[Music] hey everybody this is R from Metro gamecore we're going to do something different today we're going to test out a Windows tablet this is the first one I've ever tried before I've had iPads I've had Android tablets but I've never really been drawn to Windows tablets mostly because they are more productivity focused well I would argue this one that we're reviewing today the mini Forum V3 is more gaming Focus focused for example the chipset inside it's the ryzen 78840 U that's the Top Line AMD chipset right now that's what's coming out in all the handheld PCS that are coming out this year and so the fact that we have it in a tablet is really revolutionary at least for me in addition it's got a nice screen it's really big it's 14 in I can barely fit it in the shot but it's also 1600p resolution 16 by10 aspect ratio and then also 160 HZ refresh rate so those are really kind of high-end specs when it comes to a tablet so I'm really impressed by that it's also got a couple other features that make it good for gaming including some really nice cooling but then also it's super thin and light but has a good battery in it 50 wat hours altogether and so that all combined really makes this kind of go toe-to-toe with other handhelds on the market right now and it's just like a really unique idea for me and the idea that it's a tablet where you could do all those tablety things you know you can view your media and all those things I like to do on my iPad but then if I want I can just prop this up hook up a controller and then all of a sudden I've got a gaming tablet as well it's also got a couple other unique features to it for example it's got display in so you could use this as an external monitor as well anyway I'm getting ahead myself but as you can tell there's a lot of different use cases for this thing and even though it does have a bit of a premium price tag it's actually really competitive in this space and I don't know maybe one of these will actually meet one of your needs too and so let's do a deep dive and just talk about all the different ways that I've been testing this over the past week and see if one is going to match with you as well and so without any further delay let's go ahead and dive [Music] in all right let's jump right into pricing first now it's $1,200 right now but it's during a pre-order period it's going to go up to $1,500 when it hits retail and there's no bones about it that is a high price tag I think that's the most expensive mini SW computer that I've ever tested so let's break down all the things that are going to come with this relatively High price point first thing of note is the price does come with the keyboard case accessory most other tablet manufacturers will charge that separately in addition there's only one specification available but it is the highest end it's 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage and also during the pre-order period it's going to come with an active touch stylus as well as a screen protector and a laptop sleeve next I want to talk about the specs that I didn't cover in the intro so going back to the screen here in addition to the stuff I already said it also has a 100% P3 color gamut and 500 nits of brightness and the panel itself has a matte finish to it so if I angle it against my studio lights you can see that it's not super reflective it kind of reminds me of the EDG glass panel that you can find on those high-end steam decks in terms of brightness and dimness we've got a pretty good range here it doesn't get super dim but it does get very bright to give you context usually in most use case scenarios I've been playing it at about 50% or even down to like 30% brightness and it's been just fine going back to that first specs page we also have two different cameras one is 2 megapixels on the front so you could use this as a webcam but then also it works with Windows hello so if you want to sign into your Windows computer using your face you can do that as well and the back also has a camera and it is 5 megapixels moving on to the next page we already talked about the ryzen 78840 U it has eight cores and 16 threads and on this device it has a max TDP of 28 Watts also of note the ram is lpddr5 and it's clocked at 6,400 MHz but also bear in mind according to min's Forum the memory and the storage are not user replaceable finally on this page the last spec I wanted to bring up is that it has Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 and some other things worth noting it does have an internal gyroscope and also supports up to 65 watts of power delivery charging so all things considered I think that's a lot of specs for what you're getting here although the $1,200 plus price point is still pretty steep so next I want to compare it against other high-end tablets that are somewhat similar in that regard and I bet if you closed your eyes and tried to picture a a Windows tablet you would probably think about a surface device first so let's take a look at their high-end model that's going to be the Surface Pro 9 now the thing about the Surface Pro 9 is that even at its highest spec which is going to be the 12th generation Intel Core i7 it still is not going to perform as well as the mini for V3 this generation chip is quite a bit older but then also when it comes to gaming performance it's not going to be able to stand toeo Toe with the AMD so if we are looking from a gaming perspective I would say this is going to be a downgrade compared to the the one we're reviewing today now the starting price for this tablet is not terrible it's a little bit over $11,000 but bear in mind that's the lowest spec so 16 gigabytes of RAM and only 256 gigs of storage if we wanted to upgrade it to the same 32 gigs of RAM and terabyte of storage we're now looking at over $2,000 for that tablet alone so in this scenario let's pick the middle ground here with 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage it's still a bit of a compromise compared to the mini Forum but the pricing is a little bit more palatable at about $1300 however bear in mind that the keyboard and the stylus pen are going to come separately so they're going to charge you additionally for that so you're really looking at