Gh0st
New member
Happy New Year everyone,
I'm nearing the end of my Xmas break so thought I would share my little project that has occupied some of this time (in between laying on the couch watching Cricket).
I'm a gamer and also love my retro gaming (I'm old). I have a nice gaming PC in my lounge room however, I was looking to upgrade my media and gaming capabilities in my bedroom. I was running a U9-H for that TV, whilst it has served me well, an upgrade was definitely in order.
I started this project before Kens return and the other Android boxes on the market.. well they're not MINIX and nothing caught my eye.
I decided to take another look at Mini PCs as I haven't paid them much attention since 2019. They have certainly come a long way since then. As some gaming is a priority for me my research pointed to the AMD chipset PCs as their onboard graphics are superior to Intels current offerings. I went with the 7735-HS chipset, it's an 8 core CPU running at 3.2ghz and has the 680M on board graphics. The 680M is roughly equivalent to a GTX 1050-GTX 1060. Having owned both GPUs I would say that is correct.
I found a Mini PC that had that chipset, this particular one had 32GB DDR5 RAM, a PCIe 4x4 M.2 SSD slot and Thunderbolt 4 USB. There were a few configurations among different brands, some had no thunderbolt and more M.2 slots, etc.
I received the PC just before Xmas and wow! What a great little PC for gaming.
I was able to play GTA 5 at 1080p normal settings (over 60fps), God of War 1080p low to mid settings (60+fps).
More modern games like Spider-Man Miles Morales and Cyberpunk 2077 suffered, I had to turn them down to 720p low to mid settings to achieve 60fps, Forza Horizon 5 also the same.
As far as emulation for older consoles/PCs, the PC is capable of emulating everything up to the PS2 and Gamecube/Wii and upscaling it all to 4k (looks amazing).
It can emulate the PS3 and Nintendo Switch very well at their native resolutions.
That's amazing performance for something so small, most people would be happy with that for a bedroom PC.
Unfortunately for my wallet I'm not most people, I wanted to see how far I could push this.
First up was to put a larger SSD in, whilst inside I noticed the cooling doesn't get to the RAM and SSD as they are sectioned off from the rest of the components. They are directly under the lid of the previous picture.
Measuring the box it was roughly 120x120mm. I found a USB fan that is 120mm which screwed on perfectly where the old lid was. It worked perfectly, I transferred 1.5TB to that SSD and it didn't even get warm.
Next up was to boost the gaming performance, I had upgraded to a RTX 4070 in my gaming PC, so I had my old RTX 3060 ti 12GB doing nothing now.
I knew that Thunderbolt 4 was well capable of using an external GPU, so I did my research there and found a used eGPU box on eBay for a couple hundred dollars (AU).
This box has 6 USB ports, a LAN port and SATA connections inside. I mounted an 8TB HDD inside the box for my retro games. Anything else in those USB ports or SATA takes away bandwidth from the GPU, so the retro HDD was the better choice over an SSD with modern PC games.
I have 2 2TB 2.5" SSDs in external USB cases for modern PC games.
What a difference that made!!
For emulation I can now also get PS3 and Nintendo Switch games upscaled to 4k 60fps. They look stunning.
Modern gaming, the previous tested games all now run on high settings at 2k-4k.
The only thing I noticed was Cyberpunk 2077 went down to 7fps with Ray tracing enabled. Ray tracing seems to be a huge bandwidth hog. I imagine the upcoming Thunderbolt 5 should be able to cover that.
I am so happy with the outcome, it doesn't look pretty, but it sits behind my TV so I don't care at all.
I'm nearing the end of my Xmas break so thought I would share my little project that has occupied some of this time (in between laying on the couch watching Cricket).
I'm a gamer and also love my retro gaming (I'm old). I have a nice gaming PC in my lounge room however, I was looking to upgrade my media and gaming capabilities in my bedroom. I was running a U9-H for that TV, whilst it has served me well, an upgrade was definitely in order.
I started this project before Kens return and the other Android boxes on the market.. well they're not MINIX and nothing caught my eye.
I decided to take another look at Mini PCs as I haven't paid them much attention since 2019. They have certainly come a long way since then. As some gaming is a priority for me my research pointed to the AMD chipset PCs as their onboard graphics are superior to Intels current offerings. I went with the 7735-HS chipset, it's an 8 core CPU running at 3.2ghz and has the 680M on board graphics. The 680M is roughly equivalent to a GTX 1050-GTX 1060. Having owned both GPUs I would say that is correct.
I found a Mini PC that had that chipset, this particular one had 32GB DDR5 RAM, a PCIe 4x4 M.2 SSD slot and Thunderbolt 4 USB. There were a few configurations among different brands, some had no thunderbolt and more M.2 slots, etc.
I received the PC just before Xmas and wow! What a great little PC for gaming.
I was able to play GTA 5 at 1080p normal settings (over 60fps), God of War 1080p low to mid settings (60+fps).
More modern games like Spider-Man Miles Morales and Cyberpunk 2077 suffered, I had to turn them down to 720p low to mid settings to achieve 60fps, Forza Horizon 5 also the same.
As far as emulation for older consoles/PCs, the PC is capable of emulating everything up to the PS2 and Gamecube/Wii and upscaling it all to 4k (looks amazing).
It can emulate the PS3 and Nintendo Switch very well at their native resolutions.
That's amazing performance for something so small, most people would be happy with that for a bedroom PC.
Unfortunately for my wallet I'm not most people, I wanted to see how far I could push this.
First up was to put a larger SSD in, whilst inside I noticed the cooling doesn't get to the RAM and SSD as they are sectioned off from the rest of the components. They are directly under the lid of the previous picture.
Measuring the box it was roughly 120x120mm. I found a USB fan that is 120mm which screwed on perfectly where the old lid was. It worked perfectly, I transferred 1.5TB to that SSD and it didn't even get warm.
Next up was to boost the gaming performance, I had upgraded to a RTX 4070 in my gaming PC, so I had my old RTX 3060 ti 12GB doing nothing now.
I knew that Thunderbolt 4 was well capable of using an external GPU, so I did my research there and found a used eGPU box on eBay for a couple hundred dollars (AU).
This box has 6 USB ports, a LAN port and SATA connections inside. I mounted an 8TB HDD inside the box for my retro games. Anything else in those USB ports or SATA takes away bandwidth from the GPU, so the retro HDD was the better choice over an SSD with modern PC games.
I have 2 2TB 2.5" SSDs in external USB cases for modern PC games.
What a difference that made!!
For emulation I can now also get PS3 and Nintendo Switch games upscaled to 4k 60fps. They look stunning.
Modern gaming, the previous tested games all now run on high settings at 2k-4k.
The only thing I noticed was Cyberpunk 2077 went down to 7fps with Ray tracing enabled. Ray tracing seems to be a huge bandwidth hog. I imagine the upcoming Thunderbolt 5 should be able to cover that.
I am so happy with the outcome, it doesn't look pretty, but it sits behind my TV so I don't care at all.
