Chuwi LarkBox X Review. Is This Ryzen 7, WiFi 6E Mini PC Any Good?

Its got a ryzen 7 in it. It has dual channel ram: pcie 3.0 ssd, two gigabit lan ports, wi fi 6e. Even so, it does look really promising doesnt it, the lark box x that i have, however, theres a couple of things: okay, that straight away its a ryzen, 7 3750h, so its an old chipset that theyre using an old apu, so its not like its a ryzen 6000 series, not nor that would you would expect it for this price point, of course, and its only eight gigabytes of ram that they give you and 256 gigabytes of storage included. With the lock box x, you will find a 65 watt power supply with a status led its using the typical dc in that barrel connector. We see a lot of our power cables. So obviously ive got the eu power cable. You get a product. Inspection report warranty card a visa mounting bracket. So if you are going to mount this on the back of a monitor, for example, then youre going to need that and the four screws and a user manual build of this mini pc is plastic all around it. Doesnt feel too bad and theyve gone for quite a different look, as you can see the white and black, so two usb 3 type as full spec usb type c here. So this is video out up to 4k 60 3.5 millimeter headphone jack with mic support and then a power button with a status led and then the back of it here youll find, of course, the power plug dc in there to power it all to gigabit, lan Ports, we have hdmi 2.

0, so 4k 60 display port 1.4, 4k, 60 and another two usb type as usb 3.0, and this is the exit. So all the hot air is going to be pushed out of that chewy branding and this mesh right here has the fan underneath it a little hard to see but its just right here, the fan so thats going to suck all that fresh cool air in and Then blow it out the back of it and our underside here. This is where you slot it on to that little bracket. If youre going to vesa mount, this mini pc, looking briefly at the internals, so the good news is, we do have two sticks of ram in here, so it is in dual channel and its 2666 megahertz that theyre using the ram, but its only going to support 2.4 gigahertz anyway, so it doesnt really matter now you can upgrade this. You could add two sticks of 16 if you wanted 32 gigabytes of ram files battery right here. This is our ssd, which is plugged in ill just remove this now, and we should have a wi fi card below it, and we do so. This is also upgradable interchangeable. You can swap it out for something else. If you wanted to, and theyve used the mediatek its the rz608 first up, our bias, so this is completely unlocked to us. Weve got every single option you can think of in here and, like i say in my mini pc reviews, just be really careful what you touch in here now, one of the interesting options is this one which is under the amd cbs menu.

Now, if you go into nbio common options, you will see that chewy have configured this with a 25 watt power limit. Now, theyve probably done that to keep the thermals in check. So that is exactly how im going to remove review it. Sorry not remove it, but if you wanted to, you could probably set it here to 54 watts, but beware: it will generate more heats, consuming more power, of course, and thats. The trade off the fan will probably be a lot louder. So im going to leave everything as is stock here and lets jump into windows. The like box x here does ship out with windows 11, as you can see, and it is all fully activated. So you dont need to worry about any problems like that: theyre, not using a dodgy license or key or digital license, okay, so that is all good. Now, one of the things i wont cover in this review, because its very obvious that spreadsheets documents things like that they are perfectly fine on this machine. Everything does feel quick and snappy. It is not a bad chipset, but yes, its dated now, three generations old maximum turbo is 1.4 gigahertz and we do see it listed here eight times because well its a quad core chip, it does have eight threads in total, though thats, why were seeing it there? So the network adapter, this realtek – is actually quite a good one, its fast im getting about 1.

3 gigabit per second transfers. It has bluetooth 5 with it so thats unexpected. I probably would have assumed, with this kind of mini pc and the price that they went for wi fi ac, but no, we do have wi fi ax and its 6e, which is really good. So here with the other thing to point out here, is that we do have real tech, uh sorry intel with the ethernet, so ethernet the lan, the two controllers on there uh our gigabit ports, and at least we do have that. Now. If you wanted to set this up as a server or a router or something thats good, that we do have those two ports there, so nothing really else here of interest, but ill disk drive too so its its a kingston – and this is a pcie 3.0 drive. The speeds of it are slow for mvme, so a pcie 3.0 drive say something like a samsung. 970 evo would be twice as fast as this, but it is at least faster than sata 3, which is good, were getting a bit of a benefit here. Normally this price tag most other manufacturers, would use sata3 instead now a couple of benchmarks, i wanted to show you just a few, because the power limit that chewy set 25 watts means that its underperforming and it will underperform with all that im showing you in this Particular review here so this score could be higher. That could be a lot higher again its because its limited to 25 watts instead of 35, which would have been ideal now.

