Chris with the gmktec nuc box K8 so this is a Mini
PC that they sent out to me in exchange for this video I'm not being paid for it and what we have
here is the new 8000 series from AMD which is very disappointing if you ask me because it's simply
a rebadge basically a rename but they have added an mpu now to this Apu that is really the only
difference it's exactly like the 7,840 HS same clock speed same core count and same but very good
uh Radeon 780m and that is our integrated Graphics so in this video I'm going to test it out I'll
let you know all the pros and cons exactly what to expect with this new K8 model so this is what
is included with the nuke box K8 we've got our power cable HDMI cable a Visa mounting bracket
with screws there for it so you can mount that on the back of a TV or a monitor which is good uh
we have a warranty card and a power supply this is a non-brand hunt key I see a lot of these uh they
are normally like a laptop brand of power supply and we basically got laptop components here anyway
with this model so 120 WS is its maximum output which is good it's definitely sufficient for the
chipset that we do have here then some paperwork which is this right here a user guide user manual
for our K8 and it just goes over some very basic standard stuff talks about our ports that we do
have there and a little technical specs too about the various different models so the frame around
the outside of it uh it may look like it's metal but this is plastic and to me it kind of feels a
little bit cheap you can see some seams here it really could look a little bit better more premium
if it was metal and that would dissipate the heat a little better so it got ventilation either side
of it and there are two fans in this apparently now I won't be tearing it down to take a look
at that because I want to keep the factory past job intact that's the reason why I do not do the
full tear Downs with these it's not because these companies request I don't it's just because I
believe that's the best way to handle things so it's just like one of the units you bought
yourself here so along the bottom we've got the little hooks there that's for the Visa mounting
bracket at four rubber feet there obviously and gain access to the internals I'll show you that
shortly but it's just removing the top you can see I've partly removed it already uh that is
just for the video that's why it's it looks like it's coming off but it's normally clipped
in like this so two 2.5 GB land ports here HDMI this is 2.0 unfortunately it's not HDMI 2.1 why
I don't know display port 1.4 and usb3 here this is Gen 1 USB 3.2 gen 1 uh USB 2.0 our power in
obviously and this is where the hot air comes out kingsington uh lock slot right there and then
we do have two USB 3 2s these are the 10 GB ports here both of those and then this is our USB 4 so
good to have this one it's full spec that's the 40 gbits per second that it can handle data and it
does support up to 100 watts of power delivery and then on 3.5 with mic support this is our power
button uh which is plastic there green yeah the color of it they could have made that something
a little bit different there and this is a status well there's a status LED behind it so you know
when it is on so internals here you just need to lift off the top okay and you'll see we've got
this uh little tiny cooler fan here at the top so that's going to keep the SSD the ram cool because
previous many PCs that I've reviewed especially the AMD ryzen ones I did notice did have some
problems with the ram just getting way too hot causing corruption and instability and the systems
freezing up or just rebooting on us so hopefully that won't happen I'll let you know in this video
if it does Ur So four screws here on the outside I do need to to remove those first then I can lift
off this top portion and show you the upgrades possible there are some little tabs either side
that keep this in so make sure you use a pry tool just on the side and then you can clip it up so
it's a little difficult to get out it's not the easiest thing now when you pull it up don't just
yank it up straight away because there is this you'll see we got a a little plug there for that
fan which is our Ram cooler SSD cooler as I'm just mentioned before so that you need to just wiggle
and then remove and you'll see that we do have our pcie 4.0 slots there's two of them here so that's
great to see there's no room for 3 or 2.5 sorry should I say uh drive in this at all and you can
kind of see why because there just wouldn't really be room it looks like maybe on the back here there
could have uh but with this height of the unit Noe just not possible there so go great to see they've
used crucial brand there for our RAM and it says uh ddr5 and it is the 5 ,600 megat transfers are
using with this one here and SSD brand I'll let you know that later on but I can kind of see an
M there I don't really know so it's not looking like a normal kind of brand that I deal with good
to see they have put a cooler on it at least there and the Wi-Fi card well that's located underneath
this SSD Wi-Fi antenna location is at the front of this Mini PC so for the best possible signal
strength I recommend you have the front of the Mini PC aim towards your Wi-Fi router so first up
our bios and the good news is we do have advanced setting tab now not everything is there but gmk
Tech has given us the important settings and this is really good to see so if you're going to run
this on a switch as a server or something maybe a file server whatever uh you can have it auto
power on good setting to have that option there now we do also have the won L USB on boot blah
blah blah that's all kind of normal but these are interesting settings here so by default out of
the box it is balanced okay our power limit here now you can put it onto performance which is 65
wats and I know a lot of people in the comments are probably going to say hey why did you not
review it with its maximum performance to see what it can really do the new chipset the new
ryzen the 8845 HS and I'm going to do that I'm going to put it onto performance I know I don't
normally do this and no I'm not doing this because the company asked me either just believe me I
just think a lot of people are going to ask for that and you can even sit here our default for our
RAM for shared Ram here for the 780m so you can up this right up to 16 GB and in my experience
