work we're then going to go and look at things like the performance power consumption and also the noise which I think they did a great job with on the system and then I want to get to our key Lessons Learned but before we get to all that I just want to say thank you to all the sth YouTube members who allowed us to go and purchase this with their support if you want to support us you can always click join down below and by supporting us it allows us to do things like buy these units and do really independent reviews which is why we're going to show you something that uh nobody else has talked about that doesn't work with that let's get to the hardware okay the first thing we say Mini PC you kind of expect that it's mini right well let me just kind of show you this new gtr7 and I think it looks uh by the way very slick this is just one of the color options there's also like gray this bright orange color but in terms of size it's also a lot bigger and not a lot of folks have talked about this and so this is a 13th gen Nook and you can just kind of see that this is uh this is notably larger than the Nook but I actually really like that because as much as I like how small the Nook is the fact of the matter is that you get a lot more I guess performance but also you get a lot quieter system with this the other thing that is very noticeable is that this chassis is thicker and one of the things that we talked about in when we did the GTR 6 review is I said if you could make this a little bit bigger and a little bit quieter that would be awesome and so let me just kind of Stack these up real quick so this is the gtr7 the gtr6 and now we're gonna put the GTR 5 on top it might be a little bit hard to tell but the gtr5 to gtr6 the gtr6 was a little bit thicker and it was also a lot noisier but now with the GTR 7 we have a pretty substantially thicker chassis but on the other hand they have fixed a lot of the complaints I had on noise and I just realized it's probably smarter to have these things racked from five six seven so that's what we're going to use going forward but I'm just going to show you this real quickly what the differences are with this version versus the previous generations this is a complete new redesign and from the front it may not seem like it is because you can see that we still have the power button clear CMOS button a type a port a type c port a audio jack I mean this is pretty much the exact same front that we've had for generations and the similarities don't really stop there I mean because if you look at the side of this uh this pretty much looks the same the other side pretty much looks the same if we were to go and look at the bottom uh these things all pretty much have this exact same bottom bit except this is the new feature I guess on the bottom but you have the little pull tab you have the rubber feet and then you uh you have this which tells you how to get into the BIOS it's kind of a little bit weird the other feature that is similar is uh is the top of this where we get a nice little fingerprint reader you can see that we have this on all the different versions but that fingerprint reader is on the top of the chassis and as you're going to see here there is a lot of difference between the generations right like this one said b-link but it had like some massive light up AMD branding on it the GTR six well that one um that one had this like replaceable top and we actually used the red top for our YouTube cover and stuff but I like the gray one so I just have left that one on uh but then the gtr7 uh this thing looks awesome right this just looks cool now look at the back of this that is where this gets totally crazy because if you look at this you'll see that it's kind of like a mashup of the five and also the six because we get things like on the five where we get HDMI and DisplayPort we also get features from the six like we get our two USB 2 and two USB 3 ports going back in time we also get two Lan ports and these are Intel i225v which means they are two and a half gig ethernet ports so on board you get five gigabits per second of total networking and if you saw our Asus store flash store 6 review with all those m.2 ssds you had two two and a half gig ethernet ports and what you can do is you can use SMB direct now so you don't have to do things like lacp and all that kind of stuff and you can still use smb3 multi-channel and that gives you your full performance really from Storage we're pretty close to it without having to do anything on the network you can literally just use an unmanaged switch turn it on and go we'll link that review in the description next up we have an additional audio jack so this is one of the first mini PCS we've seen that has two audio jacks one on the front and rear now I know you see the two usb4 type c ports but we're gonna get to that in a second so what I want to do is really talk about this whole power situation because you're obviously going to see that here so if you look at this you that we have this like like kind of little cut out and we have this like new little it looks like a button and so with this unit you get a little power brick and that has the corresponding side and it's actually magnetic so you're gonna see you know it uh kind of locks in place there which is kind of cool and then when you sit down uh the idea is that the cable can come out here now this is new because the old ones just had USB Barrel Jacks but frankly I'm not