Month: Feb 2024

Intel NUC 11 Mini PC (Hardware) Review

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You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/intel-nuc-11-mini-pc.2450/

I’ll keep the preamble short here since we’ve been covering a number of mini PCs in the past month of so; I imagine most have a general idea of what’s on offer here. The NUC 11 is, to the best of my research, a collaborative effort between Geekom and Intel to release a mini PC under Intel’s official NUC branding (which is notably now handled by ASUS). Originally releasing late 2021 and sporting the same ultraportable-optimised CPU as the GPD Win 3 in the i7-1165G7, I’m here to see if it still holds its own in a marketplace that’s only grown more competitive over time.

Fresh From the Box

Out of the box we see a fairly standard package for any mini PC I’ve looked at in the past. Outside of the unit itself, you have a fairly hefty power brick to power the PC via barrel connector, as well as a HDMI cable and VESA mounting kit for those who want to stow the PC away on the back of a monitor (or proudly display it on a VESA arm if you’re that way inclined). The IO on offer is generous, with the body of the PC being all but a mirror image of the later Geekom PCs I’ve looked at before, minus the Geekom branding on the top. The front of the unit shows us a Thunderbolt 3 port, next to a USB A 3.2 and 3.5mm jack. To the left you get a full-sized SD card reader, and the right a Kensington lock. The back is, as usual, where you find all the good stuff though. It’s certainly not the most generous outing I’ve come across, but you do get a Mini DP, two USB A 3.2s, a HDMI port, Ethernet port, and finally another Thunderbolt 3 port. It’ll certainly be enough for most.

Looking to the internals you have the i7-1165G7 being the brains behind the operation, with this being among the first to have Intel’s Iris Xe graphics when it first came out. Supporting it in this configuration is 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB M.2 SSD, though you can also find flavours of this mini PC with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, and completely barebones if you already have your own on hand. Opening up the bottom of the case you’ll only really find a 2.5 inch SATA bay empty, but it good as always to just see four screws between you and being able to upgrade your RAM and SSD too. It’s a clean and accessible design with no frills.

Day to Day Performance

Using the NUC 11 as a day to day PC really isn’t much of a challenge; to some its age may even come as an advantage with the older Windows 10 coming as standard. You can of course upgrade to Windows 11 whenever you want, but I do know we have no shortage of people wishing they never did so on our site. I had no issues driving two monitors on this PC (3440×1440 and 1920×1080) and it handled 4K video playback on YouTube with no issues at all. Looking at your standard benchmarks, the i7-1165G7 managed to hit 6291 on Geekbench 6’s multi-core score, and 2170 for single-core performance, while with Cinebench R23 we see a multi-core score of 6547, and a single-core score of 1533. It does well enough, but I wouldn’t expect any miracles with modern PC games. Some more demanding titles will run, but not without compromises on quality and resolution; your 2D titles aren’t a problem though. I had a good bit of fun playing the recently released Balatro on this PC, though you really wouldn’t expect issues out of a 2D card game.

Emulation is perhaps a little more interesting. To assist in this review I decided to put together a bit of an emulation showcase to show off some of the higher end systems and how they performed. In the video below, you can find an hour long supercut of me trying a bit of Wii U, Switch, 3DS, and PS3 emulation to varying degrees of success. Wii U, as it has surprised me in the past, really had no issues running on the NUC 11. Even Breath of the Wild managed to hold a steady 30fps at 720p with FPS++ enabled, which did admittedly impress me a little. If you’re happy to lower the graphics to 180p, you can even achieve a stable enough 60fps… though I imagine this is a little less desirable to most. Mario Kart 8 also ran well after enabling asynchronous shader compilation, with Wind Waker HD following up with no issues at all.

Yuzu was a bit more of a mixed bag than I was expecting it to be, with a number of games crashing outright, and others just running poorly. It’s not all doom and gloom, with the pivotal Atelier Firis DX Art Book running at full speed though! Jokes aside, I do think this chip can do more. Dark Souls Remastered struggled to run at full speed at native resolution but crashed on load when trying to scale it down. Other titles like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe straight up wouldn’t run too. The biggest surprise in the Switch department was definitely Tears of the Kingdom running at a state I could almost call playable. I personally wouldn’t go for it myself, but if my Switch died and I really had an urge to play, it certainly would be an option.

My time playing PS3 and 3DS games was a little more limited, with Dark Souls 2 running particularly poorly after a very long load time. If you are going to watch the below video, you might want to skip over this part if you’re particularly sensitive to jerky images. It is very rough when it decides to stutter. 3DS would run well enough at x2 to x3 resolution scaling. I will mention in the video I didn’t realise Majora’s Mask 3D was running at x2 speed due to playing without audio at the time, which does explain why it struggled more than I thought it would.