that causes instability so I won't put it that high but I'll give us a very healthy eight we'll
see what happens eight should be I think stable so we'll see what happens with that now you got
CPU configuration a few more things in there and none of those we need need to touch under normal
circumstances uh and then memory configuration well uh there is a few things you can change in
here but I'm going to leave that on auto okay because it should be at the maximum 5,600 anyway
so those are what I'm going to go with run with there with the settings so here we go with uh
just a couple of benchmarks here I'm not going to go mad with these in fact I'm going to show
you barely anything with benchmarks because as you'll see uh it turns out to be really pointless
because we're looking at the same performance as the last gen chip so the 7,840 HS identical kind
of scores here what I'm getting with geekbench six you can see this single core score is good
it's almost 2500 we're looking at almost 13,000 multi-or score and sometimes those older chipsets
can get the 13,000 now I expected maybe a little bit higher here because of the higher wattage
the power limit I have set being in the power mode our 65 Watts didn't seem to make really any
difference I did test this later with the balanced and I've put it back into performance and it was
more or less about the same plus or minus that's like 50 points or or whatever that was it so very
very little uh in terms of difference there so why is it so disappointing well this is because this
is a basic Rebrand this is all AMD has done and I was so disappointed when I found out about this I
just thought what the hell are AMD doing they've missed an opportunity here and they've taken a a
very I feel a lazy uh way of doing things they've just rebranded it they've added the AI this is the
only thing that's new really is this okay so we've got now uh the mpu so we've got mpu performance
there that's the the new part of the chipset the a uh Apu that they've added that is it because
look at those clock rates so we're looking at a base clock of 3.8 GHz boost clock 3.1 it's got
the 8 core 16 threads and then you look at the old chip it is identical identical and this is why
the performance is for me identical it still is the Ron 780m Graphics you can see the same clocks
there the same Graphics core count of 12 uh that's the old version okay but you see here the 12 uh
exactly the same and the same 2700 maximum for our uh GPU for the integrated graphics for its top
end frequency so nothing new just the AI That's it and just a very lazy Rebrand now I was hoping that
AMD would add another few cores here everyone was and perhaps release it as the 880m or something
else but no that didn't happen so that's why I'm not going to go crazy with benchmarks because
it is identical so if you can find a a 7,840 HS Mini PC for cheaper I'd say go for it go for
it unless maybe you want to use and you do need the AI very limited case for that maybe someone
is out there using diffusion or they're using something they need for AI okay then you've got a
legitimate excuse for it otherwise I just wouldn't really go for that it's not worth it at all very
disappointing from AMD and here you can see that the SSD so PCI 4.0 very good speeds I expected it
to be actually slower than this and it's a Mason semi SSD that's all it lists in the device manager
device ID Hardware ID and it's okay it's good it checks out it's not a non brand for me I've never
seen this brand before but I do like the speeds I'm seeing out of it so that performance there is
very good and a quick test here of the graphics with a benchmark that is 3D Mark so this is
time spy and see there it's getting 2,00 uh just over 2,600 with a graphics score which
is again like that's last generation kind of scores here so it unfortunately is no B there so
everything basically the same as it was so this is why it's kind of um yeah a little bit boring
really because of this and of course it is our integrated Graphics that handles the decoding of
hvc MP9 and all of that vp9 sorry and you'll see that I'll just play a sample clip here that's very
smooth in fact I think this run runs better than Intel's counterpart although be in mind I've not
tested out the new arc integ integrated Graphics from Intel but normally there's a few stutters but
with AMD seems to be a bit smoother although there were couple of drop frames just then I don't
know why that was I've got nothing going on in the background Windows updates and all that is
turned off too by the way and this one here which is an HDR clip um this is also 4K and you'll see
that it does run fine with looks okay it's meant to look slow at the start there sorry just mute
that there we go so that's running fine and even when I go and just maximize this so looking very
good no drop frames so it's great a great chipset great Apu for media playback things like this is
really good the last of us this is part one and a game that has been requested a lot so I'm running
this with the default low preset for graphics oh it's gone to Auto here but it's in fact low it
selects low anyway so everything is on low uh you wouldn't want to run any higher than that not with
integrated Graphics of course and then resolution 720p let's have a look and see how it runs okay
so so far this is looking very good for integrated Graphics yes it looks grainy yes it's a bit washed
out and yeah we've got some uh down scaling and whatnot and FSR and all that on by default I
think with the low preset what is important is the frame rate is it going to be playable or
not and it is looking good around 60 frames per second you can see here and this is just as far
as I got unfortunately I lost my save game well I've played this with the PlayStation version uh
the original and this is the remake of course now on PC here so it's looking promising considering
look at all the vegetation look at what it has to render still and we're getting this kind of frame
rate so in fights and whatnot uh yeah it's going to drop down a little bit some areas of of the map
that are very very heavy but looking really good very good I think uh for this kind of a modern
game was still very good looking graphics for a low setting preset that is so you can see we're
at the maximum 2 CL there so the 2700 uh mahz there for the radon 7 ADM and 60 watts it doesn't
really seem to go over the 60 wats even though I got it set to 65 but that's all fine let's move