sure if I even like this solution uh we get a nice hunt key adapter but the challenge with this is like how do you get a replacement this is very proprietary stuff okay really quickly I want to talk about the best feature of this unit or at least the outside of this unit by far which is the usb4 because with usb4 not only do we get fancy usb4 but we also get Thunderbolt 3 as part of that and what that means is that we can use external devices like egpu enclosures that are Thunderbolt enclosures and plug them right in and that's why when we reviewed the GTR 6 Pro people were like great you get four HDMI but you lost that second Network Port and also you don't have usb4 and that's like a feature that a lot of systems have the scr6 pro will review that that did have it it wasn't as nice as a GTR series but on the other hand the fact that it had it was uh meant that we could actually show you an egpu and we're doing the exact same thing here but there is one Challenge and that's a b-link does not tell you like okay we have three USB type-c ports but they don't actually tell you which ones are Thunderbolt and which ones are uh are just USB ports and so what you're going to see over here is that we have our unit we have below it our Razer Core X egpu chassis and then inside we have an Intel Arc a770 just because we wanted to create an entirely Unholy Alliance of GPU here and something you can see behind me is that this is actually running right now so just real quick when we tested this what we found was that the two back USB type C's those will get us to a working egpu setup the front one will not and so we know that there are two Thunderbolt slash usb4 controllers on the system and so it looks like that this one is not the Thunderbolt one or usb4 one but using the egpu and Thunderbolt enclosure we found something that's uh kind of a bummer actually when you plug in the GPU and you're using the usb4 Thunderbolt port on the back of this you might want to go and log into the system the same way that you would normally do that and that would be to use the fingerprint now you can see that we have the fingerprint sensor set up and so it's asking us for that in Windows and you're going to see that absolutely nothing is happening here we're just uh we're doing nothing here now this fingerprint reader Works no problem when you don't have any GPU attached but if you do have any GPU attached for some reason it does not work and I don't really know why one other thing is that sometimes when you disconnect or reconnect the egpu you have the system reboot on you I don't really know why that is on a lot of other systems that doesn't happen but it is some on like these little mini PCS you see it happen a little bit more often it might be because I don't think that the you know Intel Graphics is actually supported for an egpu enclosure so maybe it like works when you plug it in but when you pull it out it resets the device I don't really know why that happens but it just does so something to be aware of and now that we have done that let's uh let's see what happens when we use our fingerprint reader we get right in so that's the difference of having the egpu connected versus the not having the egpu connected is just that little fingerprint reader all of a sudden works when we don't have the egpu installed okay getting into the bottom of the system uh something that v-link does that I really like is they have these feet and I was pretty surprised to see that the feet actually match the chassis there's a little thing that they're doing and even the little pull tab once you've done your four screws uh that even matches the chassis which I think is awesome and for folks that have been following the series the ryzen stickers are still here but they have been relegated to the bottom of this chassis instead of prominently displayed like on the gtr5 okay so now that we have undone our screws we just opened the chassis super easy and inside we get a Innovation that v-link does but a lot of the other Mini PC vendors don't do and this is great they have a little cooling fan on the bottom of this with a little airflow shroud and then they have a little heatsink here and that heatsink I guess is supposed to take heat from the nvme ssds and give it a little bit somewhere to go [Music] and one of the things I don't like about the solution is if you have your LTT Creator Edition screwdriver you can't get into the like screws for the Shroud they just require too thin of a screwdriver to be able to get in there there's only three screws but they're a pain to get in and out when you do want to service the system but once you do get the shot off the first thing you're going to see is that because we have that little magnetic DC power jack um there's another cable so it's not just the fan cable there's a second cable for that DC but once you get it past that small challenge you're gonna see something that is awesome there's a lot of labeling which is just a little tiny feature that you see on higher end units but you don't necessarily see in a lot of mini PCS so let's talk a little bit about what's in here the system comes standard with 32 gigabytes of memory and that means that you get two crucial ddr5 5600 dimms that's just a little bit faster but it is nice when we have an igpu to have that extra memory bandwidth inside the system we have an ampy ryzen 7 which is a pretty fast processor with eight cores and 16 threads one of the really cool