- If it wasn't already obvious, the EliteMini H31G from
Minisforum is freaking tiny. It's six by six by three inches, which is bigger than
the last Minisforum PC that we checked out, but it
also packs a lot more punch. This tiny thing actually has a GTX 1050Ti, an Intel ninth gen six core CPU, a sweet custom motherboard,
and a really interesting cooling configuration to keep
it all operating smoothly. You know what else is smooth? My segues to sponsors like GlassWire. Are you having poor
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get it as small as possible is ah yes, the external supply brick, but whether or not that
matters to you is sort of your personal preference. We've got an included fan filter, power cord, DisplayPort
to mini DisplayPort? Oh, because it has mini DisplayPort, HTMI cable, and of course,
an included vesa mount if you wanna mount the thing
to the back of your monitor. Now, the top tier configuration with an Intel Core
i7-9700F, 16 gigs of RAM, and 512 gigs at NVMe
storage goes for 879 US. But don't let that scare you off. The bare-bones version, meaning
that you provide your own CPU, RAM, and SSE, goes for just 399, making it actually a great
starter pack if you want a small form factor PC
and you don't wanna worry about compatibility. It's also a great value
considering that some of the really cool small
form factor cases out there cost as much as a bare bones H31G. Of course, though,
you're gonna have limited upgrade potential on something
like this compared to a case that uses more standardized parts. Let's have a look at what's inside. The first thing we find on the inside is a two and a half inch drive sled. This is great if you don't
wanna spend the extra for an NVMe SSD, 'cause the performance doesn't matter to you. Underneath that, we've got the back plate for the CPU socket, an M.2 slot, which has a 256 gig NVMe
drive in it in our config. 16 gigs of RAM, and then
of course built-in wifi and Bluetooth with a, it
looks like an Intel card. Okay, so you got four
USB 3s, gigabit ethernet, mini DisplayPort, HDMI,
and of course power in. You got a micro SD slot
over here, line in, mic in, as well as headphones out, and then really? A headphone-microphone combo
Jack over on this side. On the top, we've got a good
look at what appears to be two small intake fans,
and then at the back, a whole lot of heat sink. Let's dig deeper. Hey, wait a minute. Is that another M.2? Oh, sick! I didn't even notice that! They got a little 40
mil M.2 over here, nice! This one is keyed for SATA only, and it can only take a 40 millimeter M.2, but that means you can put up
to three drives in this thing. That's a lot more than a Mac mini. All right, this is pretty sweet. So instead of having two
separate cooling elements for like CPU and GPU, there's a single one that sits right down
the middle between them. So the graphics board is right here and then the motherboard
is here with the CPU on it, and then they both actually
feed into the same cooler. This is super cool. Speaking of Apple, we've
actually seen Apple take a similar approach in
the past to great effect where you have one heat-generating
element on one side, another on the other side,
and then a single cooler that sits in between them
so they can share it. Now it's not quite the
same 'cause we're using heat pipes here, but
let me just pop this off and I'll show you what I mean. There we go. You know, I can't deny it. I get pretty jazzed when I see
shiny heat pipes like that. Naturally we did our thermal
tests before disassembling any of the units and this
solution kept our CPU at anywhere from 75 to
80 degrees in blender, albeit with the fans running
a bit louder than we'd like, and it was especially
noticeable due to the pitch. I'd love to see a revised
version of this in the future, which they have said is coming, with maybe fewer but larger fans. That's a 1050-Ti, ladies and gentlemen. VRM, there's your Ram,
and there's your GPU. Now that is some beefy cooling
for a small form factor. Oh, I love this! They've even put the exhaust right here at the back of the unit in direct contact with the VRMs for the CPU. So all the important
heat-generating components are being actively cooled here. That's awesome! 1151 sock in here, so you can
put in whatever CPU you want, well within reason, as
long as it's a 65 watt one. So we've got a Core i5-9500F. This is a six core with no
hyper-threading and a base clock of three gigahertz and a boost of 4.4. That should be pretty darn decent for a little compact gaming machine, especially given that
our unit as configured comes in at just 669. Nice. You know, it's not even
that bad, actually, all things considered. This is a fair amount of expandability and pretty easy access for the size. I mean, that was only like a dozen screws and we took it completely apart. Bigger would obviously give us more room. By the way guys, get subscribed
because we've got a small form factor build that's
probably more like this big that we're gonna cram a 3090 into, so you're not gonna want to miss that. Should we fire it up? All right, let's do it. We changed around our desk
here and while you'd think having everything plugged
in back here would be better than having it like right
here where you're trying to use it, it's really ugly, so we came up with this solution. Oops. Oh crap, I just pulled the power plug. (laughter) - [Brandon] That was perfect! - Okay, well this is a perfect
opportunity to talk about how small is small. So, it's considerably bigger
than the last Minisforum, but well, hey, this thing
didn't have discrete GPU, but it's considerably smaller
than an AsRock DeskMini, although this has a more powerful GPU. So that gives you like
a sense of the scale. It's quite a bit smaller than a Mac Mini. Windows 10 is included in the
non-bare bones configurations and then naturally, because
we've got a proper discreet GPU in this thing, we're
gonna go ahead and change our monitor over to
1440p, 144 Hz mode, and boom, we're good to go. This is not a male mini
DP to female full-size DP like I expected. This is a little tiny cable, I guess it would be fine if
you're just vesa mounting to the back of the monitor, but this is gonna be a bit of a stretch for our configuration. Well, this is the
challenge of pre-production hardware sometimes. It looks like neither of our units has a working DisplayPort output, but we don't see any
complaints about it online, so it must just be a quirk
of these pre-production ones. Guess we're stuck with HTMI. One quirk that's already
thrown me for a loop a couple of times is that
the USB ports are upside down compared to the conventional orientation, so if they could fix that on
future ones, that'd be great. And my Mac mini is now
here for size comparison. So you can see it's quite a
lot smaller in this dimension, but actually about double
the thickness this way. And in terms of performance,
I would actually expect better from this in, well, almost any
application other than games, assuming you've got the
new arm powered one, and also I'm expecting this
to be quite a bit louder. They market this thing as a do-all. You know, light video editing,
light CAD, light gaming, or even for use as a home theater PC, so why don't we start by doing
some light video editing? Well it's not really light. Mark bench is pretty heavy. Yeah, it's our benchmark.
