Game:

Kangaroo (1982)

Category:

First Impressions

Duration: 12:48

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72

InFocus Kangaroo Mini Desktop PC - here we take a quick look at the Infocus Kangaroo portable Desktop PC which is available for $99 US. It has a Intel Atom x5-8500 Cherry Trail CPU, 2Gb of RAM, 32Gb eMMC SSD and a 4 hour battery. An impressive little Windows 10 Home PC, and most notable is the fact that the Cherry Trail platform has a GPU with increased power, but the CPU is not noticeably faster - all on paper of course, but how does it fare in real life?

As you will notice at the last part of the video - we test Skyrim and it demonstrates some severe disadvantages from the less powerful Baytrail gaming tests. Initial tests show this is strictly a thermal throttling issue, as the 16 Execution Units in the Cherry Trail GPU run a lot hotter than the 4 EUs in the older Baytrails.

All this mumbo jumbo essentially means this (and we will do some video proof later). The Cherry Trail x5-8500 in this Kangaroo PC has the potential to run Skyrim at 40fps - and from a normal operating state it does start that way - but the heat load on the processor quickly causes it to throttle down the speed of the CPU to hit 15-20fps within a matter of minutes in order to keep it cool.

It does not mean that every game will have this experience, but we will need to test the platform with some other titles to see if the same problem persists across other games.

*** Update: We will go into this further with some actual testing video, but additional testing reveals that the passive cooling of this Cherry Trail Atom CPU is just not sufficient to cool the processor. While the Bay Trails CPUs in tablets and mini laptops like the X205TA ran at or just under the thermal limit with passive cooling, the Cherry Trails simply run too hot to continue with Passive Cooling options and require active cooling with a fan. There are some very tiny fans which could have been implemented with a slightly thicker case, but as it stands, the decision to use passive cooling for the x5-8500 CPU is not sufficient to keep it from hitting high heat values - which results in severe performance throttling.

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