This Mini, Mini PC Packs a Punch! GMKTec G5 N97 Review

hey everybody it's lony and we've got yet another Mini PC to take a look at today this one is a mini mini PC and it really surprised me by its overall performance this is the gmk tech knockbox G5 and it is powered by an Intel n97 processor and believe it or not the n97 actually performs a little better than the n100 we have been looking at inside of their G3 knck boox that is one of my favorite mini PCS at the moment so we're going to take a look at what this little computer is all about and what it can do in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that gmk Tech sent us to the Channel free of charge however no other compensation was received no one has reviewed or approved what you're about to see before it was uploaded and all the opinions you're about to hear are my own so let's get into it now and see what this little computer is all about now there are two price points on this at the time I'm recording this video for $149 you can get one of these with2 56 GB of storage if you opt for the 512 GB version it is about $200 but the specs are otherwise the same inside of the computer now as mentioned this has the n97 processor from Intel for its main CPU and Graphics all of these models have 12 GB of soldered RAM on board and it's ddr5 4800 MHz Ram so it's a little faster than some of the other n100 devices we've looked at recently the storage is upgradable on here if you flip it over and unscrew the bottom panel you can swap out the m.2 drive it is a 2242 drive so you will have to look for one of those shorter ones there as you can see and you can also uh use in addition to an MSA what looks like a PCI Express nvme Drive in there as well if you want so you do have a little bit of storage flexibility but there's only one storage slot on this meanwhile the n100 based device we've been playing with over the last couple of weeks has two storage Bays so you could have two hard drives installed this one is a little more constrained and of course you can only upgrade the storage and not the memory but still 12 gigs is enough for I think what most people might do with one of these computers now as far as ports are concerned you don't have many to choose from on here you do have two usb3 ports here in the front these all run at 5 gigabits per second each on the side here you have a SD card slot this will take cards up to 512 gigabytes in size you have a Kensington lock slot over here and then on the back you have a USB type-c port but this is for power only it doesn't work for data or video unfortunately I did test that to see if we could do more with that Port but all it does is take in power you do though get two HDMI outputs they can run at up to 4K at 60 htz and you'll see some performance examples running at 4K in a few minutes out of it it is pretty Snappy as you will see this is gigabit Ethernet many of these mini PCS have 2.5 gig ethernet but not this one so just gigabit on this one here and then you have an additional usb3 Port along with the headphone microphone Jack there is a fan on board it will get a little bit noisy but it's not too loud and you'll hear that kick on a little more frequently than some of the larger PCS that have a little more room to dissipate heat but overall the fan wasn't too distracting but it was audible when I was using more demanding software so that is the lay of the land here why don't we plug it in and see how it performs all right why don't we start off with a little web browsing here we will load up the Google Chrome browser and I should add that we are currently running the machine at 4K 60 H Herz so you can get a feel for what it might look like on a Modern Display and surprisingly it's keeping up it's not all that laggy here it feels pretty responsive if we were to go to 1080p which I can right now you might see a little bit of an increase in performance here but not all that much so I think this is actually pretty usable as a 4K workstation and if you have a monitor that runs at a lower resolution it might even do a little bit better um but here we'll visit the same website now at 1080P and it does feel a little bit quicker maybe it's rendering in a bit faster so uh you can try to figure out what resolution works best for your particular environment but overall I found this to be a very nicely performing machine for doing the basics here like web browsing a little bit earlier we also took a look at some YouTube videos and I pulled up a 4K 60 video from my channel and although we had a couple of drop frames when things first started once everything settled down it was able to play back that video perfectly at again 4K 60 htz without any further drop frames so overall for video consumption whether it be YouTube twitch or other Services I think you will have a very good experience with this little mini PC and on version 3.0 of the browser bench. org speedometer test we got a score of 10.2 and that is pretty much right within the margin of error with what we saw on the Intel n100 based G3 computer we looked at recently you can also see it's holding its own against the I3 variant of this processor too so all in very good web browsing performance now one of the things that these little computers excel at if you part the pun is getting some Microsoft Office applications up and running so why don't we load up Microsoft Word here running at 4K 60 and see how it does with a document with some graphics and text in it and as you can see here it loaded everything up very quickly I can move my head around here and the text reflows quite swiftly here and I think if you were looking to buy a bunch of computers for the office for workstations these are going to be just fine if this is mostly what you're doing you don't really need need to spend more than that these days to have an effective office machine and this will certainly get the job done here so all in a pretty nice experience even at 4K 60 htz now one thing that these mini PCS usually come with are brackets to mount the computers on the back of a display like this one this one has holes for a bracket to do that but it did not come with a Visa bracket in the box so at least as far as