Gadgetory

so when asrock sent over their new desk mini for the intel side of things I said to myself in that review I would love to see an AMD solution because it's kind of like a MOBA right if you guys have played MOBA games when they drop a new hero and then everyone wants to play that new hero that's what the desk mini is is that new hero everyone just wants to play him the Intel one unfortunately is like that hero that you know it's kind of been out for a long time people like me don't really know what's new about this thing but regardless we've got the new hero here on the desk it supports the Verizon 520 400 G and 2200 G as well supporting some of the normal rising CPUs if you wish to use it as an afk standalone machine regardless today we're going to be taking a look at this 150 dollar unit you can currently get it on Newegg they do ship worldwide because in Australia I can't find it up the sale anywhere I think as ROC haven't distributed in these strange channels but at this price you get something that weighs in at nine hundred and forty grams bare-bones if you add a CPU cooler which we're gonna try today add this stealth cooler on there because it's gonna have much better cooling performance then the included cooler I think this is like the GE dual core cooler which they do include in the box but it's performance on a four core eight threaded Rison 2400 G sort of a little bit worried about that but it does have two slots of so-dimm memory support so you can't use usual desktop memory on this you have to use the laptop stuff because of the small form factor which measures it in 154 mill by 155 mill by 80 mill depth so it is a very small unit comes in smaller than my hand at the back it's also got the option to vase and mount it to a monitor or vase amounted to a wall if you wish to that accessory isn't included in this unit you can buy it for 8 bucks which is very cheap you can also get a USB extension USB to extension which is another eight dollars so there goes build these little extensions that sort of add to the cost but it'll give you two extra USB 2's at the front the speaking of the front yeah USB type-c USB type 3.1 as well as your onboard audio out and mic jacks in at the front and your power button at the rear you get DisplayPort 1.2 HDMI 1.4 and a VGA out - as well as a USB 3.1 type-a and a real tech 1000 megabits per second dick so there's the install it's super quick super easy it takes little to no time put the CPU in put the RAM in and put your Anthony Drive in and you're good to go but in this case we did have a little bit of trouble getting the Wraith stealth in I did have to bend this up a little bit and then it inserted and hopefully this fan doesn't cause any issues being so close to the mesh here I'm hoping it's not since the edges of the fan are a little bit taller than the actual blade itself but other things to speak about before we get into the BIOS is there are two sided ports included as well side of three you can raid these over raid 0 and raid 1 we've also got two nvme drives one at the front but also one of the back and you will have to pull the motherboard off the tray to access this but on that let's jump into the boss see how well we can tune this thing and then try and run some games on it so we're in the UEFI BIOS it looks like any other azeroth BIOS except it is missing two features which I actually do use regularly and that's internet flash and also the fantastic tuning software but it's not to worry you can still customize your fan speeds manually if you wish to and you can also update your boss just by a USB downloading from the website but some really good things is that you can manually control the clock speeds and you can also overclock your ddr4 memory which on the Rison AP use does make a big difference but since we are using so dim memory I think we just might and try and go for like a 29 33 megahertz at CL 16 or something like that just to get things boosted and smooth but of course since we don't have good so dim in there I think you can still get really good so dim it's just I don't have any good stuff on hand and since it is sort of like a budget orientated option I am gonna go for that sweet spot overclock as for the CPU speeds we're gonna leave that on auto for now simply because we're using 120 watt brick which I don't want to overclock too high and of course it's a little motherboard super little but that aside let's get into some games and see how this thing performs so the benchmarking is all finished and what a very impressive little unit we got 1080p apex legends on lower settings but it still got 56 average FPS 48 minimum so very well controlled and the problem is I had to use fraps this time because apparently right as I started benchmarking this thing from about 15 hours ago there was this bug where River tuna just fails to open anymore so I don't even know what's going on there so use fraps minimums were okay apex Legends was fine at 1080p but that's a big difference compared to the Intel variant which couldn't even play 30fps at 720p so there's that night and day difference between the AMD version the APU and the Intel HD graphics so the 5 strikes scores will show this too with a graphics score of 3000 and a physics score there's going pretty much near 10000 so nothing's being hampered by this motherboard except my own so dim memory which unfortunately could only go up to 2600 six megahertz even though you're able to get it much higher with the limits being pretty much unrestrained with of 1.2 