The Best AMD Ryzen Mini PC

this is a standard Nook form factor with an AMD ryen processor it has dual land quad display output and plenty of features inside this Mini PC is larger with a higher TDP ryzen 8000 series processor but both of them have the new AMD ryzen AI npu so the question is well which one is better we got a lot to cover so let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from St and this is the azrock industrial 4x4 box 8040 U but this is actually the 8840 U version and this has the brand new AMD ryzen 78840 U processor with the ryzen AI npu and it can support up to 96 GB of memory there are two wired network interfaces plus Wi-Fi and a ton of expandability in a relatively normal 4x4 form factor but something that we focus on on a lot of our reviews is whether or not the 4x4 form factor is really needing to be replaced by something a little bit larger sure it's smaller but if you can get a little bit larger V chassis get better cooling well then that's an opportunity to use a higher-end processor and get more performance out of it so this sc8 PC has an AMD ryzen 7 8845 HS the HS means that this can run it up to 65 wat TDP whereas the uer processor that we have here is really like a 28 is watt TDP part and you can see side by side that the beat link is certainly a little bit larger but it's using that really for cooling so instead of doing two videos one for each I thought why don't we just go and do one video and then really talk talk about the difference between keeping a 4x4 form factor from a larger vendor or going to a larger form factor from a smaller vendor and which one's better and before we get too far in this I want to say thank you to azrock Industrial for providing their unit belink for providing their unit and also the St YouTube members for helping provide funds so we can go and buy stuff to go put in these so we can actually configure them with that let's get to the hardware okay so let's talk about the hardware of this little 4x4 box now this is a form factor that we've reviewed a number of generations AZ industrial has not just the AMD versions of this but they're also Intel version so you can pretty much get whatever you want so if you don't want the AMD ryzen AI npu you can go get the Intel one just as easily okay so taking a look at the Box real quick up front we have our audio jack and then we have a USB type a port now this is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Port so it's say 10 GB per second Port next to that we have two USB 4 ports now these USB 4 ports can also do display port output mode so these are actually display outputs as well now looking at the top of the system we have some plastic on the sides we have some vents underneath we have some rubber feet okay and then on the back let's get to that cuz that's what we really want to see here and let's start with what we have here which is our power input next to that we have two USB type A ports but these are USB 2 ports some people ask why do we still have USB 2 ports and the big reason is really that these tend to work pretty well especially if you have like Wireless dongles for like your wireless keyboard and mouse and stuff like that so that's why we tend to see those there are also some peripherals that just work better with USB 2 they're supposed to be Backward Compatible but that's just kind of life now next to that we have our two HDMI outputs so we have a total of four display outputs and then we have two ethernet ports now one thing I wish that azrock industrial did was just label which Port is which you would have no idea that these are two different real Tech ports one is a realtech 8125 BG which is your 2 and a half gig Port the other one is your 1 gig Port which is an 8211 okay so looking inside this Mini PC it's a pretty standard layout now first let's talk about the memory The ddr5 Sod dims are ddr5 5600 memory and we managed to put in two crucial 48 gig dims for a total of 96 GB of memory now these crucial dims are the ones that we just recommend we have an entire main site post on them uh if if you're going to get a mini PC they just if they work and the dims are not like DOA or something like that then they pretty much work in every Mini PC that we use they may not be the fastest but at least they work and and that just saves a whole bunch of headache which is why we're always using these crucial ones they're not paying us for those it's just that it saves our time now one of the standard features is that you get a mediate Tech RZ 616 which is a preferred AMD solution for Wi-Fi 6E you don't get Wi-Fi 7 in this which is kind of a bummer but Wi-Fi 60 is probably more prevalent right now so I guess that makes sense now inside you get two m.2 slots but one is a 2280 and the other is a 20242 so a 80 mm and 42 mm slot one fun thing that we did was we are using the the fit quad SSD that didn't work in the Asus nuck that we tried recently in a video that we had but it actually worked in this no problem still with 96 GB of memory two NVM ssds you also get Wi-Fi 6E a 2 and2 gig Port A 1 gig Port there's a lot you can do with a system like this of course one of the big features is the AMD ryzen 88 40u processor now this is a 28 is wat TDP processor that has 8 cores and 16 threads and frankly we've seen AMD CPUs with eight cores and 16 threads for it feels like forever