things with this is the fact that we saw this actually go and on cpu-z hit over five gigahertz and that means that this is a fast processor that also has a lot of performance I mean if you're over five gigahertz on a modern p-core then that you know that is just about the best ish user experience that you're gonna get now aside from the crucial memory we also have a crucial SSD D this SSD is a one terabyte crucial P3 plus which is uh frankly one of the least expensive one terabyte PCA Gen4 nvme ssds that you can get there's a P3 which is a little less expensive P3 is uh not a very good drive the P3 plus is frankly not my favorite but I mean I guess okay we use the P3 plus ssds when we did the Asus store flash store both the six Bay and 12 Bay models so if you want to see my thoughts on that drive you can go check out that AC store review also will has done a P3 plus review on the sdh main site so you can see compared to some other drives the cool thing though is that this doesn't just have one SSD spot it actually has two PCA Gen 4 m.2 slots so if you want to you could go put like say two four terabyte ssds now if you did see our b-link eq12 Pro review you're definitely going to notice that if you install Like New ssds in here you may not get your windows 11 Pro license um easily I had to go when we did that and actually email the support from b-link and they finally sent me new keys for that n305 unit but at the same time I would expect that the experience seems similar here the support around these things is just not as good as something like a project tiny mini micro PC the other thing that you get here though is you get an Intel ax 200 which is a Wi-Fi 6 generation Wi-Fi card it's good that it's Wi-Fi six it would have been nice if it was a Wi-Fi 6E card but still not too bad but the big thing with this is not just the hardware it's also the performance power consumption and noise so let's talk about the performance first foreign so first off I just want to point out that we are looking at the AMD ryzen 7 not the ryzen 9 which is the gtr7 pro version so when we compare that to some of the other older units just keep in mind that we were looking at like ryzen 9 like this was the ryzen 960 900 HX or something like that in the gtr6 and so when we look at the performance though between those two processors it's actually a pretty huge jump on like everything that we ran uh it's a pretty huge jump with the new architecture so that was cool in itself but at the same time if you're using this as an office PC frankly compared to gtr5 GTR 6 you're not going to want to upgrade to this because it is a little bit faster but it's not going to like be a game changing level performance faster uh but but then we talk about the integrated GPU the integrated GPU in this is an integrated rdna3 graphic Apu CPU anyway I'd ask what's the impact of going to rdna A3 and it's huge actually and it was actually kind of a funny story so one fun thing is that when we were setting up the OBS 4 or League of Legends so that we had access to was actually recording with the av1 encode feature so this now has Hardware av1 in code which is really cool especially if you come from an older system it just helps you use smaller file sizes and you know being able to do that GPU offload is awesome just to note here when we do this League of Legends we're also using OBS to capture so if you are doing something like you know you want to stream or something like that having av1 encoding really helps so my thought was that League of Legends is highly relevant just because of how many people play it but also it tends to run pretty darn well on these mini PCS and in this case it ran way better than I expected because I saw that as we were going through the 4K results everything on very high we saw the performance was like in the lower end like about 70 something FPS and then on the high end like maybe 90 95 FPS and so we saw absolutely awesome performance from this so we ran 1080 on this we were getting over 100 FPS pretty darn consistently and even into like 120 and what have you FPS and if you're wondering that previous gen gtr6 well that was only doing like maybe be 45 50 60 FPS somewhere in there on 4K and so that was a huge jump just in terms of performance we're not going to show the recording of this but I just wanted to tell you that I did try a CS go on this and this is really starting this is probably the first Mini PC that has an integrated GPU that I think is just about on that borderline where I think it's playable this little system is able to run generally in about the 140 270 FPS range although there are dips below 120 and then that's when things get a little bit weird with some monitors foreign consumption and noise are huge these days and let's talk about how much better this system is so first off this is the idle and I'm gonna be quiet I'm gonna actually hold this up but I'm just going to tell you that this studio is a 34 DBA studio with this sitting here and the sound meter not too far away this only gets up to about 34.4 to 35. okay and just taking a look at the idle power consumption we're at about 9.8 Watts sometimes you'll see it bounce up to about 11 Watts so it's maybe about 9.8 to 11 is what I would use okay so let's put this under load for a little bit and I just want to show you this real fast the power consumption you're going to see on the entire unit is going to go up into about that 91 to about 95 watt range so