about $1,600 to get one that's going to have a lower performing chip as well as Less storage and RAM so in a toe-to-toe between these two I think the minis Forum actually is a better deal now to be honest when it comes to Windows tablets there is very slim pickings another one that I found was from Asus this one's quite a bit more expensive as Asus products tend to be it's $1,750 however when it comes to Performance I bet this one is better it's got an Intel Core I9 and then a laptop GPU it's got an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 so if you're only looking from a gaming perspective and you want to make sure that you get the absolute best performance you can in a tablet it does look like this one will probably give you better performance but at a higher price point and there are some other interesting things about this one like the fact that it is compatible with the XG mobile like the r allies so you can plug this into an external GPU as well either way between the Surface Pro and this one I would say this is actually a better comparison against the minium V3 and then finally because we are talking about high-end tablets I think it's worth mentioning the iPad Pro as well if you look at the most recent 12.9 in model it's going to come with an m.2 chip and the price is going to vary depending on how much storage you use the absolute cheapest is $199 but that comes with 128 gigs of storage and on a device that doesn't have an SD card slot that kind of feels criminal if we wanted to get one terab of storage to match what we can find on the Mini's Forum we're looking at $17.99 for the starting price so already it's quite a bit more expensive than the tablet that we're reviewing today and of course bear in mind that the accessories are not included so you're going to have to spend $130 for the apple pencil and then $350 for the magic keyboard and of course those are all optional accessories but if you were to put that all together it's going to be over $2,200 to get something that's similar spec-wise to the mini V3 now there are all sorts of rabbit holes I could go down between like the M2 performance versus something like the ryzen 7 but as it stands right now just looking at your price point I do think this is competitive against the other models so now that we have an understanding of all the specs and features that come with it and the overall price let's now look at the actual device itself and as a disclaimer this was sent to me by minis forum for review but no money was exchanged in any way and all opinions are my own and it really feels like mini forum is putting a lot of heart and soul into the V3 not only did they tease this device for over 6 months before it lost launched but it also comes with a set of custom V3 stickers and then a love letter to me written in both Chinese and English and I've never seen these kind of packings with a mini Forum device before which leads me to think that yeah they really care about this one anyway further inside the box we have a quick start guide it really just kind of talks about all of its different features and then it also comes with a rather small 65 wat Gan charger and then finally it comes with a USBC cable and yeah that's about it so now let's take a look at the tablet itself and first impression yeah these are really thin bezels and you can also see the front-facing camera is right here centered at the top next I wanted to take a look at the back and first thing I noticed is the act of cooling up top but then also the material on the back feels really good it has a powdery matte finish to it and also seems to be fingerprint resistant as well in fact over a week of testing I got a little bit of smudging but not as much as I expected so I think the material here is pretty good also on the back you can see on the top left we have our camera and then a small minium logo now the cooling here uses two different fans this is the intake portion and then it'll push out all the hot air on the top up top all we have are those two exhaust vents that I mentioned before and the bottom is also relatively aere all it has is the connection port for the magnetic keyboard case now on the sides is where all the magic happens on the left side we have a 3.5 mm headphone jack then our volume rocker up and down and then we have a full SD card slot it's got a little removable rubber thing right here as well next below that we have our USBC vlink Port so this is a display in Port only it doesn't do anything like connecting any USB accessories or charging or anything else like that and you guessed it we are totally going to test this later now a little bit further down you can see we have two of our four stereo speakers and that's about it on the right side we have our other two speakers and then two fullspeed USB 4 ports and these can be used for anything an external display accessories or even power and then finally we have our power button and then a power LED indicator and all told this is a very Sleek feeling t PC there's no camera bump or anything else sticking out it just feels like one piece of hardware and it feels really nice it does remind me a lot of an iPad Pro although it is a little bit heavier it's about 200 g heavier but of course it is larger too before we move on I do want to do a quick audio test so this is just going to be testing the speakers themselves and the quality that we can get from [Music] them overall I would say the audio audio quality is just kind of mediocre if not a little bit underwhelming it's certainly lacking in bass but it just doesn't feel overall Pleasant to my ears like I would not look forward to listening to an album from this tablet I think it'll be serviceable for example if you wanted to watch TV on this and if you're playing a game but all the same I'd probably rather just use Bluetooth headphones okay next I want to look at the accessories that came with it we'll start with the keyboard attachment now I actually got a preview of this device a few months back when I went to CES so I kind of know what I'm getting myself into and I remember that the company said that the person who designed their keyboard is the same person who designs the keyboards for apple as well and I