The GTR 7 is Amazing! But mine broke...

up next we have something that caught my eye that's very special from b-link the GTR series this is a 7000 series mobile processor and it's in a Mini PC in my case a dark green one 32 gigabytes of memory one terabyte of storage Wi-Fi six 2.5 gigabit Lan this is 120 watts what can you do with 120 watt power budget well let's take a look [Music] 120 watt power budget you say 7000 series mobile processor you say things have been strange because like in the market with the macro economic conditions I guess and then laptops that are based around 6000 series it seems like just yesterday we had 6 000 series mobile processors from AMD and now we have 7000 series mobile processors from AMD and this is you know ryzen 7 class processors not even ryzen 9 but this is the 7840 HS H meaning Zoom so this is the gtr7 from b-link and yes they've gotten Fancy with their boxes and for a Mini PC this is pretty weighty very heavy all right let's take it apart foreign no it literally it it says hello in the Box I mean hello basic operation and after service okay okay ooh modular Ram okay look at that a ribbon good Lord that's a brick of a Mini PC they put the stickers on the bottom for ryzen 7 and Radeon graphics that's nice I I approve I might have overdone it a little bit with the GTR branding but I think they're proud of what they've done here there's also a power button combination fingerprint sensor in the top so you've got some security here that's a little bit of a premium feature it's basically a laptop not in a laptop form factor I've also got two mounting screws here which will help you mount this to your Visa mounting bracket dual Lan at the rear oh enthusiasts are going to really like that four USB type A ports at the rear HDMI and full size DisplayPort two USB type-c and a combination headphone microphone at the front and rear at the front we've got a USB type a and a USB type-c kind of a big clear CMOS button was pretty easy to hit that I think I might have preferred to have clear CMOS at the rear I also can't help but notice that the rear is entirely dominated by heatsink exhaust oh there's more Hello on the back congratulations you get our latest product we adjust the maximum TDP from the of the 7840 HS to from 54 watts to 65 Watts b-link advanced technology belongs to you yes so they're telling you that the profile processor configuration is 65 Watts now technically this is not an overclock because AMD does actually support these higher DDP features of their processors it's just that usually you don't see 65 watts in a laptop Leisure team blue right uh no seriously though I mean you can turbo that high but usually it doesn't it's diminishing returns but in this form factor it's basically a mini desktop computer okay maybe it makes sense also in the Box you get a large 120 watt power brick let's get this weird funky connector so don't lose this power brick you're never going to be able to replace the power brick look at a really short HDMI cable a longer HDMI cable and a Visa mounting adapter so you screw this into the the b-link machine and then on the other side is your 75 or 110 millimeter mounting holes so that you can mount it to the back of your monitor where the Visa Mount normally is the feature that we've seen before [Applause] now you may be wondering well if they've tuned the processor to be 65 Watts what's the other 65 Watts for power delivery Lan dual m.2 yeah you could run range 0 or Raid 1 m.2 with this so you can get this is kind of getting into quasi workstation territory although without a dedicated GPU or a separate GPU processing chip plus all the USB plus attack C plus everything else 120 watts makes sense definitely a weird little magnetic connector thing you can definitely hear the fan one's probably doing the initial ddr5 training before we get super deep into the Nitty Gritty let's do a tear down and see what we're working with I always love what b-link is doing with their their builds because it's a nice heavy metal construction there's no plastic here I mean the vent the Breather the side panels the sort of built-in dust filter it's going to accumulate dust on the top so you have to dust it so that it's got breathability oh boy a lot of fun things to watch about the design when you take the bottom off you're greeted by this gray plastic shroud with a fan and a heat sink the heatsink is designed to cover the controller part of your SSD see a lot of people really they don't fully understand demand part of your SSD doesn't really care about the heat I mean it does a little bit but mostly nand actually works better when it's running a little hot it's the controller that will throttle when it starts getting north of you know 70 80 90 105 C depending on what the controller is equipped in our in our gtr7 is a crucial it's a p3p so that's sort of the commodity value pcie Gen4 qlc flash drive doesn't get particularly hot unfortunately it exposes an incorrect assumption that b-link made when they designed the gray plastic thing and I think they're probably going to end up having to revise the gray plastic thing a little bit and that is the heatsink doesn't actually make contact with the controller you see in this era of Gen 5 ssds a lot of the Gen 5 designs move the controller to the middle of the SSD instead of right on the edge the reason it was located originally right on the edge was because of signal Integrity you didn't really have to have redrivers you didn't have to have a lot of complicated signal Integrity circuitry inside the microcontroller itself it could just physically be close to the m.2 slot and you can be assured that it would link up with those fancy newfangled pcie 4 gen speeds because everybody struggled with pcie 4 speeds on the motherboards and connectors and