it feels like it's almost stagnated at that level but we also get a couple of accelerators now the AMD radon 780m that's in this is actually pretty decent now AMD is going to increase the speed of their integrated gpus of course in future Generations but on the other hand this is really one where I think for a lot of like casual gamers like Esports titles and stuff like that this is actually pretty useful now the other feature of course is that this also has our AMD ryzen AI npu now of course the npu space is something that all of the manufacturers whether that's Intel AMD or some of the arm vendors they're all trying to go and innovate on that mpu so that is something that is going to be faster in future Generations but on the other hand having mpu built in plus having the GPU which can do Hardware video encode and decode uh those are really useful especially when you think of this like as an industrial PC or if you're doing AI applications where you need that encode decode uh that's something that's actually pretty nice now I know AI is a huge buzz word right now but on the other hand we are going to see more applications take advantage of the npus so I think that they are useful and one advantage of this processor is the fact fact that it is a lower power processor even though you get all of that compute built in but then the question is how does this compare to the unit okay so let's take a look at this and uh first we get our power button and next up we get a clear seamos uh little uh button or recess button at least this isn't a huge one like we've seen on some other mini PCS next to that we get our 3.5 mm audio jack and then a USB type-c port now this is only a 10 GB per second Port it's not a fancy USB 4 port for example next set USBC Port we get a type a port and that is also a USB 3 Gen 2 Port so that's also a 10 GB per second Port okay now moving to the back we get our dcn of course and then we get a couple of other features on the front I mentioned that the USB port is not a USB 4 Port but on the back we do get a USB type-c and a USB 4 port for other display outputs we also get an HDMI port and a display port Port so one thing you are giving up with the belink is you are giving up an additional display output now of course you get three which is enough for most people frankly but on the other hand if you do need to go and power multiple displays then you're kind of stuck with only three on this now we also get a headset Jack and a 2 and2 gig landport we only get a single land port not two again I think this is more of like you know this works for most folks maybe not everybody but it also lowers the cost by only having one but the USB situation on this is just totally weird and it's unnecessarily weird because the middle USB type a port well that's a USB 2 Port it's only labeled USB now there's also another stack of USB typee a ports also just labeled USB but one of them is a USB 3 Gen 2 Port so a 10 GB per second port and the other one is a USB 2 Port now as rock industrial I wish that they did better on their labeling as well but here I mean man I just wish that these things said this is usb3 this is USB 2 that would be nice and also why not just put the USB 2 ports together and have the USB 3 because it's different sitting out all by itself I don't know but the other big feature that you will see on this is the fact that this back panel has a giant vent for the cooling solution most of this chassis on the inside is dedicated really to Cooling and I think that's pretty important oh and on the bottom of this we get a plastic cover that's vented which I guess is good okay and let me just kind of show you what I think my least favorite feature of this entire Mini PC is so when you open up this bottom lid after four screws by the way inside there's a dust filter now this is a feature that belink is like hey this is the best thing but let me give you my thought this dust filter has more screws in it on one hand I like the idea of having a dust filter and is probably to me at least more useful than having a 2 and 1/2 in sat Bay or something like that but on the other hand I mean man it's just such a pain to have to go do that okay so once you're inside there are some cool things that they did and some things again that are a little bit painful so one of the things that you're going to see is that we have our two sodm slots the scr8 comes standard with 32 GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD in this configuration but of course you could upgrade that if you wanted now the other side over here is this little heat sink area and underneath this heat sink is two mdme slots now these two nvme slots take m.2 2280 so at least they match and that's kind of nice because you can get matching ssds if you wanted that now while I like the idea of having a heat sink for your m.2 ssds especially on the bottom of these things I think that's a great idea the one thing that is uh well definitely kind of a bummer is the fact that you have to go and take out two more screws and these are recessed a pretty decent amount so just to get to your m.2 ssds we needed to undo four screws for the bottom two screws for the dust plate and then another two screws for this heat sink and the other thing that's under here is also the Wi-Fi card which is a Wi-Fi 6 card and that's a intel-based solution