think that even if they hadn't told me that ahead of time I would have felt the same way because yes this feels very much so like a magic keyboard for the iPad we'll start with a trackpad now this does physically click down and you can kind of click it anywhere and it's going to be a similar feeling and I think it feels pretty good I'm not a huge fan of trackpads in general but I do like the fact that it's large and that it does have a physical click now the keyboard s feels great to me I've owned a magic keyboard for the iPad for about four years at this point so I'm very used to this overall feel and because this tablet is larger than an iPad Pro it actually feels roomier to use this keyboard compared to something like the magic keyboard so no complaints here when it comes to the overall feel and yes we'll do some more testing later of note mini form is really getting into the whole AI features thing from AMD and so it even has a dedicated co-pilot button right here now the way the keyboard attaches is pretty simple it's all magnetic so all you have to do is just kind of get it close to where it needs to be and it will snap into place and the connection between the two is very flexible it kind of feels like leather or something similar to that so it definitely doesn't have enough strength to for example hold the tablet up from the keyboard case alone for that you're going to need the other half which is what they call the V3 stand and this will also come with a device when you purchase it so this is magnetically connected so all you have to do is just kind of snap it into place and from there you've got a whole range of motion where you can bend it to put it at any angle you would like now ad L for the first day or so I was totally using this thing wrong I was kind of treating it like a switch OLED or even a Lenova Legion go where I was trying to use it like a kickstand and I got to say that left me really confused because when you use it like this you're going to be covering up the intake fans and initially I thought man this is a terrible design decision because how are they going to get any sort of cooling into the tablet and so I really couldn't fathom why they spent so much time coming up with the design of this device and then covering up the cooling it didn't make any sense well thankfully I slept on it and the next day I had a Eureka moment and that is you're not supposed to bend it from the bottom up but from the top down this thing is so flexible that it can go beyond 180° in fact it's designed to do that and once I figured that out I was like hey this is actually a pretty brilliant design because it exposes all of the air intake so that you can get the best cooling possible while still giving you a lot of support for your tablet anyway I thought it was worth bringing up because if it took me an entire day to figure it out it might take you some time as well now one negative I do have for this entire experience is that I feel like the magnets on the keyboard side are not strong enough in fact it's surprisingly easy to pull the keyboard part away from the tablet another example is that if you just slide it left and right the case will just come right off and so there may be some limitations with the strength of magnets that they can use but either way these just feel a little bit too loose by contrast the magnets on the back are super strong like they don't move around at all when I try to do the same thing so I do feel among all the other design choices is this is the one where it does feel a bit like a flaw especially when you think about the fact that the keyboard part is covering up the screen which is the thing I want to have protected the most and then finally one last note in my whole unboxing and Impressions is that when you do open up the keyboard part it does wake up the screen which is pretty handy okay now I want to move into testing and min's Forum calls this a threein one so we're going to test all of the different use cases that they have set up the first one is what they call Laptop style so the idea here is that you would use this with the keyboard case install and then you can use this for productivity or things like that the next one is what they call the bracket type so this is when you would kind of prop it up to use it as a tablet but for our use case we're going to use it as a gaming PC and then finally on the far right they have what they just call tablet types the idea here is you would use it without a case and so this would be for like drawing or maybe just media consumption so let's start by testing the laptop style so all the things that you can do in terms of productivity and just using this like a laptop replacement and we'll start with a typing test just to give it a feel for how the keyboard behaves in a normal working environment now I'm not the best typist in the world but I am very used to keyboards like this like I mentioned before I used the magic keyboard for years at this point and so transitioning over to this keyboard was very easy for me I'm not sure if it's going to be the same for you but all the same yeah I really like this experience I ended up getting 69 words per minute with no mistakes and for me that is pretty good now just to be thorough I also brought over my iPad Pro and magic keyboard just to test this as well and I do have an unfair advant here because I have been using this setup for about 4 years at this point in fact I've written half a novel on this iPad using this exact same setup either way here I got 68 words per minute but I had a couple mistakes so it dropped me down to 66 and so if anything I think this does go to show that The Minis Forum keyboard is pretty solid the only complaint I have about the keyboard experience on the tablet are the arrow keys in particular it's the up and down keys because they are two half Keys as you can see right here and there have been many times where I haven't really known where to press and so I've had to look down at the keyboard which is something I'd rather not do so I kind of wish there was a physical bump on the key just to help differentiate it a little bit better and when you compare it to something like my very dirty magic keyboard you can see