everything else in the beginning in 2023 free pcie Gen 4 speeds aren't really much of a problem because we moved on to pcie5 and six in some cases I mean at the bleeding edge a lot of these connectors are being qualified for pcie E6 so the controller moves to the middle of the SSD unfortunately and you can see this in the pink thermal pads that are connected to the heatsink here in our b-link the controller doesn't actually touch the heatsink the controller is just sort of floating there now this turns out not to be fatal for two reasons one our crucial p3p doesn't run all that hot to begin with it doesn't even really need very much airflow and two there is a ton of airflow from the fan that is directly over top of the controller so as design flaws go this is pretty benign other than that there's actually a lot to be excited about under here first the power connector it's replaceable it's modular so that's good at least second thing the ddr5 is modular and user replaceable I've got 32 gigabytes of crucial 5600 in here but 64 gigabytes is entirely possible in this configuration also dual m.2 yeah dual 2280 the BIOS on this thing is fully unlocked we'll talk more about that in a minute you can run nvme Raid 0 or Raid 1 for mirroring which is a really nice setup in this configuration if you want to be able to do 16 gigabytes per second in this platform it's a little bit of a challenge but you can't get it done I mean it's got the cooling and depending on what SSD you put in there the controller is going to be in the right place because it's the last gen pcie4 SSD is like the Samsung 980 or the solidon p44 pro they locate that in pretty much the right spot and those ssds are going to have a read speed of about six seven eight gigabytes per second approaching eight gigabytes per second so the combined read or write speed of those yeah you can get there latency is still a little bit of an Achilles heel you know drives like optane or the Samsung 990 Pro or the even the solidon p44 pro have some of the class leading manned latencies but they still lose out to drives like optane in the end also because this is a fully unlocked bios booting from the network is entirely possible these are doable Intel i225v on our otherwise entirely AMD systems dual two and a half gig mix on this tiny little Fusion platform with network booting you can even run a ram disk that's fully unlocked in the Bios in fact all of the OEM options as if this system were going to be embedded are there if you wanted to run embedded DisplayPort and a whole bunch of other options now physically those connectors aren't present on the motherboard but I'm just telling you that because I'm saying that b-link hasn't hidden anything away all of the options are there and yes even the 65 watt setting out of the box if you encounter any issues with your b-ling machine I suggest going to that menu in the Bios and dialing it down from the 65000 if you clear the CMOS I did check it does reset everything back to the 65 watt default but sometimes if you run into stability issues or other issues you can maybe want to dial that back just a little bit to like 54 Watts just to be sure that the stability issue that you're encountering doesn't come from that I'm thinking about Linux and alternative use cases here so out of the box basically it should be okay if you get graphical glitches or other problems like that from your B language you first booted up almost always this is just a ddr5 training problem or temperature swings or it got jostled in shipping or something like that pop the bottom off pop the gray thing off it's three screws plus the four screws for the cover and switch around Which slot your dims are in worst case scenario try taking a Q-tip and a little bit of isopropyl alcohol to clean the edges if you still don't have a stable system and you get graphical glitches probably a hardware issue and you probably want to ask for a replacement or send it in for warranty service the graphical glitches come from the fact that your Radeon 780m that's built into the b-link is using that ddr5 memory for its video memory and timing and software and things can be a little bit off and then you end up with instability and graphical glitches and the thing crashes so just something to keep in mind something to keep an eye on let's get into the benchmarks before we do the off label uses because oh boy there's a lot benchmarking this thing was a lot of fun usually I like to you know reset everything go back to stock drivers default drivers latest drivers wh ql drivers so this is a Radeon 7 ADM it's bleeding hot it's right off the presses it's uh not available in drivers if you go to amd's website and you look for the 780 it's not really there if you look for the ryzen 7 7850 it's not there but there's a ryzen 9 78.45 it's weird I guess when it launched there was but that was a different CPU this is rdna3 but again it's all in one package so it's still an APU don't expect the same levels of performance that you get from you know having a discrete GPU in fact that if we could just ramble in a tangent for a second the single multi-thread performance of this is going to be breathtaking and we'll get to that don't worry but it's not the same as a discrete GPU or even another chip in there somewhere that is acting as a GPU there are other many PCs For example that Implement you know the Radeon 6600m which is a dedicated GPU piece of silicon so Inside the Box there's a CPU and there's a GPU and still within that 120 watt power budget that probably won't be that way in the future in the not too distant future because the onboard GPU is going to be capable enough that no one will really want to add another chip to do Graphics processing I mean why why two when one will do and that's kind of what we're starting