This LINUX DESKTOP is a MONSTER - Slimbook Kymera review
1,297I bought a new desktop! It comes from Slimbook, which is a spanish company that sells laptops and desktops with Linux preinstalled, and it's a pretty big upgrade over the previous one I used, so it's time we take a look at it, at the experience of buying it, and using it after that!
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00:00 Intro
00:36 The Computer
03:21 Performance
07:32 Issues
08:41 Conclusion
## Disclaimer
This video is NOT sponsored by Slimbook. They didn't send me the computer for free, I bought it just like everyone would, and this video hasn't been submitted to them before review. Now, let's begin!
## The Desktop
I went with a Ryzen 7 5800X, mounted on an AORUS 570X Pro motherboard. THe graphics card is an Nvidia RTX 3070, and it has 32Gb of DDR4 RAM, and I installed my own 2Tb M.2 NVMe SSD inside.
The case itself is something you might find in other shops, but it's personalized nicely, with a laser-etched Slimbook logo. You can also ask for your own stuff to be etched onto the surface, in my case, it's my logo. looks pretty good if you ask me, but I might be biased.
Slimbook actually asked me where I wanted to place the logo, which size I wanted to make it, and they send me preview pictures to ensure that it all looked like I wanted. Top notch service here.
The case is made out of aluminium for the front and the top, and the sides are both removable glass panels, held by 4 thumbscrew.
I/o on the case itself is pretty good as well, with 2 USB3 ports on the side, easily accessible, a headphone jack, the microphone jack, and the reset button. THe power button is on the top, next to a smaller one letting you control the LED color for the bottom lighting.
Now let's see how this all performs.
## Performance
I ran a few benchmarks on Manjaro KDE, and did the same on the old desktop, on the same distro, to compare the performance gains.
Running Geekbench 5 yielded a score of 1138 for single core, and 7990 for multi core, compared to 1068 in single core for my older Ryzen 5 2600 desktop, and 5796 in multi core. The Kymera gives me almost a 40% performance gain in terms of CPU in multi-core, which is impressive. Single core isn't that different, which isn't that surprising, as the base clock is only marginally higher on the 5800X.
Now, for the graphics part, running Unigine heaven at the extreme preset, on my ultrawide display at the native resolution of 3440x1400, it got an average of 66.5 FPS, with a score of 1675. The highest FPS it got was 119, and the lowest was 8.7, probably when loading the initial scene.
My previous desktop using an RTX2060 and the Ryzen 5 2600, at the same presets with a 16:9 1440p monitor at native resolution, got 52.8 FPS, with a score of 1330.
This is a 25% improvement here, and keep in mind the resolution was lower for my old desktop, as it's not using an ultrawide display, so the results might be even more impressive if I compared them using the same display.
But enough about the artificial benchmakrs, what does it mean in terms of real world use, like gaming?
Running the Shadow of the tomb raider, at max settings on the native resolution for my ultrawide display, the Kymera got 96FPS on average, rarely dipping below 90 even in the busiest scenes. My older desktop, on the same presets and on a 16:9 1440p display, got 63 FPS on average average, which is 52% lower than the Kymera, and on a lower total resolution as well. That's still more than 50% better performance on the Kymera.
Running the Total War Warhammer 2 benchmark, with everything cranked up to the max on the native resolution for my ultrawide display, the Kymera got 72.6 FPS on average, with an 86 high, and a 61 low. This computer can run this game at an nice 60fps, without any issues, at max settings. Of course, it's not an extremely demanding game, but it's still pretty CPU heavy, so it's a very nice score.
My previous desktop, at the same settings and on the a 16:9 1440p display, could only reach 19.3 on average, which is barely playable at all. Framerate got no higher than 22 and dipped all the way to 16 FPS. On this game, it makes a huge difference, as battles are way more enjoyable when zoomed up close, and at lower details, the game shows its age. That amounts to a 62% increase in performance.