that yeah this one has the up Arrow above the others and so it makes it easy to identify now I probably will get used to this over time but at least in my first week of testing this was something that consistently bothered me okay next let's talk about the trackpad experience and then also combine that with video editing so we can kind of talk talk about both at once and like I mentioned I'm not a huge trackpad fan in fact even when I'm going to be using my laptop which has a trackpad on it I will just use an external Mouse instead either way I did push myself to at least edit one video using the trackpad and so I just took one of my older videos and I cut it up a bunch and then moved everything around and I'm using D vinti resolve right here and this is a 4K video so we're really pushing the limits here of what we can edit I will admit that it was a little bit sluggish to scroll through some of these settings but honestly I don't really know how to optimize to ventually resolve because this isn't my primary editor overall I would say that editing 4K footage is definitely doable on this tablet but it may not be an ideal experience overall anyway after I was done editing everything I then decided to render it out at a 1080p resolution and my typical standard will be that I want 1 minute of footage to render in about 1 minute now I definitely threw a curveball here by using 4K footage but I was really trying to push the most recent processor and also bear in mind that I'm using this on the power saving settings so it's only pulling about 15 watts you could plug it in and use a 28 wat TDP and I bet that would speed things up quite a bit as well regardless even under these constraints we got some pretty great performance it took a 4K video rendered it out to 1080P and it took about a minute and 10 seconds to do 1 minute of footage so I would say this is more than capable when it comes to productivity tasks even some heavyweight video editing like this so now let's go over a couple use case scenarios and comparisons we'll start with the fact that this has video out so if you wanted you could plug this tablet into an external monitor like this all I've done is taken a USBC to HDMI adapter and then plugged it into the monitor so now I'm using my tablet as a primary PC where it's hooked into an external monitor as well but then also a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse this is the kind of setup I tried to set up with my iPad many times in previous years but it just never really worked because iPad OS isn't really a desktop OS solution meanwhile I could see something like this totally working for most use cases for this next part I took out a couple different devices so we could do some size and weight comparisons just to get an idea of what this is going to feel like in the hand on the left we have my 12.9 in iPad Pro this is the M1 model so one generation behind but still a very beefy tablet in the center we have the minium V3 and then on the right we have my MacBook Pro 14in this is the M3 model this is my primary video editing computer let's start with a size comparison so you can see that the MacBook 14 in is almost identical in size to the mini for V3 there's maybe a millimeter of difference between the two they are very very similar next we have the iPad Pro which is about the same in terms of depth but is about two fingers less than the other two and that makes sense this is a 12.9 in diagonal screen compared to 14 in on the other two now I did weigh all of these as well and so let's talk about each of them we'll start with the iPad Pro this was the lightest among all of them so 731 G on its own and then 1442 G with the magic keyboard attachment next we have the minisum and the tablet is itself is exactly 200 g heavier than the iPad Pro and if you're used to holding an iPad you're going to feel that difference it is pretty heavy for a tablet all things considered however I did find it surprising that when you add the case the difference between the two actually gets a little bit thinner so it's only 1,597 G with the case it's still heavier than the iPad Pro but it's actually less than 200 g of a difference so it's getting a little bit closer now I was surprised to find that the MacBook Pro is actually heavier than either of them I actually thought it would probably be some in between the iPad and the mini Forum given the fact that the MacBook Pro is impressively light for what it can do that kind of leads me to think that yes even though the mini Forum feels a little bit heavy it's still kind of par for the course when it comes to these high-end laptops or even tablets and it's a lot lighter than something like the Asus Z1 flow that we talked about earlier this one is 2200 G next I want to compare their thicknesses now this includes the case but you can still kind of see what the tablets look like without the case as well the iPad Pro is definitely thinner than the others but with the case attachment it's about the same thickness as the mini Forum this one is a little bit thicker than the MacBook Pro but not that much and when it comes down to it I think that all three of these are relatively thin by today's standards next I want to talk about footprint like how much space it takes up on a desk and I'd say the mini forum and the MacBook are about the same although the mini Forum does have that flap on the back that's holding it up and of course given the fact that it's smaller the iPad also has a smaller footprint as well however the big difference between these three is that only the minisum has a detachable keyboard and that will reduce the footprint significantly so if you are going to use it in tablet mode you're going to save a lot of space the magic keyboard is great but it doesn't have the ability to remove the keyboard itself and so as a result if you want to prop up your ipad you have to use the whole shebang and of course it's going to be the exact same kind of scenario when it comes to a laptop as well so if you are looking for a tablet-like experience without having the keyboard get in the way then I do think that the Mini's form is a pretty ideal setup and then the last thing of note in my comparison is just the glossy versus