Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Dual 2.5gbe! Looking at the Minisforum Venus NAB6”.
Up on offer today is another Mini PC, but this has a feature we haven’t seen before on this channel at least not in a 12th generation Intel part, it’s Unique you’re going to want to take a look, especially if you’re, a home lab enthusiast, this one’s from Minnie’S Forum, it’s the Venus Series. This configuration is 16 gigabytes of memory, 512 gigabytes of storage, but it has a unique feature. Oh I love that unboxing we have dual 2.5 gigabit Lan dual Lan, you say: that’s a home, Labor’s dream. As a matter of fact, it is, this is the NAB 6, that is a 19 volt power input.
Brick, we have dual HDMI as well as dual USBC DisplayPort alt mode at the back two super speed: USB ports, a power brick input, of course, Kensington lock and then at the front, we’ve got two more Super Speed, USB ports and another type c Port. The front usb-c Port is a USB 3.1 gen 1, while the type A ports are 3.2, Gen, 2., 5 and 10 gigabit. Basically, at the front, we’ve also got our combo headphone microphone Jack, so that is capable of running. You know a headset again. These make excellent business class machines, you need to run Microsoft, teams or Skype or Discord or whatever this can do it. Oh and in case you’re wondering dual HDMI, plus dual USB C DisplayPort alt mode.
Can you run four displays off of this machine? Yes, you actually can run four displays off of this machine to DisplayPort via usb-c to DisplayPort adapters and two HDMI are the USBC ports Thunderbolt? No, they are not at this price point. Did you really expect that this build also has something insanely unique? It has a tiny, tiny fan on its m.2. This is the smallest m.2 heatsink fan that I have ever seen. I’M very slightly worried about the longevity of that fan over. You know a long period of time. There is a mounting option here for a two and a half inch SATA mechanical hard drive. There is a motherboard connector for that.
There’S no spare m.2 on the inside. As far as I can tell, there’s an m.2 e key for your Wi-Fi, which is populated with a Wi-Fi adapter this one for mediatek, as well as our 512 gigabyte m.2 at the bottom. We do have mounting holes for our included Visa mounting plate. Also in the box is our SATA to motherboard. Adapter, don’t lose that in fact you could probably go ahead and just put it inside the case as long as it’s not going to get caught up in that fan comes with your two and a half inch SSD mounting screws, as well as your Visa mounting plate And screws for that, a short HDMI, cable and your power cable for your power brake your power, brick! Oh, that’s! A nice one! Your power, brick, is a two and a half amp.
It’S 119 watt power, brick and that’ll pair nicely with our Alder Lake core i712. 650H processor: how are we doing in terms of performance and sustained load? Well, it will use quite a bit of power and, as a result of that, the fan really can kick up. But it’s a nice whooshing sound as opposed to a high-pitched sort of whiny, sound uh, maybe a little bit in between whoosh and wine.
It’S definitely not the best that I’ve seen in a small form factor machine, but it is by no means annoying, and that is also an artificial stress test just using it even for really heavy computational workloads. The fan doesn’t really ramp that high. It’S just really when I’m running artificial benchmarks. So as long as you don’t run any artificial benchmarks, you won’t be able to hear it and if you mount it behind your monitor, you’re, probably also not going to be able to hear it or it’s going to be. Barely audible, this is six performance cores and four efficiency cores. That’S 16 threads total, that’s kind of a lot of threads for higher end information, Workhorse kind of thing I mean that is the i7 configuration 12th generation, but it’s kind of a lot of horsepower.
So a ram configuration ddr4 3200, nothing really to ride home about. It is pretty good, though, for this form factor now from geekbench 6 and Ada 64. Both of those are posting impressive results, pay particular attention to the results from geekbench.
Geekbench runs pretty quickly. It doesn’t really have enough time to quench the burst. You know the heat load dissipation capabilities of this thing, but I would rather have a chassis that can dissipate the heat than one that bursts, really quick and then once it gets warm, it just sits there and sort of bakes itself.
The minisform cooling solution really can take away the heat, which is pretty good. It’S a little unusual in that you have intakes on both sides and then you’ve got a pretty large exhaust on the bottom part. I have a feeling the minis Forum did that in order to better be able to deal with the heat of the 12th generation and the fact that this has 120 watt power, brick again, I like, where they’ve picked on the power performance curve, they didn’t really leave Any performance on the table – it’s not loud for what it is, it’s pretty good and you also get a little bit of an extra performance bump.
I also like that there’s so much connectivity here, it’s very nice. I was also delighted to learn that the tiny little fan on the m.2 mostly doesn’t run our SSD here. It’S a Kingston model. It is pretty high performance. All Things Considered, I don’t know if the little tiny cooling fan is strictly speaking necessary, but it does come on during the sort of heavy, intense workloads that I threw at it.
So if you’re copying a whole bunch of files to it from a memory card like a camera offloading something like that yeah, the SSD is going to get a little warm and I get why they added the fan there. Maybe that would be a problem, but mostly the fan doesn’t run, so it’s probably not going to wear out if it doesn’t run right and most of the time the fan doesn’t need to be on now. One thing to note: if you like to get this is the Bare Bones version: it won’t come with the fanned, SSD cooler. That’S part of the thing that you get with the pcie 4 SSD.
