Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor on bucks today we are checking out as rocks need s me a 300 it's a teeny tiny PC that finally takes advantage of aim D rising processors almost every custom designed mini PC that we've seen today uses Intel processors and while Intel CPUs are very good they aren't the best choice for this kind of system at least if you want a game or do any kind of 3d work for that aim DS rise and AP users really are unrivaled so after dozens upon dozens of Intel based B boxes and desk mini pcs asrock has finally developed an AMD am 4 socket mini PC to take advantage of those ray from rich EP use does also support those Bristol Ridge AP use but yeah you guys probably know my opinion on those that means ideally you will want to throw in a risin 322 energy or risin 5 2400 G they're pretty much your only options now there are some OEMs and whatnot but they're the two main CPUs you'll want and since their release it was about twelve months ago now I've been recommending the 22 energy as the ultimate bang for your buck option however in that time is n based quote cause lacking SMT support have started to struggle a bit in the latest games we saw it recently in almost every title the 2400 G was a good bit faster in the 2200 G but with the 2200 G previously priced 70 dollars lower a little over 40% less it was hard to pass up today though the 20/20 is just $40 cheaper and that's a 30% saving making it a bit less enticing in my opinion for $135 us the horizon 520 400 G is a cracking good processor and surely only those not in the know would buy a core i3 8100 for a hundred and fifty dollars for those of you interested I will revisit the 2400 G soon and a detailed benchmark video but for now I just want to see how it performs in the new des Mini a 300 as this really is the best AP you can put inside of this compact 1.9 liter bare-bones system so the desk Mini a 300 costs a very reasonable 150 dollars us and that investment you get a custom case this little guy here it measures 155 millimetres wide 155 millimetres deep and it is 80 millimeters tall it is capable of housing two two and a half inch storage devices they go on the underside of the motherboard here and you can fit CPU coolers as tall as forty six millimeters it does limit you somewhat but there is an optional cooler that you can get for this if you're struggling to find options but I'll talk more about that in a moment and then inside we will find actually where is a screwdriver before I start talking about the inside of the system we might as well have a look at the inside of the system that screwdriver of course is the wrong one let's try this one yeah we go we run till we know okay so what was I saying inside we have I'll just undo this here this is the front I owe a little motherboard I've obviously got the memory and the CPU cooler installed at this point because I have been testing with it but inside you will find the little a 300 M STX motherboard and this little guy measures 147 by 140 millimeters as you might expect for such a tiny motherboard it's not exactly brimming with features but you do get all the essentials the front IO includes a USB 3.1 gen2 on type C port along with a type-a port and then around the back there's an additional two USB ports a 3.1 gen one type A and a 2.0 type a onboard there's also a basic realtek audio and gigabit network solution and then there are three m2 ports now the two of these for SSDs there's one on the back side of the board you will have to physically remove the board from the case to access that one then the one on the top side of the board you can access that very easily and then above that there is a third m3 port and that is for a Wi-Fi module then finally there are two laptops style memory dim supporting up to ddr4 29:33 with Rison AP use the display outputs include a single HDMI a single DisplayPort and a legacy VGA port and it's also possible to use all three simultaneously for a triple monitor configuration now there are two optional items one is a very basic which did come with our sample and the other is an m2 Wi-Fi kit which didn't come with our sample there is a listing over on Newegg right now which doesn't include the cooler but it does come with the Intel AC 3168 Wi-Fi kit for just one hundred and fifty dollars so that really is a great option there after all you can just use the Wraith stealth cooler that came with your eyes an APU though be aware you will have to remove the fan shroud just the top cover with the AMD logo on it this reduces the coolers height by a few millimeters which is enough to fit it inside the a300 but this has no impact on cooling performance and I tested this previously using the in wind Chopin then powering the DES mini a 300 is an included 120 watt power brick it's a 19 volts 6.32 out version and there's just enough Headroom for using something like the risin 5 2400 G okay so that's the barebone what you need to bring to the table is a CPU some memory and well some form of storage for the CPU it's really either the 22 energy or 2400 G obviously we're testing with the 2400 G and yes some storage so for the storage I recommend using the m2 slot as your sort of primary boot drive and that frees up the 2 and a half inch drive bays on the back side for either some bigger SSDs or mechanical drives so for m2 storage obviously there's just endless options this isn't really a guide as to what you should use but something like the WD blue 500 gigabyte that cost just 68 dollars u.s. that's a great option nice