Matte feel of some of these screens now my iPad has a glass screen protector so it is making it even more reflective but also I think this is a great demonstration of how non-reflective the screen is on the min's Forum I really like that and I'd say the MacBook is kind of the middle ground between them in the fact that it's not super glossy but then also it's not super matte okay so that's all the testing I wanted to do within the whole laptop kind of style now let's move over to the next one which they're calling the bracket type but this one's the most exciting for me cuz I think this is what I would call the gaming type instead before we jump too far into that I did want to show off the display port in this is kind of unique because you can't do it while the device is turned on the device has to be fully turned off and what you'll have to do is take a display port capable device like a steam deck and then use a display port cable as well from there you plug it in from your host machine over into the tablet and it should immediately pick up that signal and then it's going to turn on the Monitor and that's about it and it's a very simple setup you'll even be able to adjust the volume from the device itself now one thing of note the touch screen functionality does not carry over so for example here with Fallout 3 you have to actively touch the play button and as you can see it is not carrying over so in this scenario you'd want to unplug the display then have it show up on the steam deck again and then tap it yourself and after you get through that menu you can just plug it right back in and now you are good to go to actually start playing a game and I think it's pretty funny to be able B to play like a steam deck game on a tablet that's also capable of playing the same game at the same time but all the same I really like the fact that they included this functionality because even though I personally can't really think of a use case where this would be necessary I think it's still really cool that other people might and this will work with any display port capable device even an Android device for example my Odin 2 I can plug it up and I'm immediately into emulation station and I can play all my favorite retro games and I would expect the battery life in this type of scenario to be pretty decent I would say maybe 6 to 8 hours altogether all right before we move into the gaming part let's talk about the software experience because minis form now has their own app and this will allow you to monitor a lot of things with your computer but to be honest a lot of this is just a readout of some of the settings that you can find within windows and so even though it is neat that you have everything all in one place I can also access all of these things Myself by knowing which app to go into within Windows 2 the only thing I found that's truly unique is within system manager and then there's a select mode option this will allow you to adjust the TDP as well as the refresh rate of your screen and they've got three different profiles one is called Power Balance this will give you an 18 watt TDP and then there's also one called Power Save which will drop it down to 15 watts and if you plug it in it'll give you access to more features for example you can now use power premium and when you tap on this it is going to black out the screen for a moment and that's because it's changing the refresh rate of the panel this will give you the full 28 watt TDP but then also a 165 5 Herz refresh rate and if we keep it plugged in but then move over to the Power Balance tab you can see that this one also had an increase of TDP up to 22 Watts from 18 so you do have different Power profiles depending on when you're plugged in and when you're not and we'll go over all that when we do our game testing too and of note you're not tied down to this app either you can always change this stuff manually by using a thirdparty app for the TDP but then also you could just go into the Windows settings under Advanced display and change the refresh rate there as well so you still have the same Freedom that you've always had when it comes to adjusting your display settings and your TDP profile it's just that they've made an app to simplify the process if you don't want to get into the weeds okay next we'll move into the gaming portion so here I really tried to figure out how I could show the best use cases overall and I decided for the most part to do my testing with a 15 wat TDP and I'll show off the battery results at the end of the video but in general just think of 15 watt TDP of giving you about a little over 2 hours of battery life altogether so let's let's take a look at how that performance is going to look at a 15 wat TDP when it comes to lighter weight games you'll be able to play these no problem at 60 frames per second even with a higher resolution like 1200p and sometimes even 1600p however when you start pushing it into more graphically intensive in 3D games I would expect to drop down the resolution to make sure that you get a good frame rate and I found the sweet spot for this device to be 800p so that's going to be the half resolution of the full display but I think it looks really good especially at the viewing distance that you you'll have this when you're playing any game and so as a result yeah I really enjoyed playing these games in 800p it's definitely not the sharpest experience but it's pretty cool to be able to play control at a pretty consistent 60 frames per second and it's also great to get even higher results for example with doom Eternal I was getting an average of about 85 frames per second which is pretty impressive and overall I found this to be the most consistent experience where I can get a solid 15 wat TDP in about 2 hours of battery life but then also you'll get a pretty good frame rate for most games as well and I think that 800p still looks good on this tablet too for God of War I was getting average about 55 frames per second for me this is definitely playable but of course if you want to have something more consistent you'll have to throw more power at it so let's drop into those settings really quickly and then go into the power premium setting this will bump