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Gucci
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Joined: Sat Jun 05, 2021 1:33 am
Location: The City of New York

Using a Mini PC is Interesting - Here are my thoughts...

by Gucci Wed Jun 23, 2021 5:27 pm

This post will be the same deal as my PSP post: just random ramblings of sorts, throwing out there my experiences with some piece of tech, with a gaming spin.

I bought and am using one of those pre-built Mini PCs that's aimed at the business sector. In this case it is the HP EliteDesk 705 GS Desktop Mini, seen here:https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-elitedesk-705-g5-desktop-mini-pc-p-8mu10ut-aba-1. It's an adorable little thing.

It was purchased at Best Buy a few months back and has the following specs (listing them out because of the nature of business oriented PCs - there's a shit ton of SKUs): AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 3400G w/ Vega 11 (the link above has the lesser GE model -- the one I have is the full APU), 8GB of RAM (added a second stick for dual channel), 256GB m.2 SSD (has the HDD bay inside where I added a 1TB SSHD from Seagate), six USB 3 ports and one USB-C port, two Displayports and an HDMI port (can be swapped out for another connector), and Windows 10 Pro. Thinks that's all the relevant specs.

Outside of the RAM and SSHD I added, I had to get an Asus dongle for Wifi and Bluetooth. Have plenty of USB ports. It's attached to an Acer 1080p monitor with 75Hz refresh rate. I have attached a 1TB portable drive that acts as a place where i store all of my docs, music, videos, etc. The SSHD is my Steam drive.

With that APU, I can run a decent amount of games. The standard suite of emulators including GCN and PS2 without issues. Some of the more modern games I can play like the two most recent Divinity games (1080p with medium to high settings). Star Wars: The Old Republic is maxed out at 1080p and has no issues hitting 75FPS. Sometimes, I get slowdowns but that might be server side issues. Not an expert. One oddity is a game called Fract OSC: had to lower settings on that one. There's no action or anything. Not sure why. On the flipside, Tales of Zestiria has all the boxes checked off (limited stuff to mess with anyway) and runs above 60FPS.

That's all I can think of at the moment. I'll add more as I spend more time using this thing. I genuinely love this form factor. It reminds of that story where Shigeru Miyamoto wanted the Wii to be the size of three DVD cases. This is pretty close.
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