what I saw from my box you're not going to be able to mount this easily on the back of a display but it is a pretty cute little device to have sitting on your desk I think but now let's push this little guy a little bit harder with some games I've got a bunch to check out so let's take a look so we're going to start off here with what they call a boomer shooter this is the remaster of dark Forces a very popular Star Wars game from the 90s so this is not the original game but the remaster for modern computers and here we're running it at 1080p at the basic settings and we are getting 60 frames per second most of the time here on this little tiny Mini PC that's pretty darn good uh I think for something at this price point additionally I loaded up GTA5 this is at a 720p resolution at the absolute lowest settings inside of a building we were getting close to 60 frames per second but we got into the 40ish territory when we got into the car and into the city this game often has variable frame rates depending on what's going on in the game but I never saw it Go lower than 30 in my testing so it's actually playable now of course GTA 5 is an older game at this point but it's a very rich game that can really suck up a lot of time and you can have a lot of fun playing it natively on this computer which is pretty amazing I think I also booted up the pcsx2 emulator and played some PlayStation 2 on it running one of my favorite games here Burnout Revenge and here we were running at the default settings and getting easily 60 frames per second almost all of the time so you can get a Full Speed PS2 experience here and you might be able to squeeze a little more resolution out of the emulator too if you tweak some settings a bit more so Allin surprisingly good performance for such a small footprint and on the 3D Mark time spy benchmark test we got a score of 487 and that puts this slightly above what we've been seeing at of some of these Intel n100 base machines that's because the n97 is slightly quicker so we did pretty well on that test but if you wanted something that was more robust for gaming and modern emulation you might want to look at some ryzen based machines or the new Intel Core Ultra based machines those cost a little bit more but as you can see there on the list an older one like the belink surf 4 does dramatically outperform this little guy but I think if you were looking for something super inexpensive to play around with this might be worth considering especially for 8 and 16bit game emulation and on the 3D Mark stress test we got a passing grade of 97.9% that means that even under heavy sustained load this little computer will be able to maintain its performance you will hear the little fan going on this because it is a smaller fan than what you might get in a larger Mini PC which means it has to turn faster um but it is able to keep the computer cool enough to operate efficiently which is great to see now as far as its Windows uh version is concerned it comes with Windows 11 Pro like many of these mini PCS are coming with and that is often surprising given how much Windows 11 Pro costs in the store to purchase a license at retail and I think what these folks are doing is they are grabbing these OEM licenses and assigning them to these computers I'm not sure if it's legit or not but the activation State on this checks out and it doesn't have any issues regarding Act acation I did also run a number of virus and malware Checkers as I've been doing lately on these mini PCS and everything checks out here as well I didn't detect anything out of the ordinary on it the only thing I did notice is that when I first set it up it did not ask me for my Microsoft account it allowed me to create a local account and this behavior is something I've seen on a bunch of other mini PCS lately that also come with Windows 11 Pro licenses but of course you can attach your Microsoft account to it later all right one last thing to take a look at here and that is its Linux performance I booted up the most recent version of muntu and as you can see everything looks and feels just fine on here that includes audio Wi-Fi ethernet everything just sprung to life here and started working without issue and I found performance on par with what I experienced on the Windows side so this might be a fun project to uh play around with alternative operating systems if you want one other neat thing these things are really good for is Plex serving because these Intel processors are very well tuned for Hardware transcoding of video and just the other day we looked at the n100 based machine to see how well it could perform as a Plex server and I think this one will perform equally well the only limitations on this one is that you don't have a lot of options for internal storage expansion you'll have to attach USB drives to it but for a small quick and dirty Plex server this should do quite well along with other uh types of media serving software that might be out there and for those of you that are curious it is running with realtech networking Hardware on board that includes the ethernet and the Wi-Fi here it is only AC Wi-Fi it is not Wi-Fi 6 but it is easy enough to swap out that Wi-Fi adapter if you need to right underneath the hood there if you take that metal plate off the Wi-Fi is socketed into one of the two PCI Express slots on the top of the computer and you can put in something better if you want so overall I am quite pleased with this little computer it is a little more limiting than what you might get out of some of the larger ones that offer more storage capabilities and have more functional USB ports on board but for a very inexpensive very small device I think you'll have a lot of fun with this machine has kind of a secondary computer for playing around with Linux or even office workstations that's going to do it for this one until next time this is lon sibin thanks for watching

Channel: Lon.TV

Views: 15,392

Keywords: GMKTec G5, GMKTec, nucbox, N97, Mini PC, tiny, small, little, computer, PC, Windows 11 Pro, Windows 11, Linux, gaming, reviews, Lon Seidman, Lon Reviews Tech, Lon.TV

Id: cBM53n-aUEM

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 10 2024