but there is another area of innovation that belink went into in this that I think is really important so what you're going to see is that this is the front panel of the unit and when you're inside all of these front panel ports are actually connected via this little cable and on this little breakout board what that allows beling to do is build a channel between the main motherboard and this kind of front IO to go and suck air through through the chassis if you look from this angle over here you can actually see the fan now while that may not seem like a huge feature having airflow get through this and out the back of this I think is actually a pretty cool idea because it gives belink better cooling than it would have otherwise now the processor in this unit is the AMD ryzen 7 8845 HS now this is a higher power part that you really see in things like gaming PCs again you still have a cores and 16 threads you have the AMD Radeon 78m graphics and an npu so you can do a lot of the same things on the accelerator side but you do get more TDP for everything to work with that I think it's time to get to Performance okay so let's talk about the performance of these two systems uh just real quickly so I think there are really two things that I want to talk about the first thing is the fact that yeah if you do have the unit you do get a faster processor the 8845 HS is faster than the 8840 U that's it's just kind of a byproduct of having more TDP now one thing that was kind of fun was that on some benchmarks especially like the geek bench or something like that you'll see that the single-threaded scores were actually pretty close between the two of them but when we scale to multithreaded workloads we do get at least 8 to 10% more performance pretty easily just by having that higher TDP I think if I were trying to play games I would probably use the belink PC on the other hand if I was doing something like an industrial PC application I do think that the performance of the 8840 is perfectly good and so I think that that's something that maybe that's why azck chose the lower power part plus it also is a little bit smaller and so I just kind of think that maybe these things are optimized at different points but what we really need to look at is power so let's get over there for that okay so let's talk about the power noise real quick first off the Azo system uses much less power because it's a 28 wat CPU okay so at idle the azrock industrial box uses something like 6.5 to maybe 9 Watts just jumps around a bit depending on what the OS is doing the package power consumption when you're doing that is often in like the 2.8 is watt range so that's super low power consumption even though the system idles with maybe a 2 point something watt idle on the package when you start bursting up you're going to go over 30 WTS more so you're somewhere in that like maybe 33 to 35 watt range and then the overall system power consumption whil it's doing that is maybe 46 to 47 Watts could be a little bit more a little less but somewhere around there but what happens pretty quickly is that we go down into a sustained range that sustained range is about 28 29 Watts on the CPU and then you'll see the overall system power consumption settle L maybe that 38 to 39 maybe 40 watt range but just somewhere in there so it's it's honestly a very low power system one of the benefits of that is that in our 34 DBA noise floor Studio it was maybe 36 38 Watts the vast majority of time that we were testing it so it's a very low uh just kind of noise system now the SR8 the idle package power consumption was somewhere that 3.7 to 4 .5 watt range that's because we have a much higher wattage processor now our idle system power consumption is somewhere in that 7 to 10 watt range so it's pretty similar but it was a little bit higher than we saw on the azrock system where things really changed though was when we talk about the load and the sustained performance because what we saw was that we got in that 55 to 58 Watts no problem on the belink system and it just stayed there it didn't go down from that so instead of seeing something like we saw in the azrock where you have like a level of performance and then you know the clock speed goes down and you get a little lower power and all that kind stuff you did not get that on this belink in fact you can even run this thing at 65 Watts on the processor and get all the way you know and just see that sustained performance but overall the system power consumption when you're running in that say 508 watt range or 55 watt range somewhere in there on the package you're going to start to see power consumption get well into that 77 to 79 watt range and you go well over 85 Watts when you have the ctdp set higher and overall the noise stayed relatively good 36 to 39 DBA both of them ran the vast majority of our tests at under 40 DBA which means that when the air conditioners here in Scottsdale were going you just couldn't hear the systems so overall the unit definitely used more power it's a little bit noisier but it's pretty darn close the azrock system benefited from the fact that it was a lower power system even though we still have pretty much the same compute resources just different frequencies and different power going into the package so of course the was faster but it's also using more power to do that