to see here with the 7000 series processors it's not really far off single and multi-thread for eight cores performance that you would get from a desktop class processor the place where it's lagging behind a little bit is in the GPU but it feels wrong to say that it's lagging behind because it's actually class leading in terms of Apu performance the 780m is no slouch it's just that if I had a choice of a 6000 series embedded processor plus a 6600m embedded GPU in a small form factor machine I would probably take that especially if I had an eye toward gaming versus the Apu route but mostly I was interested in productivity and eight cores and the horsepower that gives me maybe a developer workstation with some light Esports gaming then the 780m is going to do it for me I mean we can get 1080p performance especially if you use fsr2 but let's take a look at the benchmarks and break it down a little bit more ddr5 5600 out of the box with latency of 91 nanoseconds at least according to Ada 64 which is not the most perfect program if we're being honest for this it's not bad for out of the box defaults but it does leave a lot of room for tuning it is sort of bog standard crucial memory though so ah it's fine for something in this form factor again a Radeon 780m really does benefit from the higher memory clocks and everything else but you can introduce a little bit of instability because it's using the system memory as video memory that's why that is single core and multi-core scores in geekbench of course are breathtaking over 2500 points for single core and almost 10 000 points for multi-core keep in mind this is only an eight core part and we're still in our tiny tiny power envelope window looking at this on the kilowatt we're barely over 70 Watts 75 Watts something like that most of the time it can burst a little bit higher but it backs off pretty quickly so 120 watt power brick here probably Overkill but that does give you a lot of room on the USB type c ports on the back as well as the USB type A ports which seem to be good for up to 27 Watts give or take just doing some informal testing so nice all while I'm doing this our Hardware info 64 results and our Benchmark results show 70 to 85 degrees C at most which is very impressive for this cooling solution good job b-link the fingerprint sensor is an edge Tech egis Tec fingerprint sensor which is pretty well known to the Linux Community but support can be a little hit and miss depending on your distro I experimented with it a little bit and it seemed like it enrolled my fingerprint okay and I'm not sure if it was working because I'd also enrolled my fingerprint on the Windows side or the Linux side I really think if you're going to count on the fingerprint sensor to work you probably should hit me up in the forums and let's go from there because those kinds of Biometrics on Linux a little sketchy now of course on Windows fingerprint sensor Windows hello all that worked perfectly well I heard q and LS are equal what's he doing to it now the b-link GTR is a unique device for b-link as well as the form factor and everything else I mean don't forget this part was built for a laptop but it's also unique in the market dual m.2 dual 2.5 gigabit nics that are actually reputable and good chipset it's a really powerful system you might have noticed a couple of times especially around 14 minutes into the video that I had a weird glitch well it turns out mine died developed a mysterious issue and uh it died [Music] my unit was pre-production and it died I'm not really sure why it developed an issue but getting a replacement not really a big deal if that happens to you so I don't think it will though I think it's pretty rare and these things are tested pretty well this almost made it through all of the Windows setup and it didn't die until I uh did a lot of burn-in testing on it and for the test results I mean for the benchmarking and everything else that I got through it's a pretty solid system it just died fairly quickly so if you pick up one of these and something like that happens to you reach out and let me know what your support experiences are this is a fire breathing powerful little machine I'm very very impressed with it and the fact that mine died doesn't really detract in my mind from the overall platform because it is well engineered I mean it's a it's a vapor chamber I got to do a tear down maybe we can do a a repair or something in a level one diagnostic video I don't know but still even you know stuff like that happens I'm gonna take it in stride and I'm sure this isn't the last that we're going to see of the GTR from b-link I'm one of those level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 45,676

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

Id: yrTqoLlx9Fc

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/JohnLietzke]

I got my GTR7 Pro last week, thus far it has been running great at 85 watts.

The biggest issue is the RAM and NVMe cooling. Beelink is sending out new bottom panels to existing owners with ventilation holes near the fan, new units will include the new bottom panel. They had a few reports of the RAM overheating.

Don't know if the RAM over heating was a systemic problem that damaged other components. Just to be on the safe side I run an overlay when gaming that shows all the thermals.

[u/TheGreatPiata]

Good! I'm happy to finally see a youtuber do their due deligence on a miniPC instead of "we ran 15 games with flawless performance and had no issues" on a PC that regularly overheated and crashed.

[u/NutzPup]

Having a Chinese mini pc blue screen is pretty much par for the course from what I see. There's nothing amazing about that.

[u/Fragrant_Cancel8519]

want to buy one now i am afraid it will die randomly after the return window is up...