Gadgetory

hey guys Ibrahim our connects and let's kick things off with something that we haven't quite completed reviewing last year and that's this the asrock desk mini GTX is a compact base micro STX bare-bones PC and you may recall me talking about it and how I went through also the troubleshooting steps to get that thing booted up in the first place but that didn't happen so I had to send it back to asrock all the way to Taipei they reported back saying that it had a broken motherboard which made sense but I have the final working sample right now in my hands I've ran benchmarks on it it's all working just fine so let's talk about this guy but most importantly we'll come to conclusion as to why does this thing even exist considering the price and specs and whatnot so yeah let's get into it but first a quick message from our sponsor the newbie quiet dark bass 700 packs a fully modular spacious interior with option to invert your motherboard tray with excellent radiator support and an outstanding fan controller it also comes with a type C port RGB lighting and a tempered glass side panel check it out in the description below alright so taking a look at the physical aspect of this unit it's pretty simple and quite fitting within any environment being your office or your home setup it doesn't feature gamer elements or flashy RGB lining around which I personally like the chassis is primarily made out of metal with a brushed aluminum finish of the front there is plenty of ventilation for the components inside this PC and it can be used in either a vertical or horizontal configuration the i/o is pretty limited but that should be expected in a system this size you get Gigabit Ethernet HDMI power in two USB 3.0 ports a full-size DisplayPort another HDMI port and another a mini DisplayPort do not that these three ports are linked directly to the dedicated MXM gtx 1060 GPU the front io consists of a headphone jack a single USB 3.0 type a and type c port and mic in oddly enough the audio jacks were not labeled so the only way I was able to distinguish the two was to refer to the manual which is unfortunate there are also a couple of USB 2.0 ports on the side of the chassis let's get into the specs the desk mini GTX comes in three flavors a kit with a gtx 1060 gtx 1070 and 80 and the pricing for all three of variants are ridiculous so the base model that I have here that comes with the GTX 1060 costs $800 and that's without the CPU memory and storage factored into the equation the top of the line 1080 Varian costs $1600 and that's a lot for just a bare-bones PC that doesn't come with the rest of the components because if you add them you're looking at spending roughly around 400 to 700 dollars on top of that investment and you might be think to yourself well I might as well just build a better gaming PC for that price you know I mean there are so many things that you could consider here and there but all in all I just can't seem to justify paying so much for just a bare bone specie that comes with an A Okay cooling solution for the GPU I also don't want to mention how memory prices have skyrocketed since last year did it a minute it is unfortunate because beginners who are starting to build a basic gaming PC would have to invest a chunk of their budget into memory instead of a decent GPU so let's just hope that in 2018 prices will come down a bit but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this do you find components a lot more pricier than they used to be a couple years ago let me know anyways coming back to the desk mini GTX there are a few things that you need to be aware of before choosing the rest of the components the micro SD X motherboard is based off a b250 chipset meaning you won't be able to overclock a CPU that's unlocked there are only two sodam ddr4 slots that can support up to a maximum of 32 gigabytes of memory accessing storage involves the removal of the motherboard tray and when you flip that you'll find three m dot two slots two of which that support PCI gen3 drives and the other one supporting SATA if you decide to use a two and a half inch SATA base drive you can populate up to two of them and they are linked to the motherboard via this proprietary connector in my case I decided to go with an i-5 7600 K CPU and yes I'm aware that it's an unlocked CPU but it was the only one I had lying around in the studio as for memory I chose Corsairs Valley select 16 gigabyte kid clocked at 21 33 megahertz and for storage I chose Corsairs force elite 240 gigabyte SSD the decimal GTX relies on an external power supply so if cable management is a concern for you do not the external power brick is half the size of the PC and it's quite heavy there's also one more thing I need to point out before getting into performance and that's cooler compatibility specifically for the CPU this micro SD X motherboard does not accept anything except for Intel's own stock cooler which is unfortunate but keep that in mind before pulling the trigger on this bare-bones PC alright let's talk about performance I ran a few synthetic and real-world benchmarks on the destiny GTX to make sure that the system was stable under full load now do note that these numbers could vary significantly depending on your choice for the CPU and GPU so for instance if you decide to go for with a core i3 processor expect slower multitasking performance and also a potential bottleneck well gaming speaking of gaming I ran all the tests at 1080p which made sense because the GTX 1060 can comfortably push playable frame rates at that resolution anything above that say 1440p or even 4k would requiring a beefier GPU would that be said i was comfortably able to head well over 60 frames per second in most titles starting with battlefield 1 at 1080p set to very high the Destiny averaged 87 point 5 frames per second over watch set to epic yielded over a hundred frames per second doom set at Ultra using the Vulcan API was easily able to hit a hundred frames per second Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon wildlands taxed out on the GTX 1016 even a 1080p set to very high settings I was only able to squeeze frame rates in the mid 50s I was very surprised with the CPU and GPU temperatures the stock cooler did a fantastic job cooling the 7600 K even at under my 30-minute I 264 stress test the GPU ran around 70 C while gaming and the maximum core clock that I was able to achieve was around 18 60 megahertz which is very impressive considering the compact form factor and the system was relatively quiet during my testing here's how it sounds then you coarser avoid pro gaming headset is comfortable stylish in different colors delivers fantastic wireless performance even for competitive gaming with an all-new microphone for clear communications check out the void Pro Wireless or wired in the description below alright so having looked at those performance numbers it's fairly evident that the azrog dustman a gtx 1060 can comfortably game at 1080p without breaking a sweat but my problem comes with the price of performance ratio I just can't justify spending $800 for a bare-bones kit and then spending an extra $400 to get a basic CPU like an i3 dual core 8 gigabytes of RAM and a pretty small compact two and a half inch SSD and mind you SSDs are also pretty expensive and I don't think I'll be able to offload my entire steam library to it just you know start gaming on it right away I would have to rely on an external solution or I might have to invest a lot more to populate all these storage options that we have in this micro SD x1 factor now let's also not forget to talk about MX and GPUs because they're primarily found in notebooks rather than desktops so Nvidia could stop making them this year and you know that would leave you in a dead-end space because the only option you would have is upgraded to a GTX 1060 or 1070 but I'm pretty positive gonna end up paying a lot more than what you really should for that module and of course when you keep up getting the GPU you could end up restricting airflow and it could cause overheating issues and I think there's things just might go wrong with the way how it is so oh no I really can't recommend the system guys and I think part of that primarily has to come with the price that you pay for this I think you're much better off like I said earlier build a much better gaming PC for that price but I'd love to hear your thoughts about the as drug test many GTX what do you guys think about it especially the design and of course the performance and as Rux approach towards the micro STX form factor and also I would love to hear your thoughts on MX and GPUs do you think they could potentially be the future or could this be the end could this be the last unit that we see that would come with a fully fledged desktop grade GTX graphics card let me know in the comments down below I'm Ivar with hard connects thank too much watching make sure to subscribe for more similar content and we'll see you in the next one