which makes sense with that let's get to our key Lessons Learned okay so through all this what did we learn well I think the big thing I learned at least is that you really do see two very different optimizations I mean for example if you have a whole bunch of these 4x4 mini PCS nucks whatever um you know you may just want to have a 4x4 form factor belink changes the strr series like the form factors on that all the time so what I think azrock industrial is doing is they're saying like Hey we're gonna have like one form factor if you build for this you're going to be able to use it for multiple generations and for industrial customers I guess that makes a lot of sense there's also a lot of just stuff out there for Nook siiz systems and so I totally get that but from a CPU performance perspective the belink unit certainly has better performance I mean that was pretty easy to see and it was across all of our multi-threaded benchmarks you could see that no problem so if I really wanted to do something like play a game or something like that I probably would go with the scr8 cuz I think that makes a little bit more sense from a networking perspective the ack Industrial is way better I mean not only do we get a 2 and a half and a 1 gig Nick but we also get Wi-Fi 6E whereas with the Str8 we have Wi-Fi 6 and we have a 2 and 1 12 gig Port so you just get you know one less Port one thing I didn't like on either of these is the labeling please please label your USB ports at least with what the heck they are is it a USB 2 Port is it a USB 3 Port which speed of USB 3 is it is it 5 gbits per second 10 gbits per second or is it a USB 4 port to me it just feels like that's a big Miss and something that should be easy to go and do while I like the cooling that belink did I think that the ASRock industrial is much easier to service the azero industrial also has four display outputs whereas the only has three but next I think we really need to talk about what you get in terms of pricing so maybe it's also looking at the value of these so the ASRock industrial unit is $599 on New Egg as I'm filming this it could go a little Up and Down based on discounts and all that kind of stuff but that's how much we generally see these for and that seems about in in line with some of the previous generations that we've looked at but for $599 you're only getting a barebones PC so that means that you have to go put memory in it you also have to go put an SSD in it if you want to go up to 96 GB of memory then maybe not getting any memory in there is great if you want to use a large SSD then maybe it's nice to not have any and save a couple dollars the other thing you don't get though is you don't get an operating system so if you want Windows well you're probably going to have to go pay for it if you're using Linux of course you don't care but for that extra say $50 or so for the be sc8 you're getting a lot when you look at it right first you're getting a 1 TB nvme SSD which means that you have Windows 11 and that can be pre-installed for you so you don't have to go and install an operating system unless you want to put Linux on there and you don't have to go install a SSD you also get 32 GB of memory which I think is a pretty good match for these systems and so if you don't want to go any higher than that well you get it included here in the price now when it comes to power adapters I have to say there are definitely more regulatory markings and all that kind of stuff on the ASRock industrial one but it is also a much larger power brick I think that for an extra 20 watts I don't really know if I love love the fact that it's this much larger so I do think that belink actually did a better job on the power adapters if that matters to you overall though I think I came up with a pretty good idea of these two systems right like on the one hand the belink system if you're going to play games you're using his desktop I actually think that one's a better option but on the other hand if you want to make a server or you want to have something where you're going out and I don't know like processing data so you're taking like video input from cameras you're decoding that then you're going and doing some kind of like AI operation on it and then doing something based on that I actually think that the more connectivity that you get in the smaller ASRock and lower power ack system is probably what I would go for so from a lower power operation and a connectivity perspective I actually really like the ASRock industrial one but on the other hand I think if you're going to use it as a desktop then I would probably just get the sc8 and be done with it and guys I hope you like this look at these two systems they were really fun to go and review we have tons of Mini PC reviews so if you want something else definitely go check those out also if you did like this well why don't you share it with your friends but also give it 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

Views: 6,773

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, asrock, asrock industrial, beelink, ser8, beelink ser8, 4x4 box-8840u, box-8040u, amd, amd ryzen, ai, ai pc, amd ryzen ai, ryzen ai, amd ryzen 7, ryzen 7 8840u, ryzen 7 8845hs, best mini pc, best amd mini pc, best ryzen mini pc, npu

Id: fUKLwUteh5Y

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 16 2024