This one caught my eye back when the Anniversary Aliexpress sale was on, I order one for $328 with DHL shipping. The spec on paper is great, Core i5 8350U (I was expecting the 8250U), NVMe SSD support, two RAM slots DDR4 up to 2400Mhz. And of course, HDMI 2.0, Gigabit LAN, DisplayPort out and even a type-C port. And the form factor is tiny, even smaller than the Intel Gemini Lake NUC’s I’ve reviewed. The seller took 3-4 weeks to send it out as I wanted the taller version with a 2.5″ drive bay, after been lied to with fake tracking numbers DHL customs hold up lies, the seller finally admitted they didn’t have it in stock yet. I should have canceled due to their lies. Instead told them to ship the short version to me as it looked too interesting to pass up! Below is my unboxing hands-on preview of this mini PC.
Great speed at short bursts, video editing and demanding tasks it runs into current limiting, something I’ve not seen before. So the max turbos on 4 cores will throttle to 2.6Ghz, the seller never mentioned anything about this of course. Maybe to hold off thermals or save the motherboard either way not too happy about it. But still, for the size, this is one fast little PC!
The seller is here if you’re interested. But just be aware they could be super slow to ship it and might just give you a fake tracking number at first to stop the order from auto-canceling.
Bandroid
Any fanless alternative with similar specs?
Samuel
this is a 15W quad core core i5 cpu, base frequency 1.7 ghz , single core turbo is 3.6 ghz.
quad core max turbo at 2.6 ghz sounds just about right to me, did you notice faster performance from reviews/testings of other device with this processor?
Chris G
Yes, I did, it should be able to hold higher if you increase the power limits (3.4Ghz on all 4 on the Mi Notebook Pro 8250U). But it will not, minor let down but no a deal breaker. Overall it’s super fast for the size.
Sean Taylor
Can you use a bigger power supply?
filn
The M920 Lenovo miniPC looks very interesting. With Thunderbolt 3 eGPU support:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkCentre-M920-and-M720-Tiny-are-the-first-one-liter-PCs-with-PCI-E-expansion.302936.0.html
Chris G
They look good. Would be better than this mini pc of course twice the price!
Olivier Barthelemy
Oh, I’ve been blocked ? What did I do ?
Chris G
No I haven’t blocked anyone on Twitter apart from spammers. What is the problem?
Olivier Barthelemy
Well, I’m blocked. I’ve looked in my history in case my account got taken over by spammers: nothing recently (it happened once in 2014 but I got the account back). And I barely ever tweet, let alone aggressive stuff.
I put a couple of pics (block screen, recent history, “following” screen) there: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wTf9hIw9UOb3H4YW1mjQceRGhuxKuFXO?usp=sharing
Hopefully that’ll be enough for you to unblock me, I only follow 9 peeps to start with ;-p
Olivier Barthelemy
Unrelated, but what’s up with your Twitter ? Have you disappeared from there ?