on to a few other games wicher which is in my test spot here that I like to test out because
it's very demanding now this is at 1080P and well a little choppy you can see the frame rate
stabilizes around the sort of mid 40s here uh but I just find that a little bit too choppy so I'll
test it now at 720p and by the way this is the lowest setting preset again so this is more like
it a lot better you can see around 80 frames per second so much smoother a lot faster not getting
those horrible stutters before although it does Di down to about what was that 56 frames per
second still looking very good and I do find this performance similar to what I've seen out of
the best mini PCS uh with the last gen the ryzen 7,000 series really like I've just been talking
about before in this video it is basically the same what is helping out here is the power limit
being set to 60 wat early accounts and finally cyber Punk 2077 so this is the low preset FSR is
on by default so I've left it on here and 720p you can see it's playable looking good but really
this is the same as the last year it really is no different here it's just gain that power limit
of ups that is helping a little bit and note that the turbo here isn't always at the 2700 okay it
is dropping down you see that some certain areas it drops down to 6,2 100 instead of holding that
2,700 really on the area of the map that you're going to see that happening but overall very
good for integrated Graphics to be able to play demanding games like the Cyber Punk 2077 at this
kind of frame rate at 720p and still looking I think pretty good we'll see what happens when here
still good frame rate still very very playable just before I get onto The Thermals there's one
thing I wanted to talk about and that is the USB 4 Port uh which does support Thunder Thunderbolt 34
devices what I've noticed is it will occasionally disconnect on me and reconnect and I see this
on a lot of amds for some reason I I noticed that with Intel it tends to be a little bit more
stable perhaps down to the chipset could be down to drivers so my drive here my external type-c uh
drive that I'm using uh this is a thunderbolt 3 uh Drive working fine good transfer speeds over
it it's just occasionally that's very annoying that it would disconnect reconnect and if you do
run games off an external drive well that's going to cause some big issues it's just one thing I
wanted to point out just a a minor little niggle that I have with it I do find that to be a little
bit annoying so that uh type c Port does support power delivery I've tested it it works fine
the PC hasn't cut out uh with 100 watt power delivery power supply that I've been using it's
been fine it it didn't cut out at all so that's a good sign and what about 4K 120 HZ yes working
with again that USB 4 Port so that's good and The Thermals being monitoring them they are good fan
noise well you'll see it got up to 90° basically here that's the hottest it's gotten so far that's
bit of gaming stress tests benchmarks all of that uh the fan noise is constant sadly it doesn't
completely drop off 100% so the fan curve they have set is just normally always on maybe at the
start when you turn on the mini PC you'll notice it to to be very quiet but as soon as it just gets
a little bit of warmth in there it doesn't tend to go away of notice so the fan is always on and when
you start to stress it out you do hear that fan uh it's not super offensive but I'll give you a
sample of it now I do find it slightly annoying I wish it was a little bit quieter but The Thermals
are good it's not thermal throttling uh I just wish that uh it could be controlled a little bit
better we could manually adjust that to through the bias would be good to tweak it but here's that
sample worst case scenario here with a stress test gaming so there we go the K8 is a very good Mini
PC good fan noise good SSD speeds great options that you have wifi6 e been tested out works great
it could have better fan noise the USB 4.0 Port sometimes disconnects and reconnects which is a
little annoying but it has been stable it hasn't powered off and even over power delivery type c
no issues with it either but I would probably go for one of the previous gen 7000 series because
amd's just simply rebadged this chip really and added the mpu it is truly disappointing at least
Intel has a new integrated Graphics they're doing something slightly different they've got the
arc integrated Graphics now putting pressure on AMD great to see this competition head-to-head
it's great for the end consumer but this year is going to be very bad for consumers especially if
you're looking at AMD mini PCS because now we're going to have 30 50 of these products probably
mini PCS and gaming handheld consoles all with basically the same chip but rebadged as the 8000
series and that's not something I really want to cover I don't want to be going over those again
and again and every single Mini PC is the best yet the most amazing yet and um it just becomes
an absolute La tiring and that brings me on to another note that uh many PC reviews from me
will probably be a little bit scarce in 2024 I'm going to move away from them a little bit
and there something's really interesting for me because what's happening as well and not g MK
Tech either by the way but a few of the companies out there that are the big Mini PC producers
uh they intentionally are delaying review units for me so they have other types of channels that
cover them first types of channels that you may know of they're very popular and and I don't have
anything against them but they're very different style of review that's 100% positive never mention
anything bad and everything it's amazing kind of reviews which aren't reviews if you ask me anyway
and I think those companies don't like my style because I might say hey the fan noise is bad hey
the typy port has issues and they don't really want that to be mentioned they don't want that to
be shown they don't want fan noise samples which uh I do that's my style so just to warn you I
will probably have less many reviews and it's looking like it's going to be a boring year unless
those Intel mini PCS with the new art Graphics are simply outstanding and a lot better than what AMD
is offering with their rebadged 8,000 Series so thank you so much for watching this review and I
hope to see you back on the channel bye for now