- I know, I know. - Made by Mark. This is a pretty heavy
timeline with multiple 4k clips super-imposed over each other. You can see we're playing
it back in one quarter just fine, without any skipped frames. Let's try one half. Not bad. Now we don't have 10
gig networking or even two and a half gig networking, so all these assets would
have to be stored locally on the machine unless we were to use a USB to two-and-a-half gig ethernet adapter or something like that. But it does seem to be
handling it just fine with about 40% CPU usage, 60%
RAM, and about 25% on the GPU. Can we do full quality? Scrubbing's a little bit eh. Just not even close to as
good as what you'd get out of FinalCut on the Mac mini. But what you're after here is versatility and some light gaming as well, so why don't we give that a shot too? It's definitely usable,
although I'd probably drop down to a quarter resolution
for actual day-to-day use. Interestingly, we actually
can run 1444 Hz over HDMI. I had forgotten that
these GPU had HTMI 2.0, so that's great. We don't really need DisplayPort
unless we wanna run G-SYNC. It's borderline, and I think
we've actually got a bit of a crappy cable 'cause we
were getting it flickering once in a while 144
and it was fine at 120, but hey, at least you've got the option. Let's have a look at our performance here. So we're running at 1440p, 8X MSAA, so this is basically cranked. Not too shabby! We're looking at around a
hundred to 130 frames per second, which is actually good enough for a high refresh rate monitor like this one. And that's at 1440p, not 1080p. Now it's not as fast as
like a brand new mid-range graphics card, like a 1650. In fact, it's anywhere
from 20 to 30% slower, but compared to almost anything this size, that is a very compelling
e-sports gaming experience. Wait, what? Oh, I suck! Oh, terrible! I'm gonna be defeated
by bots. (mock cries) Like any gaming PC, it
doesn't make you a good gamer. Just gives you a chance to be one. In Doom Eternal, I'm not
even gonna try to run it at 1440p, but I think 1080 medium details might be doable. Let's give it a shot. Teenage me we've been
pretty stoked on this. Anywhere from like low to mid
fifties to even high seventies absolutely playable. Might even be able to
get away with high here. It is amazing to me how far
like budget gaming has come in the last few years. If gaming is your first
priority, honestly, I'd buy a console as opposed
to this, but for the size, it's really impressive. Not quiet though. And it's particularly
the pitch of the fans that makes it more noticeable. (fan blowing) Not loud, just not quiet. Interestingly, the fan
is way more annoying under a heavy CPU load than
it is under a mixed-use load like gaming. Like listen to this while
we we're on Cinebench. (fan blowing) That's something that
hopefully they could fix by tuning the fan profile on the bios, but we can only evaluate what we have, and that would be pretty obnoxious to me if I were to go ahead
and buy one of these. They offer free worldwide shipping, they've got a two-year warranty, and to answer the question
that I'm sure you guys are just chomping at the bit to ask, there is apparently a Zen
2 AMD version in the works, which would be pretty sweet, 'cause like, you know, 8 AMD
cores in this form factor? (clicks tongue) That would be pretty nice. Nice like my transitions to
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your first purchase. If you guys enjoyed this video,
why don't I throw you over to our Ryzen 5000 desktop CPU review? Yeah, it's not, you know,
necessarily directly applicable, but it might give us a look
at what we could expect from Zen 3 in a machine like this. I mean, forget 8 cores, 12 cores, and like a hyper bend mobile part? We're gonna have to wait and
see exactly what AMD does.
