So, I have been having no luck in getting plex to bend to my will when it comes to working with basic streamers like chromecast and fire stick. Most of my anime needs to be transcoded and because plex does not transcode at higher than the native bitrate, a carefully encoded low bitrate file is re-encoded in a hastily and in some cases lower bitrate causing a dreadful drop in IQ. Several months ago (before I made a last ditch with the amazon firestick) I designed (but never carried out) a miniITX build. It was certainly powerful enough and quiet enough, but the set top style box was still kinda clunky and it was going to cost at least $380.
So after running into much the same problems on the amazon stick that I did my chromecast I knew a more full fledge pc was going to be needed so I can have full decode capabilities on the client side. The obvious step between hdmi sticks and miniITX chassis is a NUC style mini PC. I had my doubts as I wasn’t keen on dumping a couple hundred bucks on a device that is more or less non user repairable. If anything on the mobo or the cpu died, the whole unit would get chucked. So I poured over all the >$200 units and did my be benchmark checks, I was looking to target 4k Passmark as a processor that won’t keel over on the next generation, at least capable of 1080p hevc.
So of all the units on new egg only one really shined, and that was the amd 5557m based gigabyte brix for $150. MSI has an i3 ulv at just a little over $200 that looked good, but it seems msi has some unit failure issues to work out. The Gigabyte brix offered all the usual ports and while the cpu is a little dated it nonetheless is a low powered APU that performs. My only worry was AMD never ran the smallest fabs and their processors all ran hot down the line. This version of the brix did have its fair share of fan noise complaints, too. However I figured I would be able to tweak it so that it wouldn’t be an issue, and tweak it I did.
I’m not going to describe the unit specs, there are plenty of unboxing videos and a few quality web reviews, instead I want to cover the things the reviews did NOT touch on, but that I really needed to know. So first and foremost I want to say, come prepared! I was quickly reminded during the installation of windows 8.1 WHY I dislike going AMD, there was ZERO driver support built into windows 8.1 for AMD. It had nothing for the chipset, nothing for the sound, nothing for the wifi, it didn’t even have a usable ethernet driver! After the windows 8 instal, loading a network driver either from a usb dvd reader or a thumb drive you can load up from another computer is required. After a couple of false starts with installation issues (I scrapped my first install cause connectivity issues popped up, probably because of the many driver installations I went through) I figured out you only need to install 2 things, the wifi driver, and then the apu driver pack AMD’s auto detect program downloads. With these 2 things, there are no ? marks in the device manager.
So right out of the box the device is configured to use turbo, which translates to yes the fans are freaking noisy. So unfortunately if you want to leave the turbo ON you will have to deal with constant ramping up of the fan as even small app loads that bring the cpu freq up will also quickly bring the fan up. There is very little lag time either, when things go turbo, things quickly heat up and the fan quickly gets faster and faster. At the minimum fan speed, it sounds about that of a modern day laptop on medium speed. I find it tolerable, but even next to the TV it is audible and only gets drowned out at high volumes. When the fans start to reach their maximum they are fairly intolerable, loud, but not high pitched like a hairdryer would be. It’s like hearing a hair dryer from one room over.
Thankfully there are things we can do about this. The first thing I did was turn off turbo. This means it never goes over 2.1ghz. This helps considerably, and you are not likely to notice the performance impact (In cinibench 11.5, it was the difference between 2.07 and 1.78). However this didn’t stop the fan from constantly going up and down anytime you did something. The CPU idles at 1.3ghz, but quill quickly increase anytime something needs to be done. We can however do something about THIS, too! Using the battery saver mode in windows, you can effectively tell windows not to increase cpu speed unless you absolutely need to. I didn’t find any performance issues with this mode either, benchmarks remained the same. You can go one step further and tell the battery saver mode to not utilise more than %55of the cpu. If you find most of your videos don’t need much cpu (like mine) you can run this and the cpu will never go above 1.3ghz, and the fan will mostly stay at its lowest speeds. Only my benchmarks were able to heat the cpu up enough to ramp the fans up in my test while in this low battery power mode. Notice I said %66, it seems that the cpu utilization will be locked at %66/1.3ghz until %80 in which it will allow the cpu to run up to 1.6ghz.
So to summarize, There are a couple ways to control the cpu speed allowing you to lock down the fan speeds at the sacrifice of some cpu power. If you had plans for using other methods of controlling clock speeds and fan speeds, you won’t get very far. The cpu is locked down so AMDs overdrive program won’t let you do much, especially with underclocking. Worse yet, there seems to be NO WAY to modify fan controls. Neither AMD Overdrive nore SpeedFan can read fn RPMs or change speeds. This isn’t really a bad thing though, the fan reaction times are pretty fast and if you look at the temps you never feel the fans are running fast for “no good reason”.