and 1.3 5 volt choice in the BIOS so you will want to get some better sodium memory if you are enthusiastic about getting the most performance out of the 2400 G or even the 2200 G but in this case it still gave us a smooth experience dota 2 was getting over 60 FPS on 1080p 100% screen resolution medium settings so that did really well so I was very impressed with this unit when it came to its gaming performance moving on with some other tests like 4k video playback of course that was smooth we just tested with YouTube this time because last time I tested with Netflix in the Intel review if you haven't seen that put that up here already Netflix decided that it wouldn't stream on as the internet at 4k so this thing will handle 4k video streaming absolutely fine though do keep in mind you are limited to a HDMI 1.4 out as opposed to HTML 2.0 out so that you won't get 60 FPS at 4k but I think the AP you could handle that so if there's any feedback for asrock I would like to see them improve on the hdmi 2.0 upgrade with this particular unit in the next iteration but in terms of the vrm temperatures and also the APU temperatures themselves with this cooler on it just managed to fit as we said before but the temperatures were well control we got the node temperatures up to 93 degrees in a 26 degree ambient environment and the CPU went up to 58 degrees from the 10 sensor itself T in 10 10 10 10 10 10 pin pin and the thermal-imaging camera showed that the ventilation with the mesh side in front was allowing the unit to breathe itself using up about 85 watts United 64 on the stress test and then 25 watts idle roughly and then we went to a heaven benchmark was using around 70 watts so pretty good temperatures considering the wattage is going to 85 watts so I was very impressed with this unit instability and eventually heat and going through some more rounds of tests here USB 3 speed transfers on my kingston SSD drive was showing over 300 megabytes so they're absolutely fine as well as the internet speeds on the realtek that was getting over 100 megabytes per second copy transfers and then the last test were the onboard audio now here's where things get a little bit tricky the onboard audio out is decent I mean below 10 Hertz we only got an 8 decibel roll-off after that it was actually a pretty smooth line but the mic input itself was showing some serious worries so basically don't use the mic import for any serious audio recording because the 30 decibels and the plus 100 volume was just showing like really inconsistencies and then switching between it was jumping so I mean it is a sort of cheaper solution for the mic input and that's understandable it's a desk mini and the audio out is good too so there was no problems really with the crossover as well to crosstalk and you guys there it is for the desk mini a 300 from asrock the 2400 G is just going hard in this thing the memory speeds they're able to go higher but unfortunately I've got the two same ddr4 mismatched RAM sticks that I used in the Intel variant which if you haven't seen that yet I'll put the link up here for it unfortunately the team group memory they sent out one of the sticks was faulty so I couldn't use that for this review and you don't want to use single-channel when you when you're using an APU because you'll just have lower speeds and real worse performance you do want to use dual channel and you do want to get those memory speeds as high as possible so if you're really enthusiastic about this you can raise the voltage in the BIOS from 1.2 volts 1.35 volt on the memory side of things and if you do get some really good sodimm kits with XMP profiles or whatnot then you should be able to get even better performance than I showed in the video here today but as it stands for 150 bucks this thing has checked every box that I'd want it to it's a real solid little unit besides that mic import but again it's a hundred and fifty dollars and I'm sure pretty much anyone out there is not gonna really worry about the mic import you got the HDMI out too for the audio if you're already a purist you can use I think HDMI to optical out extractor as well if you're that concerned about it but other than that everything checks out I hope you guys enjoyed the review for the risin a300 desk mini if you did be sure to hit that like button also let us know in the comments section below what you think of it are you in the market for one or what would you do with one of these as there is another youtube I think ETA prime who has tested this with emulation and it does check out really well so it's good for using for emulation if you wish to use it for that and yet just checks out in general I'm really impressed with this unit and yeah there's also not much to say as well as one thing there is the m dot 2 nvme you have to use a PCIe m2 you can't use a sada m2 otherwise it won't boot so do keep that in mind the two PCIe nvme s ones on the front ones on the back of the unit they only support PCIe nvme so one thing to look out for but other than that this unit is rock-solid from asrock or should I say as rock-solid and I'll catch you in another tech video very soon and that's about it guys I'll catch you in another tech video very soon if you enjoyed this content enough you may wish to consider subscribing hitting that Bell notification to take our city on Instagram as well if you want that latest inside scoop on posting up some stories behind the scenes stuff too and I'll catch you in another take vo very soon pays out for now buddy you