 For the longest time Intel reigned supreme all the way from the highest power workstation and gaming rigs to the tiny power sipping chips that you'd find in an ultra portable laptop. Fortunately for consumers, AMD got their crap together a couple of years ago bringing the world Ryzen, a return to at least competitiveness on the consumer desktop and even the high-end workstation. But one area where Intel was on top, that is until very very recently, was super small PCs with their Nook or Next unit of computing lineup, which possibly changes... I can't get my hand on this today. This is what appears to be one of the very first AMD Ryzen based Nooks. It's tiny, it's light, and I have very high expectations. Just like you have very high expectations of my segues to our sponsors. Like Vessi. Vessi footwear makes comfortable shoes that are light and waterproof. Their new weekend shoe can be worn any day, anywhere, anytime, even on the weekend. Reserve yours today for $5 at VessiFootwear.com slash LinusTechTips. Mini's forums goal for the DMAF5 on Indiegogo was like... What a weird number, like $13,500 or something like that. They ended up raising over 400 grand. So why don't we do a quick unboxing and have a look at what we get inside. So we've got a VESA compatible mount, so you can pop one of these on the back of your monitor. If you want like an AIO look to your setup, we've got... Wow, really? Apparently it includes what appears to be a little Bluetooth keyboard. So the receiver just tucks into the back, you plug that puppy in. If you wanted to use this as like a media PC, for example, this would be great. I have something very similar at home. It appears that there's left and right click on here. Is this an air mouse too? I'm not sure, but it only comes... It only came for like the early backers. Oh, only the early backers get this? Actually, I'm jazzed to try this because mine is super bulky. It's one from Sodeco and I haven't been able to find an alternative to it yet. You also get a power brick, HDMI cable. That is a really short HDMI cable. That is a pinner HDMI cable. I mean, I guess it's good enough to go from a VESA mount to the bottom of the monitor, but that's about it, ladies and gentlemen. You get an equally pinner display port cable. I'm bringing back pinner, you know that, right? It's just because you're a pinner. Hey, there's no shame in being pinner. You've also got a USB type A to micro B charging cable for that included keyboard. I kind of inadvertently showed you guys how easy it is to get access to the internals, but let's take a tour of the outside first. On the front, we've got our power button, we've got a headphone jack, two type A USB 3s. Now this one, according to the Indiegogo page anyway, is 10 gig and this one's 5 gig, but this one provides power even when it's sleeping, but it used to be color-coded yellow like those normally are. Now it's not, so I don't really know what the deal is with that. We've got a type C running at 10 gig and then nothing on this side, nothing on this side. I keep accidentally popping that top off. And then over on the back, we've got a couple more 10 gigabit per second USB 3s, display port, HDMI, dual gigabit LAN, and power in. Okay, so that gives us a total of one, two, actually, apparently this front USB type C can be used as a display output. So that's three outputs. And because it's got dual LAN ports, one of the use cases that they advertise for it is actually as like a PF sense box. Although personally, I think I'd feel kind of limited by something like this. Anyway, let's formally open it up now. You've got two clicky doodads right here and you just pop it off like that. That reveals, looks like we've got a SATA drive connector right here. It's not immediately apparent to me exactly where that's gonna mount to. To the bottom of the lid. Two sodium memory slots for dual channel DDR4 as well as an M.2 slot over here. Now what I can't immediately see is the cooling solution and socket for the CPU, or rather I should just say the BGA solder point to the CPU. Reveal your secret. Oh, no, I didn't quite have it removed there. Secrets! No, plugged in is probably not best. Reveal them! Why is this not coming off? Oh, I see. So there's probably some clips or something for this back part here. Whoop. Oh! Ah! Hey, wow, that was awesome. Knock that screw right into the parts tray. That's some advanced dropping technique right there. Oh my goodness. Um, why? Is this screwed in from the other side? Why? Maybe I overcomplicated things for myself. You know what? I bet I didn't see these screws because there was memory in the way. There they are. Way to go, Linus. See? The whole thing would have just popped off like that. I blame Jake. This seems to be a VRM heatsink of some sort. So let's go ahead and pop that puppy off. There we go. Oh, interesting. Well, I mangled the bejesus out of that thermal