everything to that full 28 watts and then here again with God of War I've kept it capped at 60 frames per second but you can see that it is very stable now and so there's kind of two ways to play these games one is going to be on battery power which I would recommend to be about 15 watts but if you're going to plug it in you might as well Crank It Up and so let's look at that performance for a few games with God of War like I mentioned it's a very consistent 60 frames per second but for other games you can up that resolution and it'll still get you a better frame rate for example with the risk rain 2 we're getting an average of about 100 frames per second at 1200p with medium settings and this experience looks awesome on this big tablet now there's always going to be limitations when using an APU especially with newer games hell divers 2 is a great example this one really chews through anything that doesn't have discret Graphics so even at 800p in medium settings I was getting an average of about 40 frames per second it's still playable but definitely not like a premium PC experience however one thing to bear in mind is that we have full USB 4 ports which means that if you took an external GPU like this one right here I reviewed this last week it's called the 1X GPU this works perfectly fine with the tablet as well and this will give you options when it comes to adjusting the performance one way or the other in this particular example I decided to increase the resolution to a full 1600p so here under high settings we're still getting about 40 frames per second so not super perfect gameplay but you have to remember I'm pushing a lot of pixels into this tablet right now either way I think this is a good demonstration of the kind of flexibility that you will get if you use an external GPU or you also plug it in with power now one feature I really wish we had with this tablet because it has a 1600p resolution solution is the ability to use integer scaling now you can actually adjust this manually by editing the registry configuration but I would rather not have to do that in fact a lot of people did that with the Lenova Legion go but then afterwards AMD actually included it within their software and it appears that this was something that Lenovo kind of worked out with AMD and so they had it in the settings with the Lenovo Legion go unfortunately here with the tablet we don't have those same options and so as part of this review I'm going to send a note over to min's Forum and ask that they can talk to AMD and see if they can get something set up because that would be amazing this means we'd be able to play our games at 800p but the scaling would look a lot better than it does right now so if I had a wish list of all the things I'd like to see in this tablet that's really high up on the top for me okay let's go back and do some more game testing but this time let's talk about game emulation this is always one of my favorite things to test and one of my favorite things about this tablet is the fact that it has a 16 X10 aspect ratio that means that 4x3 content is going to fill up a lot of the screen especially compared to 16x9 and so when it comes to Retro Game emulation this is a pretty ideal aspect ratio so I'm happy to see it here on top of that this makes Game Boy advanced games look incredible because these played in an original 3x2 aspect ratio and 16x 10 is pretty close to that and so as a result these games natively will just fill up the entire screen it looks amazing next let's talk about some of the harder games and emulation performance we'll start with Sega Saturn this is running the accurate Beetle core and you can see here that it's really not taking a lot of power to play this at full speed about 7even or 8 watts altogether moving on to GameCube we're going to run this at a 3X resolution that's going to be just under 1600p and as you can see right here it's working great it's only pulling about 10 watts TDP as well next up we have PS2 emulation we're going to use the Vulcan backend again at a 3X resolution and yeah same thing here it's running great and not pulling a lot of power I was surprised to find that Dragon Quest 8 played at a 3X resolution and only pulled about 6 or 7even watts of TDP now let's move into the Next Generation we'll talk about Wii U First this one also doesn't require a lot of power for most games here I'm playing Legend of Zelda Wind Waker HD at about 11 watt TDP profile at a 1080p resolution it looks great next we'll try breath of the Wild on the Wii U this is going to be at 800p with a 60 frames per second cap and I'm also running this on battery power so it's going to max out at 18 watt TDP even then I think the game is playing great we're getting an average of about 48 frames per second it's not a full 60 but it's still going to feel really good another system that does pretty great at an 18 wat TDP is PS3 in fact even Infamous which is one of the hardest games to play is well above 30 frames per second and if you wanted to get this closer to a 60 frames per second when plugged in you could then bump it up to a 28 watt TDP and I think most PS3 games are going to play great one system that definitely requires that full 28 watt TDP is going to be Xbox 360 this emulator in particular is pretty power power hungry but even then I found this to be excellent when it came to Xbox 360 just like the 7,000 series of apus that came out last year I also did just a tiny bit of Nintendo switch emulation using the Ryu Jinx emulator I started with the 18 watt TDP and I found that most games played just fine I did get some slowdown when it came to Shader compilation but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting and I would say this is fully playable of course if you want to make sure that you have even better performance then you can also bump up the TDP to 28 watts and then that probably smooth out some of those rough edges and then finally another thing I wanted to test when it came to emulation is whether or not I could boot into Linux and then play something like Basera for this I had to go into the BIOS and turn off secure Boot and then I told it to boot into the flash drive instead of the internal storage and after that it