that is pretty darn significant okay now the fan is spinning up a lot here but just something that's different between this unit and some of the previous gen units and some of the other just mini PCS that you see is that this thing is running with the CPU consuming 65 Watts the total system is sitting in that 95 96 Watts as that fan spins up but the clock speed is still sitting between about that 4.6 to 4.7 gigahertz range so that thing is just absolutely jamming right now so I think one of the advantages of this versus a smaller chassis is just the fact that this has more room for cooling and finally b-link is taking advantage of that but noise levels have definitely gone up this is no longer a silent machine the decibel meter should be reading somewhere about 46 47 47.5 DBA on our 34 DBA noise floor studio and I'll let you hear it just so you can honestly what this reminds me of is like a laptop when the fans are like really going because maybe you're doing like video encoding or gaming or something like that that kind of reminds me of what's going on or of course just Windows Defender is going from a noise standpoint this is a huge upgrade over the gtr6 okay for all these systems I love love to have key Lessons Learned because we should learn something every time we do one of these reviews right and I think in this case we definitely learned a bunch so the first thing that is my key takeaway is just the fact that when you go from the gtr5 GTR 6 to gtr7 the big upgrade is really you know the new graphics that you get here you definitely get a faster processor but in CPU performance side but the GPU I think is much better also I think that b-link did a great job with the features here when we did the b-link GTR 6 review a lot of folks had feedback which I think is very valid which is like hey it has four HDMI ports cool but what I really want is like you know usb4 or Thunderbolt all that kind of stuff and I also miss having the two two and a half gig ethernet Nicks and in this new system uh we we definitely get that now from a standpoint of Hardware quality I can tell you that just looking at these units this new gtr7 is much better than the previous generations it's getting close to what Lakeman Intel Nook is it's probably on par so with this is a gecum as6 which I think we're gonna do a review of Just on mean say we're probably not gonna do a video of this one also this thing just looks cool and I really wish that we had the gtr7 pro that we ordered in Orange but that one's just not available yet so we don't I do want to be clear though that there are definitely some differences in terms of support if you want like firmware upgrades and even things like if you want to reinstall Windows um that's probably going to be a challenge now for the Linux users out there we did run this with Ubuntu no problem the proximoxide we just didn't do on this yet we might do it in a future video but since that's also Debian based I would assume that that would work but my biggest takeaway is really how much this little platform makes it so that you don't need a giant desktop anymore let's face it you have a processor that can go over five gigahertz It's relatively quiet I mean you can maybe get something that's quieter but you're gonna spend a lot of money just on the cooling to get something that's quieter than this that has decent performance the integrated GPU for a lot of folks is all you need if you're someone that you know you don't get to play a lot of games maybe you play League of Legends maybe you play CS go-ish or something like that you know you could do a lot with this system and I think that that's pretty darn awesome if you're a content creator my content creator I don't know but if you are you have things like h.264 h.265 and av1 Hardware encode decode that's something by the way that even the Mac Mini does not have because the M2 silicon just lacks it even if you went all the way up to the Mac Pro or Mac Studio you're still not going to get hardware av1 and this system has that with 32 gigabytes of memory you could expand that to 64 but I think 32 in this form factor is probably pretty good and then you have a one terabyte SSD now it would be nice if that was a two terabyte but also you could just go put a four or two or whatever next to it because you have another slot I mean heck there are eight terabyte m.2 ssds and since you have your Thunderball ports there are things that we've reviewed like qnap nasas that are Thunderbolt based and so you can put a giant storage array if you really wanted to on this you could also do things like having egpu you could have a external you know Nick or something like that and have 10 gig I mean there are a ton of different options I mean we're calling this a Mini PC and it used to be that Mini PC sucked but this is maybe even overkill for a lot of users this is now the premium gtr7 and I think it is a premium system that is more than enough for the vast majority of people out there hey guys I hope you liked this review of the b-link gtr7 it is definitely one of my favorite reviews that I've done so far and favorite mini PCS I think this thing is absolutely awesome if you can't tell and if you did like this video well why don't you check out some of our other videos give this video a like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

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Id: J5NWsRjmSXg

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023