 If it wasn't already obvious, the Elite Mini H31G from Mini's forum is freaking tiny. It's 6 by 6 by 3 inches, which is bigger than the last Mini's forum PC that we checked out, but it also packs a lot more punch. This tiny thing actually has a GTX 1050 Ti, an Intel 9th Gen 6-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 quality video meetings? Use GlassWire and instantly see what apps are wasting your bandwidth during your meeting and block them. Get 25% off today using offer code LINUS at the link down below. One hack from Mini's forum to get it as small as possible is... Ah, yes, the external power 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, display port to mini display port, oh, because it has mini display port, HDMI cable, and of course, an included VESA mount, if you want to 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 of 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 SSD, goes for just $399, making it actually a great starter pack if you want a small form factor PC and you don't want to 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 going to 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 2.5-inch drive sled. This is great if you don't want to spend the extra for an NVMe SSD because the performance doesn't matter to you. Underneath that, we've got the backplate 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 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with a, looks like an Intel card. Okay, so you got four USB 3s, a gigabit ethernet, mini display port, HDMI, and, of course, power in. And that, 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 because 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. There's your 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 socket 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 6-core with no hyperthreading and a base clock of 3 GHz 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, but we're going to cram a 3090 into it. So, you're not going to 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, that's really ugly. So, we came up with this solution. Oops. Oh, crap. I just pulled the power plug. So, it's perfect. Okay. Well, this is a perfect opportunity to talk about how small is small. So, it's considerably bigger than the last Mini's form, but, well, hey, this thing didn't have discrete GPU. But it's considerably smaller than an ASRock Desk Mini, 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 discrete GPU in this thing, we're going to go ahead and change our monitor over to 1440p 144Hz 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 face-mounting to the back of the monitor, but this is going to 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 HDMI. 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, uh, 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. Markbench is pretty heavy. Yeah, it's our benchmark made by Mark. This is a pretty heavy timeline with multiple 4K clips superimposed 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 2.5 gig networking, so all these assets would have to be stored locally on the machine unless we were to use a USB to 2.5 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 is a little bit... just not even close to as good as what you'd get out of Final Cut 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 144 Hz over HDMI. I had forgotten that these GPUs had HDMI 2.0, so that's great. We don't really need DisplayPort unless we want to run G-Sync. That's borderline, and I think we've actually got a bit of a crappy cable because we were getting it flickering once in a while at 144, and it's fine at 120, but hey, at least you 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 100 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 eSports gaming experience. Wait, what? Oh, I suck. Oh, terrible. I'm gonna be defeated by bots. 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. That teenage me would have been pretty stoked on this, anywhere from, like, low to mid-50s to even high 70s. Absolutely playable. I 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. 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 run Cinebench. It's like... 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 because, like, 8 AMD cores in this form factor? That would be pretty nice. Nice like my transitions to our sponsors, like Squarespace. Squarespace gives you the tools that you need to build and grow your online presence. They've got tons of templates spanning a large variety of categories, so whether you need a website for your blog or your wedding or your business, Squarespace has you covered. If you don't have a domain, you can get one quickly through Squarespace, or you can port over an existing domain that you already own. So why wait? Get started with a free 14-day trial. Just head to squarespace.com forward slash LTT, and you'll get 10% off 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, maybe 12 cores and like a hyper-binned mobile part? We're gonna have to wait and see exactly what AMD does.