pad, so that's cool. But yes, that is in fact what that was for, so that's good. And you know what? Let's just pop the M.2 out. Who needs this thing to ever boot up again anyway, right? Ba-dump. We do. And ba-dump. OK. Yeah, we haven't really done the video yet, so that's challenging. Wow, why does it have these little rubbers on the M.2 stick here? I don't like rubbers on my stick. Does anyone? Don't appreciate it. Exactly. Well, they have an operation for that. Let's give you the rundown here. It's available in two configurations with 256 gigs of storage and 8 gigs of RAM. For 429, that's early bird pricing, though, so we have no idea how that's going to shake out to regular pricing or double that for, I think it's, yeah, 529. Now we do have some concerns. This is a SATA drive, so it's M.2, but you can tell by the keying that that's a SATA M.2, not an NVMe drive. They have gotten that feedback, though, and apparently the newer ones are going to be NVMe. As for RAM, unfortunately, the 8-gig configuration ships with a single stick, so you're not running in dual channel, which means you kind of have to go with the higher end one if you want the full performance. Speaking of full performance, as we all know, Ryzen benefits from higher memory speed in a big way. Unfortunately, not only is this 2400 megahertz RAM, but we actually tried installing some higher speed stuff that we had lying around at the office, and the BIOS seemed to still be locked to 2400 megahertz, so we'll see how that works out for us when we do our performance testing later. Oh, nice. So we got AX Wi-Fi, so that's Wi-Fi 6 in there. That's pretty sweet. Hey, they took the gamer's nexus approach to thermal compound. You can't have too much, so don't even try. I have no idea which screws go where anymore. This is quite disassembled. Now we get our first look at the Ryzen 5 3550H APU that's installed in the system. Now, don't let AMD's confusing naming scheme mislead you here. Even though this is a 3000 series Ryzen, it is not Zen 2. It is unfortunately Zen+. Don't feel bad, though, if you didn't know that right off the hop. I, too, was bamboozled. The fact that I thought this was Zen 2 was one of the main reasons that I was so excited to check this thing out. So it's not 7 nanometer, it's 12 nanometer. Everything is PCI Express Gen 3 and all of that good stuff. With that said, this is still an utterly unique product and one that I really wanted to look at just because it's finally an AMD alternative to Intel's Nook lineup. Now we can go ahead and put this puppy back together. With it mostly reassembled, all that remains is to pop in some dual channel memory so that we're giving it its best chance possible, as well as throw in some more storage so that we've got room for all of our games about warfare that's very modern and all that kind of good stuff. So we'll pop that in there. Now, one of the things you might have noticed about that cooling solution as we were looking at it was that it's pretty darn robust. By default, AMD specs this particular CPU for 15 watts TDP, but it can be configured to up to 35 and that is apparently the route that Mini's forum has gone. Now we're still not expecting it to compete with a Zen 2 based CPU and Asus actually has some sort of Nook competitors based on Zen 2 that are probably going to beat the stuffing out of this thing, but I want to give it a shot anyway, just because, hey, first out of the gate, all right? Got our screen capture working, which involved poking around in Radeon software a little bit, but yes, Radeon software. That's right, my friends, it's a Nook-a-like. Hey, can we call them that? Nook-a-likes? That's not bad. That's not bad. It's a Nook-a-like running Radeon graphics. Now Intel actually did a Nook with AMD graphics in it a while back, but this is different and unfortunately not as powerful. These are Vega 8 graphics and they're clocked at around 1200 megahertz and our expectation is basically that we should get a pretty solid experience in e-sports titles, but beyond that, probably not that amazing. While performance, as we expect it, is not jaw-dropping or anything, to their credit, it's not loud. That's very reasonable for a mini PC and check this out, the whole strategy of more than doubling the suggested TDP from AMD seems to be working out pretty good. 3.36 gigahertz at 100% load across all cores. 1667 points puts us right in range of a mobile Skylake Core i7, so that's pretty respectable, but well behind even a quad-core desktop CPU from that generation. A little unfortunate, but maybe we'll make up some ground in, let's say, Rocket League. I mean, obviously this is not a gaming-oriented product, but it's got Radeon graphics compared to Intel on board, so. 1080 texture detail, high performance, world detail, high quality, most stuff turned on, but not everything. Okay, sure, yeah. Let's see, let's give it a shot, right? Okay, so we're getting anywhere from around 30 to 40 FPS, not bad. So like game console territory. Yeah, look at that. Oh yeah. I mean, obviously it's not amazing, but like if you showed me this like, you know, 10 years ago, I'd have been like, of course, just because it's quiet doesn't necessarily mean that the thermal performance is good, so I want to take a look at what our CPU temps are like when we're hitting it hard. Okay, that's respectable. 