and affordable all those the Plextor I saw the s2 G on new egg a 512 gigabyte SSD that was just $55 either of those will work well you really can't go too wrong for this kind of system you don't need some sort of really high speed SSD any of those should be more than sufficient so with SSD prices for your half terabyte drives 500 gigabyte with them well under $100 u.s. I don't think you need to bother with the 240 250 60 gigabyte models anymore but if you only want to spend like $35 then they are an option but I'll leave that to you guys to decide what stories you want and then of course once you've got your SSD in your m2 you can flip it over you have two two and a half inch drive bays here again you can populate those with larger mechanical hard drives whether they're one or two terabytes or you can put in some additional SSDs as well I suppose one or two terabyte SSDs they'd be spending a bit of money to do that but the choice is yours there are options any way to expand the storage I'll talk more about the hardware configurations towards the end of the video and some us various alternatives to this little mini PC know so we'll discuss all of that in the conclusion for now though I just want to see what kind of performance you can get from the desk mini a300 of course we have tested the risin AP use the 2020 and 2400 G quite extensively haven't done any updated testing so perhaps I'll do some more in-depth testing with the 2400 G and 2020 G in a later video for this one I just want to delve into a bit of gaming show you some actual gameplay footage so you get a good idea of what you're in for with this thing and again no application testing because none of that's really changed from my day 1 review that I did about a year ago now so if you want to know how performs in a whole heap of applications then go back and see our 20 plus minute long review covering the 20 20 G and 20 400 G in depth the only other thing I haven't talked about is memory obviously you can use whatever so did memory you would like but for testing I'm using g.skill ripjaws ddr4 21 33 CL 15 memory it's a 16 gigabyte kit the reason I've used that memory is quite simple it's very cheap it was actually the cheapest memory I could find and it worked out to be about $80 u.s. there are ddr4 3200 memory kits but they cost upwards of a hundred and thirty dollars u.s. so about what you'd spend for the 2400 G probably not we're spending that much on memory for this little build but okay you can do yourself you're wrong because it will offer a nice performance boost for that integrated vaguer 11 GPU of course you can overclock the memory and that's what I've done in this video so we've gone from 21 33 up to 29 33 of course setting the frequency to 29 33 did reduce the timings from cell 15 to cell 16 and then the following timers were 21 21 49 you could no doubt manually tune those timings for even better performance do that but I wanted to test something that was closer to the out-of-the-box experience because I'm sure not all of you guys are gonna delve into memory timings and tune those all up and then getting low latency higher frequency memory is extremely expensive I can't remember the exact prices but it was north of like $180 u.s. so yeah that means we're gonna use g.skill Ripjaws ddr4 2133 and overclock it to 2933 with lucid timings so all that other way I think it's time to see how this thing gets on first up we have apex legends and here I was forced down to the 720p resolution with the lowest possible quality settings for playable performance at times the performance was a bit deceiving though as frame rates went over 100 FPS but they would still often dip down to around half that still overall we were looking at around 60 to 70 fps and performance was very consistent for the most part bumping the resolution up to nine her P was still playable but here the frame dips were more noticeable beyond that though the game just wasn't playable moving on we have battlefield 5 and again I was forced down to the 720p resolution in search of 60fps and this is the kind of frame 8 that's really required if you hope to rack up a few kills and the multiplayer modes with the low quality preset enabled we typically saw around 60fps with dips into the 50s but overall quite a smooth and enjoyable experience certainly playable by entry level PC standards when testing potato-like gaming hardware you've always could have included csgo and for this one I was able to test that tell your pay using the higher quality visuals though it's probably not saying too much frame rates did dip down into the 40's at times but we're often up around 60 fps needless to say with a few quality tweaks maintaining over 60 FPS at all times really won't be an issue then for Far Cry new dawn I used the normal quality preset which is quite respectable though I did so at 720p here frame rates fluctuated between 35 and 45 fps there were at times quite serious frame stutters which did detract from the gameplay but the game was still playable and I guess you've sort of got to expect that kind of thing when you're gaming on you to graded graphics next that we have fortnight and for this one I went with the quality settings at 904 at least 75 FPS though most of the time we were looking more at 90 to 100 FPS which sounds really great sadly though the experience was spoilt somewhat by fairly regular frame stuttering again it was playable depending on your standards I guess but had frame rates been smoother the experience would have been great on this little PC