Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “EM780 Unboxing and Quick Review”.
Look look at this madness. Look at this just this is an entire computer. This is the EM 780. In the Mercury series from minis Forum, we’ve been taking a look at amd’s Mobile Solutions lately, but mobile solutions kind of in a desktop form Factory.
This one is truly 65 WTS, don’t remove the CPU Cooler liquid metal liquid metal first time you power it on, might take it a minute. Cuz ddr5 training, here’s the manual. This is it.
This is the PC. This is literally everything. Yeah forget pillow, Cube more, like compute Cube, all right, so at the rear we’ve got HDMI two USB type, A and one USB 4. Yes, this does support pcie tunneling, we’ll test that don’t worry another type, A on the side, a Micro SD card slot and a Kensington lock port on the front.
We’Ve got a power button. I suppose that’s the front, a combination, headphone microphone Jack. You know trrs 4 conductor and then another USB four port, along with a reset button. It breathes from the top and sides and bottom it’s got a tiny little fan in the bottom and a tiny little fan in the top, and that’s it.
This model is configured with 32 GB of memory. You can get it with 32 GB of memory, 16 GB of memory or 64 GB of memory, but this is a dual Channel model and if you’re going to go with the igpu, I definitely recommend dual Channel inside bundle. This time is a hardwired, ethernet, port plus USBC. This is the thing that a lot of people, including me, complained about and look look.
It’S a hardwired. It comes with a hardwired, USBC adapter with USBC pass through. You can actually use your charger with this. So your charger charges through here and then this goes that way, and then you get your ethernet connection here. This is also a thing that I suggested last time is to just use the USBC port in creative ways, and then you don’t really need a hardwired, ethernet port actually physically built into this thing. But in the Box you do actually get a hardwired ethernet port.
Via this mini Forum, adapter, which we will also test it’s funny, they call this a USBC docking station. It’S like probably need more USB ports if you’re going to call it a docking station more like ethernet plus power pass through. Also, bundled is this g 65 W charger, which is pretty premium, got two cables: a type-c cable and an HDMI cable um. So it’s a pretty good bundle. This time around, I mean eight cores 32 GB of memory. This thing is going to have some serious performance.
Let’S look it up through a level on text KVM and we’ve got several different models of of KVM that we sell at store. lev1 text.com. This one is the combo one which does USBC power delivery and display. You give up some display bandwidth in order to have display and USB travel over one wire, but it can do 65. W charging comes with a big giant power break. Hey look at that.
I got my keyboard and my mouse connected and the display and everything through just the single USBC data connection. That’S pretty awesome. The fan can go into turbo mode. Can you hear that that is the loudest? The device will ever be on your desktop.
The cooling is definitely effective. I can feel a lot of air coming out the back 5,400 points in CPU for multicore, it’s pretty good, considering where at I mean we really are at a 65 wat power limit at about 543 for single thread. That’S pretty good performance for something so tiny and don’t forget. We’Ve also got the 780m graphics built right in confirmed. Their memory is four channels at 32-bit. Well, there’s two channels per dim, so two dual Channel, but it’s it looks like it should for two sticks of memory. Basically, but not sticks of memory, because it’s you know built in we have. We have what we should for the memory here.
It is lpddr5, though so lpddr5 means in a of 64, it’s going to show is 3907 front side. Bus, clock, speed, okay, fine, whatever reasonable speed for LP ddr5. It’S not really configurable overclockable replaceable. Keep that in mind.
If you had insanely fast notebook memory, that does help the igpu, so you can game on orts on this with a 78m but you’re better off streaming from a dedicated uh gaming PC with a dedicated GPU, because you do have Hardware decode for h264 265 av1. You got all the the rdna 3 goodness in this chip. The outof, the boox latency, is not an awe inspiring 127 Nan we’re going to go into BIOS in a second and see if I can get that down just a little bit. Cpz knows that we’re dealing with hyx memory, SK hyx, but it doesn’t really know any of the other parameters.
So I don’t really know what frequency it’s supposed to be or if this is normal behavior for the memory. It’S not performing bad, like the The Benchmark performance for lpddr5 on an ultr mobile 65 watt platform is about where I would expect it to be, albeit with the memory latency, as reported by 864 being a tabed on the high side. I was expecting around 100 NS, not 127. Now just to be clear.
Overall system power limit is 65 Watts. The reported TDP of the CPU is 28 Watts yeah. The CPU can use a little bit more than 28 watts in sort of a burst scenario, but as we look through the sensors for Hardware info 64, we see the CPU does actually stick pretty close to 28 watts. In most cases, we’ve got one case where it went 150 % over the limit in in EDC.
But again this is normal. This is totally fine. 28 watts in a in a mobile platform is reasonable and the fact that it’s in our desktop platform form here. Well, I mean that’s goes without saying that it’s fine, their cooling solution is better in this than just about any notebook that you would have well. The cooling solution that you have in this is as as good or better than middle class and higher notebooks. So let’s run the 864 Benchmark, one more time, with the system not being quite so busy and just make sure that our latency really is 127 NS yeah. This is supposed to be lpddr5 6400, oh 3200, yeah yeah. So that was actually correct, so it was showing up.