So now to look at performance, especially when dealing with the underclocked speeds. I have no problem running it as turbo off and battery mode with max CPU restricted to %66. I am using an SSD so windows boots up lightning fast, apps load fast, web browsing is fine, and I have no problem with my movies. 1080p movies take around %20 cpu and youtube 1080p needs around %40. I did some stress test using normal settings and turbo on/off. Cinibench was my cpu test and as I mentioned, turbo increased its score by about .3 marks. Not worth the noise IMO. Gaming turned a little interesting but logical if you think about it. Scores didn’t change whether turbo was on or off. This is because most games were bottle necked by the GPU side of things and the cpu was only working around %60. In the end, you will have some luck on the ps3/xbox360 era of games, but I used Unigine’s Valley and the FF14 benchmark programs at low settings and found the fps to be just under playable. The APU is impressive for a $150 unit, but it is still to low to do any worthwhile games on it. Although Warcraft and DOTA would probably be fine.
BTW I did break out some HEVC samples to try out on it. Like I thought earlier, 1080p HEVC seems all good, but 4k video kinda falls off. Using Turbo ON and the most up to date LAV filters, I could do 4k at 5Mbits with a little drop out. As you can imagine, a 50Mbit from sony I got was a side show. Also the fan noise drowned out the videos audio. So that is a no go if you have any hopes on doing 4k video. I think the only other remark I want to make about the box is the 8821ae wifi card included is an AC 1x1. That means 150mbit. Apparently this is becoming a common bullshiat tactic today in an effort to get you to buy the more expensive cards, since I highly doubt there is an actual cost difference between 1x1 and 2x2. None of my movies are any where near 150mbit so I am not worried, but if you like to store and playback full BD rips over your network from several rooms away, you might have an issue. It is totally upgradeable of course.
I’m going to keep it for now, it atleast does what I want aside from being totally silent, I figure if I happen along a sale of an i3 or i5 based box, I would have no problem selling this off for the $210 in parts to the many people I know kicking around with an old windows xp box. Currently I am accessing files via usb drive cause my remote does not work well with the web interface for plex. I TRIED Kodi but had no luck understanding how to add videos to it (I added them to the video tab, they don't actually do anything but show up under files). Unfortunately %99.9999 of web and youtube guides are just for installing the plugins for illegal streaming services.
So after running into much the same problems on the amazon stick that I did my chromecast I knew a more full fledge pc was going to be needed so I can have full decode capabilities on the client side. The obvious step between hdmi sticks and miniITX chassis is a NUC style mini PC. I had my doubts as I wasn’t keen on dumping a couple hundred bucks on a device that is more or less non user repairable. If anything on the mobo or the cpu died, the whole unit would get chucked. So I poured over all the >$200 units and did my be benchmark checks, I was looking to target 4k Passmark as a processor that won’t keel over on the next generation, at least capable of 1080p hevc.
So of all the units on new egg only one really shined, and that was the amd 5557m based gigabyte brix for $150. MSI has an i3 ulv at just a little over $200 that looked good, but it seems msi has some unit failure issues to work out. The Gigabyte brix offered all the usual ports and while the cpu is a little dated it nonetheless is a low powered APU that performs. My only worry was AMD never ran the smallest fabs and their processors all ran hot down the line. This version of the brix did have its fair share of fan noise complaints, too. However I figured I would be able to tweak it so that it wouldn’t be an issue, and tweak it I did.
I’m not going to describe the unit specs, there are plenty of unboxing videos and a few quality web reviews, instead I want to cover the things the reviews did NOT touch on, but that I really needed to know. So first and foremost I want to say, come prepared! I was quickly reminded during the installation of windows 8.1 WHY I dislike going AMD, there was ZERO driver support built into windows 8.1 for AMD. It had nothing for the chipset, nothing for the sound, nothing for the wifi, it didn’t even have a usable ethernet driver! After the windows 8 instal, loading a network driver either from a usb dvd reader or a thumb drive you can load up from another computer is required. After a couple of false starts with installation issues (I scrapped my first install cause connectivity issues popped up, probably because of the many driver installations I went through) I figured out you only need to install 2 things, the wifi driver, and then the apu driver pack AMD’s auto detect program downloads. With these 2 things, there are no ? marks in the device manager.