This is bundled with from Kingston and not part of the Bare Bones. Chassis, of course, the worst part of our torture test run was definitely the extended Center bench run. We were able to get all the way to 87 degrees C on the total CPU package temperature, but oddly the system temperature was more than 10 degrees C below that.
So I guess it was just the CPU that was super hot at the wall in this configuration it’s drawing 101 Watts well below the 120 watts Max of our power. Brick, which means you’ve still got some power overhead to do some USB charging of your cell phone at least 20 watts. Something like that now real world scenario, you’re not going to be using 100 Watts continuously like this. Are you really going to be rendering using Center bench on a small form factor machine like this? No probably not more? Realistically, maybe something like geekbench you’re on geekbench, maybe you’re processing, a big document doing something like that. That’S more of a bursty workload and I’m happy to report that, even though our power also peaked around 101 Watts, while running workloads like geekbench, the temperatures were much more reasonable at, like 75 degrees C, with no thermal throttling.
It’S also worth noting that the thermal throttling that did occur in the cinemas workload was very minor. There was not really a significant loss of performance, meaning that I think Minnie’s Forum has done the tuning here to find exactly the right spot. That they’re built-in cooling capabilities have, but that also means that if you wanted to go in the Bios and configure things – and you know maybe take the rails off a little bit – you’re not going to have a lot of Headroom in this configuration. Sorry, and or don’t do that this is not the machine to do that in the built-in Intel, UHD Graphics here, nothing special, nothing to write home about.
It is a pretty fine productivity machine. However, if you want to run this with dual monitors, no problem, dual 4K monitors with a high refresh rate, because you enjoy a high refresh rate when you’re looking at your spreadsheets, no problem. All of that will work with this configuration a single thread score of over 2300 and that’s the power of Alder Lake. That’S a pretty smoking single thread score, so this system is going to feel really Snappy. As long as you’ve got that single core boost up to 4.6 gigahertz 4.7 gigahertz 4.8 gigahertz and that single thread score makes sense because well it can boost up to 4.7 gigahertz.
I mean the Intel MSRP on this processor is 500 just by itself, because it’s the best of the best for 12 700h. You know when I was doing the video. This thing was like 359, which is insanely discounted for the bare Bare Bones version. This is a ridiculous amount of horsepower and for off-label uses like a miniature forbidden, router or Home Server. This is pretty awesome.
The fact that you’ve got two two and a half gig Nicks. You would be able to run a lot of real-time processing here. It’S actually really insane Overkill, even for the Forbidden, router type scenario, where you’re going to be running, you know a router, but also a bunch of containers doing stuff. It doesn’t really take a lot of CPU power to run things like pie, hole or anything else. But if you wanted to run full fat intrusion, detection well, you’ve got six performance cores you’re going to be able to do that. You want to run a full Docker stack on this thing with tons of storage. Well, you can add a two and a half inch Drive in there and be able to do that. You’Re, probably going to spend more on a two or a four terabyte SATA drive than you are on most of the rest of the system, which is pretty nuts, because both of these Nicks are based on the Intel, i225v and Intel’s been a little bit on The Struggle Bus with their two and a half gig mix – sometimes it was Receiver Lock Up Bugs sometimes there’s more software crashes. I did try to to lock up the receivers here and it seems like these are the reliable version of the i-225v. That’S a relief so in the router Home Server scenario should be usable, oh and even if you don’t want to use them in a Home Server configuration you can actually plug both of these Nicks in and as long as you’ve got the bandwidth back to your server Things like SMB file sharing will aggregate the link automatically SMB multi-channel, assuming your network is set up for that which it should be because it’s basically Plug and Play. I mean you can even do that on like Synology Nas devices these days, and that means you’ll be copying. The network server 500 megabytes a second Intel Arc says the maximum reported speed or the maximum speed. Capabilities of the CPU is 4.7 gigahertz, but I note that cpu-z has 4.6 or 46 is the maximum multiplier for the CPU in this chassis and just be aware, 4.6 gigahertz, and that’s about what I saw in benchmarks now. Maybe it’ll thermal velocity boost or something.
But I didn’t think that was really a thing on mobile and usually those are listed separately on Intel Arc, so your mileage may vary. So I want to do some software stuff with this, maybe over on the Linux Channel and maybe on this channel and open sense. There’S an open sense project that plugs in to give you a really nice graphical dashboard and that part of it can run in Docker.
So maybe we can set up something that has both open sense and the full Docker stack on this machine, but also takes full advantage of our dual two and a half gig interfaces. Because more and more isps are at a gigabit and Beyond. Who knows, maybe Barnacles could use a router upgrade I’m Wendell.
This is level one. This has been a quick look at the NAB 6 from minis forum, it’s kind of on fire sale, probably they’re, trying to get rid of it to make way for newer Generation stuff. I don’t know, but with the Dual two and a half gig land for the home lab use case, it’s pretty interesting, I’m one of this level, one I’m signing out. You can find me in the level one forums. .