Okay, that’s good. The latency was just terrible. This bios is a customized minis bios, so you don’t have all of the options. It’S not the unlocked APO.
This is, may be more user friendly, but it doesn’t give you as many options. It does have the AC failure and wake system by RTC. So as soon as it gets power, it can come on if you want to configure it for remote access or as part of a kiosk or something small form factor machines. People often want to do that.
You can also customize the fan profile if you like, so that it’s a little more aggressive or a little less aggressive by default out of the box, it does come with svm enabled so you can have a secure virtual machine. That means the windows subsystem for Linux. Will work some Min form machines come with virtualization disabled some come with it enabled this one for me was enabled out of the box. We also have some of the AMD CBS options exposed to us, including smart shift, SPL PPT and thermal control.
Thermal control really just gives you control for TJ Max and that’s pretty much it for the graphics configuration it comes by default. With a 2 gigabyte frame buffer. It does have the game optimized option. You could disable the igpu if you were using USB 4, but I don’t know that I recommend that under system configuration you can set the wattage from 15 to 54 Watts that and load optimized defaults are pretty much the only bias options you have. If I want to look at timings or subtimings to control the memory, latency, there’s not a lot of options from the bio side of it, I’m going to have have to use another approach, single core scores in geekbench over 2,995 for the multicore score. This is really good for something that is so tiny and so power efficient.
The same CPU and a higher TDP configuration we’ve seen that we’ve seen that from Mini’s Forum we’ve seen how much faster that can be, but in this power envelope with these features, dual USB 4 ports plus HDMI plus 3 USB type, A Plus micro SD. That’S pretty incredible now, internally, like the other one, you got a 22 m.2, so you could put in a larger m.2 if you wanted, but that’s pretty much it for your upgradeability, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you consider these as basically disposable computers. This is something you’re going to use for two or three or four years or hand me down to a family member or it’s something that you need to just run in an out ofthe way place.
If you are planning to use this as something in an out of the way place, though I would say consider consider the dust and dust implications it’s like generally would do better with a larger fan for dust immunity, because you know behind a cash register or something The little the little fans are not going to hold up, but in a Hospitality type situation, or you just need an internet kiosk, or something like that. This is this is hard to beat. It really is among the folks making mini PCS that have exploded in popularity. The last couple of years, Min for’s reputation, is still among the best. The weakest part is getting bio updates after the fact, but in terms of stability, you know you can mail it in for warranty, service.
I’Ve actually bought stuff from Min forum and I’ve actually had to use the RMA service and you got to mail it in. You got to wait a week or two and then get it back, but it’s a reasonable process and I’m not sure that I would be able to say the same for some of the other uh stuff that I’ve ordered and that has come from far away. And it’s just like now: where did this come from again? Can I get some warranty service? I don’t know it.
It really does feel like we’re living in the future every time I look at one of these because it’s eight cores, it’s eight cores and 16 threads and a tiny power envelope and it’s running almost entirely off of a single USB 4 connection, and then I’ve got A wired ethernet connection on the other side and it’s coming out to our monitor here and it’s just it’s what a time to be alive, it’s so powerful, but it’s so tiny and it’s come from. I mean it’s not come from nowhere, but we’ve come a long way in just five short years: heck the Gan Charger alone’s worth what 20 35 bucks. It’S tiny, but it’s 65 Watts. Now I didn’t talk enough about it before, but Min form does actually bundle a USBC ethernet adapter that has passed through USBC. The pass through USBC theoretically would support pass through for power, but I wasn’t actually able to get that to work reliably. It uh works fine as a USB port, but plugging your DC, brick, your power adapter into this and then powering the minis form was Never As Good As just running the minis form directly off of a power brick or the level one Tex USBC KVM. You can also use something like this. This is the one from the pine project.
This is one of the best USBC breakout things that you can get, and so you can plug that in like this, and then you can connect your USBC power to this, and then you still have hardwired ethernet this way as well, but you can actually power the Device which is welcome and nice and awesome and you’ve only got the single connection to the mini Forum machine and it’s going to wake up our display and everything’s going to work. So it is really awesome that minis Forum bundles this ethernet, this hardwired 1 gbit ethernet adapter, so good job Min Forum, one of the funest Mini PC makers in all of Hong Kong mayhaps the world. Just. I can’t, I can’t believe it’s as fast as it is. I mean you can do Esports on a 7 ADM. I will always prefer dgpu or something like our hx1 100g, that we also reviewed or and that we also stuffed into a Super Nintendo, be sure to check out th those videos anyway. That’S enough of that, I’m W this level, one I’m signing out and you can find me in the level one forums these are all AMD.
So many little processor .