Better Mac Mini than the Mac Mini - Slimbook One Review
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This is the Slimbook One, and it's a small form factor desktop. It looks really good, and it packs a surprising punch for its size. Let's see what that thing can do.
#macmini #slimbook #linux
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00:00 Intro
01:22 Disclaimer
01:40 The Device
03:31 The Specs
04:54 Performance
06:38 Insides
07:23 Slimbook One vs Mac Mini
09:49 Parting Thoughts
## The device
The Slimbook One is pretty small for a fully fledged desktop. It's a 20x20 cm square, 5 cm high. It's fully made out of sliver aluminium, and it weighs 1.2kg.
It looks super stylish. That small case has a small Slimbook logo on the top, and is neatly perforated on the top and the side, as well as the bottom, for maximum airflow.
The front is really simple, with a power button and 2 USB 2.0 ports. At the back, you can screw 2 included antennas for the Intel AX200 WIfi and bluetooth card, which supports Wifi 6 and Bluetooth 5.
A full gigabit ethernet port, 2 USB 3 ports, 2 more USB 2 ports, a USB-C that also does display port, an HDMI and a full displayport, as well as an audio jack and a separate 3.5 mm microphone jack.
You also get the power input, which is a barrel charger.
## Specs and performance
Ok, but what's inside that case?
The base model has 8Gb of RAM, 250 Gb of SSD, and a ryzen 7 4800H, with vega 7 graphics running at 1600Mhz.
You can spec it out a lot more though, with up to 64GB of RAM, and 4 TB of SSD (2TB NVME, 2Tb Sata). The RAM and the storage are user upgradeable as well.
So, how does it perform?
On Geekbench 5, it reached a score of 1285 in single core, and 8364 in multi core. It beats my Slimbook Pro X 14 in multi-core, with a nice margin of 14%.
Being an 8 core CPU, you can definitely hear it a bit when it's really going though.
In terms of SSD, the disks I got have relatively good read / write speeds. Running KDiskMark, I got speeds of 2213 Mb/s Read and 1400 MB/s write for a 1GB sequential test, with 16 threads.
I ran Shadow of the Tomb Raider in windowed mode at 1080p at the lowest settings, and I got around 23 FPS.
At the native resolution, it can barely reach 13 FPS.
For Dawn of War 3, at the native resolution and lowest settings, I got 21 FPS on average, and at 1080p, it reached a nice 43 FPS.
## Comparison
Ok, so what's the main competitor for this kind of device?
The only reasonable answer is the Mac Mini. In terms of size, it's almost exactly the same dimensions, the mac Mini being just a little bit flatter, with 1.5cm less height.
In terms of performance, the Mac Mini gets 1752 in Single-Core, and 7703 in Multi-core. That's 36% higher in single core than the Slimbook One, but 8.5% less in multi-core, for the same number of cores.
Now, the disk read and write speeds on the mac mini are higher, at 3120 megabytes per second write speed, and 3120 megabytes per second read according to Apple Insider, running the same tests I ran, but on Crystal Disk mark. That's a sizeable difference, but most people going for a small form factor PC like this one probably won't ever notice the difference. The Slimbook One will never feel "slow" to access data, or write it.