now one of the best experiences I had was with Rainbow six siege using the lowest quality preset the resolution was set to 9 MP though with taa a 50% render scale is set still the game looked very good and played buttery smooth I couldn't blame any missed shots on frame stutter for this one framerate stayed above 60 FPS at all times and generally hovered around 80 fps again it was a great experience and a perfect example of how much fun can be had with this compact system finally I fired up rocket League enabled the performance preset at 1080p and this generally saw a frame rates hover between 70 and 80 FPS frame rates were consistent allowing for smooth highly playable performance so as we saw with csgo it is possible to play these less demanding titles but still very popular titles at very respectable quality settings now as mentioned earlier the desk mini a 300 it does come with a 120 watt power brick 120 watt power supply it is this thing right here and with the 2400 G providing you don't do any serious overclocking perhaps any overclocking at all you can get away with this 120 watt power but obviously this is designed to work with the 2400 G but not sure how much testing asrock did with a lot of the hardware being overclocked such as the CPU and the eye GPU I think there you'd probably be limited by thermals anyway so probably a bit of a non-issue with the 2500 G unless you can get some big huge copper cooler in there but that'd probably cost more than the case and the processor and all that so again probably not worth doing anyway in its stock configuration which is what we use for testing the 2400 G with a pair of one terabyte mechanical hard drives and then a 2 terabyte SSD that we use for all our testing the a300 consumed a do 2 watts in our blender stress test that's not too bad that's obviously well under the 120 what rated capacity of this power brick however when gaming such as battlefield 5 multiplayer which is quite taxing on the CPU and obviously very taxing on the integrated graphics we did see the wattage climb as high as 102 watts so not a great deal of headroom there so like I said I probably wouldn't recommend overclocking this or making you any more power-hungry than it already is obviously it's very efficient 102 watts for the entire system while playing a game is exceptionally low but when you've got to have just 120 watt power brick here you don't want to go too much higher than that moving on let's look at operating temperatures using the optional cooler the risin 5 2400 G hits 78 degrees under load now blender stress test but idled at just 33 degrees this is a reasonable operating temperature and surprising this little cooler didn't make that much noise replacing the base cooler with the race stealth I only dropped the low temperature by 4 degrees though the desk mini a 300 was basically silent now so if you have a stealth cooler and you're happy to take off the top cover then I recommend using it in the a300 as rocks new desk mini a 300 is really everything I hoped it would be and I'm glad they finally released a mini PC that supports Raven Ridge ap use been begging for one of those ever since AMD release them about a year ago now of course the gaming performance won't blow your socks off but you can at least play games in some capacity so that's a pretty big win there it really wasn't possible with any of the Intel CPUs you were really limited to flash base games there so yeah this is a significant upgrade in that respect so if you're after a compact gaming rig and you don't want to buy a console for whatever reason perhaps you want a fully functioning PC so you can do things like video editing or whatever else it is that you may do with a fully functioning PC then I feel like the a300 fits the bill nicely of course it is a very niche product you have to be in the market for an extremely small PC that can handle some light 3d work I have to say though if you just after a cost-effective gaming rig then this really isn't it and that's despite being one of the cheapest options available the issue here being the a300 inability to support a discreet graphics card making your only upgrade option a Zen - based APU alternatively you could build your own rising 5 2400 G system and a much larger micro ATX case for a few dollars more and this gives you the ability to snap up something like a Radeon rx 560 or perhaps even one of those insanely cheap rx 570 models and this 100 to 150 dollar discrete graphics card upgrade will improve performance tenfold or of course for a slight price premium it's also possible to build a mini ITX system it won't be nearly as small as the a320 but it'll still be very small and again it will have the ability to support a discreet graphics card so this means the desk mini a300 is an extremely niche product but I doubt that's going to surprise to many of you in the end if you seek a super compact PC capable of a little bit of casual gaming and whatnot then there really is no better option than as rocks mini desk mini 8300 and it really is very mini he's a he's a gtx 1660 for example the MSI gaming X model and you sure as hell aren't fitting that in there but you that gives you an idea of just how small this thing is if it wasn't obvious already anyway I think that she'll do it for this one if you did enjoy the video be sure the like button subscribe for more content and if you appreciate their work with your Harrow box then consider supporting us on patreon thanks for watching I'm your host Steve and I'll see you again next time you