Why has chewie done this? Probably for the fan so fan noise? I can hear a bit comes in cycles on and off a little irritating, but if it was at 35 watts it would be even worse. Cinebench, r23. Okay again it should do better than this. This chipset can do better if its set to 35 watts or if its set to 54 well, do even better than that so underperforming here, but for spreadsheets office documents, video playback, all that kind of stuff that im not going to show you because its just obvious It does perform really well how about something demanding then like a 4k video edit here. So this is very basic im not doing any fancy transitions, layers, effects or anything like that or even color grading here, its a simple drag and drop cut edit, and it is fine with the playback resolution here at a quarter. I do occasionally see it dropping a few frames. I think the ram and yeah ill mention it again, of course, that power limit is going to be holding this back a little bit, but if you wanted to do it on the lock box x here, yes, you can do these basic 1080p or 4k even 4k. 30 edits on this spec, the ryzen 7 3750h is still a capable chipset, even if it is dated and its just about to finish up now. This is, of course, the 4k youtube preset, and it took one minute and you could say about 32 seconds thats, a lot slower than it normally is with this becca mini pc should be just under a minute for one minute of 4k footage onto gaming here and Sounding like a broken record, of course, this is not going to perform as good as it could so limited by that 25 watts its only clocking up to megahertz here, the vega 10 graphics.

So it can go a lot higher and, as a result, im getting around 40 frames per second in the car here with gta 5.. Now the graphics setting im running is medium settings 1080p. So, of course, if you lower it down to 720p or lower the settings, you can get up to and even around 60 frames per second, but a little bit disappointing here, wed really like to see this ship out with at least 35 watts out of the box. So thats all im going to show you for gaming just in the interest of keeping this video a little shorter here, because we know, if i play any other games, the performance will be exactly the same lower than expected. Now, linux, if youre wondering yes, it will run on this mini pc, but you could run into problems with the mediatek rz608 wi fi card the drivers for it. I had trouble with linux mint now its a very fast wi fi card, and it does have bluetooth. Five and great to see in this – and i think for this price point its good – that they included things like that that you wouldnt actually expect. I wouldnt expect to see a wi fi 6e card in this. I wouldnt really expect to see either a pcie 3.0 spec drive from kingston. I thought they would go with a slower, sata 3 drive, but they didnt there, which is good. It can run three 4k monitors, which is great.

There weve got the type c port that supports video out and two gigabit lan ports. Again i wouldnt kind of expect that for this price point, so those really are the positives and, of course, windows, 11. now whos. It really for, i think, for people that just want a mini pc for light workloads. Thats, really, all you can expect out of this kind of spec now in 2022, so that would be, of course, documents. Spreadsheets internet browsing video playback, i didnt feature or show any hevc, 4k playback or vp9, because its most people know that that actually this spec of mini pc can do it. Just fine itll play back those demanding video files, so great as a little media center media player is able to do that. So then, that gets onto the things i dont like then about the lark box x here so theres well a couple of things. Firstly, it doesnt seem to have the cables included in the box for a sata, 3 2.5 inch drive, but theres actually plugs on there. For it, i can see what looks like power and then the sata 3 cable plug would be there, but theres no way to actually screw in a 2.5 inch drive. Even though weve got the space for it, it looks like it so thats a little disappointing. The other is that power limit that i talked about about. I mentioned maybe 20 times in the video severely reducing the performance of not only the cpu clocks, but also the vega 10 graphics.

Sadly, so, instead of 35 watts, its just 25 watts and that really did reduce the performance, it can candle a lot better and you can go into the bias and manually override that power limit. As i showed you through those settings but its not how theyve actually configured it so ive reviewed it as stock as, of course now, the fan will get a little annoying at times. But if you do increase the power limit expect the fan to be running a lot on high rpms get a little bit more annoying and the other is the thermals in this, which is another positive. The thermals are good. It doesnt go over 65 degrees celsius. Not my unit here with ambient 25 degree temperatures, so there we go now.

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