booted up just fine and so yeah Basera is totally going to be doable on this tablet and this is a great setup if you want to have a dedicated emulation experience without having to use the internal storage at all in this scenario everything is playing off the flash drive the emulators the Brams all my configurations are all housed there and so here I also wanted to push the performance to see what we could get and yeah even here with Wii U it's playing great but then also the original Xbox at a 2X resolution is still playing at full speed as well so I think this is yet another feature of this tablet which makes it a compelling buy for me in the fact that I can dual boot it whenever I would like okay and finally the last part of this segment I want to talk about the fan and the cooling just because we have been pushing it pretty hard here with this testing the device is set up with two different fans as well as four copper heat pipes and I feel like this cooling solution is kind of Overkill because even when I was playing it at a full 28 watt TDP even when pushing it over sustained time periods I never saw it go above 74° Celsius so this is keeping the device Ultra Cool and relatively quiet let's do a quick audio test and I would say all things considered this is pretty darn quiet my controller is way louder than the fans and of course if you turn up the game volume to something like 50% you won't even hear the fans at all let's take another listen so yeah overall even though I don't think the audio is the best in the world it's still a great experience when you consider the fan noise and everything else okay and finally let's talk about the last use case scenario according to min's Forum which is using this like a tablet and this will 100% be the shortest segment here in this video and that mostly comes down to the fact that I just don't really ever use these kind of stylist pens and so I kind of just don't know what I'm talking about and so I don't want to mislead anyone and say oh this is great or this is terrible able because I just don't have enough experience to be able to say that with any Authority however I did want to show off the specs for those who are familiar with this kind of setup so we're looking at an MPP 2.0 SLA and then a level pressure of 4096 and this is all jargon to me I have no idea what that means but if you are into styluses and drawing and stuff I'm hoping this is at least helpful at the very least I did install Adobe Fresco just to test it out and sure enough yes the active pen is active it works and if I use the tip of the pen it's going to give you a more sharp kind of texture and then also I can rub it with the side and get a different texture as well and again I'm not super familiar with all this stuff but at least from a testing perspective yeah it seems to be fully functional so now let's move into something where I actually know what I'm talking about let's talk about battery life to start this thing charges pretty darn fast it takes about an hour and 15 minutes to charge from 0 to 100% I also found that the sleep mode works well I lost about 1% battery overnight now I tested this with a bunch of games but here are five examples that I think are going to be helpful just in understanding what kind of battery life you can expect from the mini for V3 so let's start with the far right which is going to be our best case scenario this is going to be with Celeste this one only requires about a 4 wat TDP even at a full resolution and the battery life on this end is pretty great we got about 5 and 1/2 hours of battery life at the end moving on let's talk about mid-grade emulation with Wind Waker HD as our example this game I'm playing at its native 1080p resolution and it's native 30 frames per second and we got a little bit over 3 hours of battery life and I still think that is pretty great too now in the center I tested Hades at two different Power profiles at 15 watts we're using the power saving profile and then at 18 we're using the balanced one when I played a 15 watt TDP I could get an average frame rate of 60 frames per second and my battery life was 2 hours and 18 minutes now at 18 Watts I unlocked the frame rate to give me 125 frames per second and this gave me about an hour and a half altogether and when you're on battery power that's the highest wattage that the mini Forum settings are going to give you and so for the rest of the testing that's all I used is the same 18 wat power profile and as expected I got about an hour and a half of battery life every time so let's look at our other two examples here is Doom Eternal again at 18 wat TDP with a 16p resolution medium settings and 60 frames per second and yeah same thing hour and a half and then finally we have God of War this is different than the 800p profile that I showed earlier this time I use 1600p low settings but with FSR turned on and the performance here was a little bit worse than what we got at 800p but the graphics did look quite a bit better so really in a worst case scenario we are capped out by that 18 watt TDP went on battery which is going to give us an hour and a half battery life and this is going to limit the performance in certain games but you can always use a thirdparty app to change the TDP manually as well but for me personally I found that I was okay with an 18 watt TDP it allowed me to just go into the settings and really kind of figure out what I could do under those constraints and I also like the Peace of Mind knowing that I was going to get an hour and a half of battery life no matter what I did because it would cap out at those 18 Watts meanwhile if you want to cut it down even more by lowering it down to 15 watts or maybe using a lighter weight game you will definitely get a lot better battery life as well up to 5 and 1/2 hours if you really push it so all things considered when it comes to tablet gaming this is about what I was expecting and so I have no real issues here when it comes to battery life it's certainly not going to be as good as something like an arm-based chip but all the same this is what we have to work with under the x86 architecture okay I think this video has been packed with information this is a lot longer than my