80 degrees, I mean, obviously it's not like my favorite thing in the world to have a CPU running at 80 degrees, but it's not like you're water cooling the thing in here, and given how quiet it is, not bad. Not bad, minis for them. Is that how you're supposed to pronounce it? Minis, I don't know. I don't even know. If it can play Valorant, I'll be pretty happy with that. Okay. Looks like it's playing Valorant to me at 4K. Wait, what? Shut up. Client FPS, here we go, graph. Show both, show both. All right, both, why not both? Okay, what are we looking? What? Client FPS, 50 to 60 FPS, Valorant 4K. Hold on, get over here, Brandon. We're gonna have to do a quick check. We're gonna have to do a quick check here for alternate computers plugged into the thing. Nope, that's it. That's pretty good for onboard graphics. I mean, the settings are probably pretty, oh, is there a render resolution maybe? Let me check, let me check. Even if the settings are low, people play esports games at low settings to get better performance. Okay, yeah, it's pretty low. It's pretty low. That's what most people use anyways. Let me just see if maybe it's like rendering at 50% res or what, no, it doesn't seem to be. It doesn't seem to be. Okay, that's pretty cool. What was this thing, 500 bucks? Sure. Now for fun, let's try some media encoding. Now, one of the ways we could do this is fire up Handbrake or FFMPEG, but the reality of it is most people aren't doing that. So let's take something else most people aren't doing, running a Plex server at home, and let's put it through the paces there. So the idea behind Plex is you rip your favorite Blu-rays or DVDs or whatever the case may be, you throw them onto a NAS or a little box like this, and then from anywhere, whether it's on a computer, on your TV, or on a phone, you can access it kind of like your own little personal Netflix. So Jake actually has his account signed in here. He's firing up his phone and let's see how hard this puppy's getting hit. So Plex transcoder is asking for about 22% on video and about 20% on audio. It's running nice and quiet. It should be playing. And what is this? This 4K? It's original quality 4K. So the only thing that's transcoding is audio. That's fantastic. It's actually kind of crazy how heavy audio is, hey? Like I didn't realize until I started running Plex how video is like no big deal in some cases. In this case, it's because the 4K video stream is actually just directly streaming because Jake's phone has built-in decoding for that, but it's the audio that you actually have trouble with in some cases. So this is freaking awesome. Oh, no way. Oh, it looks terrible. Something is not happy. That's horrendous. Come on, give it a sec. Oh, there we go. It's back to 100%. There's no way. No, you're done. You're out. All right. It can't handle a 4K. Oh, well. Oh, it's dying. Time for a 1080p transcode test. 4K was ridiculous. It's playing. It hasn't buffered. It might be building up a buffer. And then maybe it'll relax a bit. I don't know. Yeah, there it is. It's chilling out a little bit now. Well, that's fantastic. So it's enough to do probably one 1080p transcode. And then maybe one 720 or something like that, but I wouldn't count on it. Still, for an all-rounder little machine, I'm impressed as heck by this thing. Of course, I'd be more impressed if it was Zen 2, but fortunately, we're going to be checking out something like that very soon. Make sure you guys are subscribed because Asus has some absolutely killer nookalikes coming that are going to be Zen 2 based. Today's video was brought to you by Drop.com. The Massdrop X Sennheiser OpenBack HD58X Jubilee headphones are the featured product today. And why not? They're tuned by the one and only Axel Grell of Sennheiser and tweaked by Massdrop based on feedback from their community. They feature new 150 ohm drivers and a colorway inspired by the HD580. They're clear and fast with a dynamic sound profile. They've got a glossy black headband, elliptical ear cups that are super comfortable with replaceable soft velour ear pads and a detachable six-foot cable. Why wait? Check them out now at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this one though, and you're looking for some more mini PC content, maybe check out our Ghost Canyon Nook review. It's in a very different price bracket, but it's also in a very different performance bracket because you can put a full-sized graphics card in the thing.