So right out of the box the device is configured to use turbo, which translates to yes the fans are freaking noisy. So unfortunately if you want to leave the turbo ON you will have to deal with constant ramping up of the fan as even small app loads that bring the cpu freq up will also quickly bring the fan up. There is very little lag time either, when things go turbo, things quickly heat up and the fan quickly gets faster and faster. At the minimum fan speed, it sounds about that of a modern day laptop on medium speed. I find it tolerable, but even next to the TV it is audible and only gets drowned out at high volumes. When the fans start to reach their maximum they are fairly intolerable, loud, but not high pitched like a hairdryer would be. It’s like hearing a hair dryer from one room over.
Thankfully there are things we can do about this. The first thing I did was turn off turbo. This means it never goes over 2.1ghz. This helps considerably, and you are not likely to notice the performance impact (In cinibench 11.5, it was the difference between 2.07 and 1.78). However this didn’t stop the fan from constantly going up and down anytime you did something. The CPU idles at 1.3ghz, but quill quickly increase anytime something needs to be done. We can however do something about THIS, too! Using the battery saver mode in windows, you can effectively tell windows not to increase cpu speed unless you absolutely need to. I didn’t find any performance issues with this mode either, benchmarks remained the same. You can go one step further and tell the battery saver mode to not utilise more than %55of the cpu. If you find most of your videos don’t need much cpu (like mine) you can run this and the cpu will never go above 1.3ghz, and the fan will mostly stay at its lowest speeds. Only my benchmarks were able to heat the cpu up enough to ramp the fans up in my test while in this low battery power mode. Notice I said %66, it seems that the cpu utilization will be locked at %66/1.3ghz until %80 in which it will allow the cpu to run up to 1.6ghz.
So to summarize, There are a couple ways to control the cpu speed allowing you to lock down the fan speeds at the sacrifice of some cpu power. If you had plans for using other methods of controlling clock speeds and fan speeds, you won’t get very far. The cpu is locked down so AMDs overdrive program won’t let you do much, especially with underclocking. Worse yet, there seems to be NO WAY to modify fan controls. Neither AMD Overdrive nore SpeedFan can read fn RPMs or change speeds. This isn’t really a bad thing though, the fan reaction times are pretty fast and if you look at the temps you never feel the fans are running fast for “no good reason”.
So now to look at performance, especially when dealing with the underclocked speeds. I have no problem running it as turbo off and battery mode with max CPU restricted to %66. I am using an SSD so windows boots up lightning fast, apps load fast, web browsing is fine, and I have no problem with my movies. 1080p movies take around %20 cpu and youtube 1080p needs around %40. I did some stress test using normal settings and turbo on/off. Cinibench was my cpu test and as I mentioned, turbo increased its score by about .3 marks. Not worth the noise IMO. Gaming turned a little interesting but logical if you think about it. Scores didn’t change whether turbo was on or off. This is because most games were bottle necked by the GPU side of things and the cpu was only working around %60. In the end, you will have some luck on the ps3/xbox360 era of games, but I used Unigine’s Valley and the FF14 benchmark programs at low settings and found the fps to be just under playable. The APU is impressive for a $150 unit, but it is still to low to do any worthwhile games on it. Although Warcraft and DOTA would probably be fine.
BTW I did break out some HEVC samples to try out on it. Like I thought earlier, 1080p HEVC seems all good, but 4k video kinda falls off. Using Turbo ON and the most up to date LAV filters, I could do 4k at 5Mbits with a little drop out. As you can imagine, a 50Mbit from sony I got was a side show. Also the fan noise drowned out the videos audio. So that is a no go if you have any hopes on doing 4k video. I think the only other remark I want to make about the box is the 8821ae wifi card included is an AC 1x1. That means 150mbit. Apparently this is becoming a common bullshiat tactic today in an effort to get you to buy the more expensive cards, since I highly doubt there is an actual cost difference between 1x1 and 2x2. None of my movies are any where near 150mbit so I am not worried, but if you like to store and playback full BD rips over your network from several rooms away, you might have an issue. It is totally upgradeable of course.
I’m going to keep it for now, it atleast does what I want aside from being totally silent, I figure if I happen along a sale of an i3 or i5 based box, I would have no problem selling this off for the $210 in parts to the many people I know kicking around with an old windows xp box. Currently I am accessing files via usb drive cause my remote does not work well with the web interface for plex. I TRIED Kodi but had no luck understanding how to add videos to it (I added them to the video tab, they don't actually do anything but show up under files). Unfortunately %99.9999 of web and youtube guides are just for installing the plugins for illegal streaming services.
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