typical Mini PC review so let's start wrapping up and talk about what I like and what I don't like about the minis for and V3 as always we'll start with what I like and there's a lot to talk about here number one I love the fact that it's so thin and Sleek it feels very premium like made by a really high-end competitor and so just in general I've really enjoyed walking around with this tablet over the past week it feels like it's really elevated experience another thing that elevates that experience is the performance of the ryzen 78840 U this is the first device I've tested with this chipset and I think it's great I think that at a lower power profile like 15 watts we get some great performance but then also if we plug it in and push it up to 28 Watts it basically unlocks every single game you can think of I also love the fact that you only have one choice of specs and it's the high-end stuff you've got 32 gigs of RAM a terabyte of storage and that gives me some peace of mind knowing the fact that I have a really high-end model that's a lot of RAM and storage I also really like this display it's nice and big has a high resolution a good aspect ratio and also a super high refresh rate it is a matte screen which means it's not going to be like super crisp and popping but all the same I think the saturation here is still very good and I also love the fact that it has display port in so you can use it as an external monitor if you'd like and when you look at the competition I think the pricing here is very good it gives you more features and performance than some of the others but at a lower price point another thing that really struck me about the whole experience is that I kept thinking to myself that man this is a lot like a laptop but better in many ways the way I saw it when I plugged in the keyboard attachment it felt just as good as any other laptop that I've used previously however when I take the keyboard off it now turns into a tablet which is something I'm more apt to use than an actual laptop and so it really did start to change my way of thinking when it comes to a tablet and a laptop we'll talk about that more at the end of the video before that I do want to talk about some of the things that I don't like and some of these are very nitpicky but I did want to bring them up the first is that I don't like that the keyboard case itself doesn't have very strong magnets it feels kind of loose on a device that has so many other premium features this is one that definitely didn't feel premium from the software side I don't have a lot of complaints but the one I do have is that I wish it had 800p integer scaling and I know it's possible because we see it on the Lenova Legion go so whatever magic they did I hope that min's Forum can also replicate another thing that was a let down compared to the rest of the premium package is the audio it just didn't feel super Bassy and clear either I wouldn't go as far as calling it bad but it definitely doesn't rise the occasion of all the other features that we have here in this tablet I also found it to be a little bit heavy especially compared to my iPad Pro now obviously this is larger and so it's going to be a little bit heavier and it's still quite a bit lighter than a full laptop as well but all the same that was something I noticed as I was carrying it around for the past week was man this thing definitely has some heft to it and then finally this one is nothing to do with Mini's Forum but just the fact that a Windows tablet doesn't really feel like a true tablet experience after so many years of Android and iPad OS it just kind of comes part and parcel with having a full touchcreen environment and while yes this does have a touch screen and I can definitely tap on the screen whenever I want it still isn't the same as using a true tablet I feel like when I was using it I was constantly reminded that I was using a Windows computer and not an actual tablet again this is a more UI kind of complaint as opposed to something to do with min's Forum but I wanted to make sure I didn't mischaracterize this as being like a supremely awesome experience in all sunshine and rainbows just like when it comes to trying to cram windows inside of a handheld there are just some weird compromises here and there however all things considered I kind of fell in love with IM minis for V3 in fact like I mentioned just a minute ago this really kind of changed my way of thinking when it came to tablet in general especially with Windows up until this review I've always thought about tablets as being something like a consumption device something where you can browse the internet or maybe watch a movie but not really much beyond that now on Android you can also do Retro Game emulation that's also great but nothing really beats being able to play PC games as well and for me this is where the mini for V3 really shines I had to keep reminding myself as I was playing these PC games that I was running them natively there's a part of me that's very used to streaming games over to my iPad or an Android Tablet from a real PC and so I found it to be very refreshing to be able to play these games natively on a tablet no streaming or anything in fact I like the experience so much that now the next time that I'm in the market to buy a laptop I'm probably going to be looking at tablets instead and I think if your situation is similar to mine that you should maybe consider a tablet as well this thing can do all the same things a laptop can do but a bunch of things that a laptop cannot and on the opposite side it can do a lot of things that a tablet can do but a lot of things that a tablet cannot so the way I see it if this is within your budget and you are looking for the most functionality possible then I'm not sure anything can really beat the minis Forum V3 you can definitely buy a laptop for cheaper and you can also buy a tablet for cheaper but I'm not sure you could get both of them combined into one at this kind of price point anywhere else so let me know what you think in the comments down below among all the different use cases we talked about in this video which one is the best fit for you as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music]