This video was a little rushed as I realised a little bit last minute that it would be a good inclusion, but I’m hoping as time goes on I can bring a little more order to the emulation process to show exactly what these devices are capable of. I did also realise after the fact that OBS’ auto noise filter is a little too aggressive with me, so apologies for my voice cutting out. These videos will improve in time!

Closing Thoughts

All things considered I do see this as a relatively capable device, and one capable of doing well for casual PC use and some mid-tier emulation. Where it really falls short is at its current price point of $495; it just isn’t all that competitive in 2024. Looking just at Geekom’s own mini PCs I can see significantly better value in something like the A5, which packs a comparable 5800H from AMD for a little over $100 less. It finds itself in a weird position where it is a perfectly capable device, but it does nothing unique for me to be able to recommend buying it at its current retail price.

MonsGeek M1W Wireless Mechanical Keyboard (Hardware) Review

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You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/monsgeek-m1w-wireless-mechanical-keyboard.2449/

Taking the M1W out of its packaged shell for the first time I was pretty stoked. Here we have a full purple aluminium case with some gold accents on each side, paired with some really great-looking gradient keycaps. These keycaps are shine-through to support the RGB backlighting, but actually have their legends on the bottom side of the key, giving a really nice aesthetic from the top down while still being usable for those not confident with touch typing. I will also mention here that the lighting is south-facing, as you can probably guess by how it shines through the south side of the keycaps. This is pretty great for those who enjoy cherry profile keycaps, with north-facing lights causing a few issues with them. Outside of the RGB we also see complete hot-swapability of the switches for simple customisation, with there even being an option to pick up a barebones model if you happen to already have some keycaps and switches to hand.

As a barebones kit you do have a lot of bases covered, with the knob in the top right being something I always appreciate having. Here it’ll control both the volume and lighting, with pressing the knob in being the way to switch between what it’ll do. You also get ample connectivity options with the choice of wired, Bluetooth, and a 2.4GHz dongle. On paper this is really solid, and the fact you can save up to three Bluetooth connections is great for those who are frequently moving between devices. To activate the wireless functionality initially you have to remove the Caps Lock key and flick a switch. At its default position the internal battery is disabled entirely, with the top position enabling the battery in Mac mode, and the bottom position enabling the battery in Windows mode. From there, you switch between each wireless mode by holding Fn and pressing E, R, or T for your three Bluetooth connections, and Y to connect to the dongle. If you want to use the keyboard wired, you have to hit Fn and U. I did at first find this setup quite annoying, especially when trying to use the keyboard wirelessly. A notable omission of the keyboard is any kind of physical power switch, putting you at the mercy of its auto-sleep functionality. This does a good job of keeping the hefty 6000mAh battery going, but it can be frustrating to be waiting a few seconds for the keyboard to reconnect after watching a YouTube video or something similar. I did later find out that the time required before sleeping can be configured in the driver software, but it would’ve been nice for that to be mentioned somewhere in the manual.

I can hazard a guess as to why there’s no kind of physical power switch though, with there being a wired-only variant of the keyboard also available in the M1. I would assume in wanting to keep the case the same, they had to have the switch in a place that wouldn’t look odd on a keyboard that doesn’t support wireless functionality. Because of this though, you’re also left with a loose dongle that you’re challenged not to lose and a power switch you’ll need a keycap puller to actually get to. On a desk this may not be the biggest deal, but having the keyboard constantly trying to turn itself back on if traveling isn’t all that ideal.

Hey It Still Sounds Great Though

Despite my irritations with the wireless, I do still really like how this keyboard sounds. The gasket-mounted polycarbonate plate provides a remarkably ridig typing experience, paired with some incredibly muted keys thanks to the porom foam hiding underneath. With the linear Piano Pro switches it all comes together nicely for a remarkably satisfying and quiet pre-built keyboard. My only real complaint is that the space bar rattles a little more than I imagine most would like in a keyboard like this. Personally I don’t mind a bit of space bar rattle, since a loud space press is something I find quite enjoyable to mix up sound of the board a bit. I can certainly see this being a concern to others though. It’s something you could address yourself pretty easily by opening the keyboard up and lubing the stabilisers, but if you’re buying a pre-built configuration, I can understand this not being something you’d want to do straight away.

Having said that, MonsGeek really did go out of their way to cater to those eager to tinker. A first in the keyboards I’ve looked at, the M1W comes with a pre-cut sheet of tape for the glorious “tape mod” so many in the space are fond of. If you don’t know, this is just the process of putting tape on the underside of the PCB to change the sound profile and make the case sound a little less hollow. It’s not a complicated task at the best of times, but having something pre-cut just makes it that much more accessible for those new to the practice.

If you are interested in how the M1W sounds out of the box, I’ve recorded a snippet above, along with brief video tour of the keyboard itself. In short though, I’m a really big fan.

Driver Software…

If you’ve seen one of my keyboard reviews before, you’ll know I am often not too fond of brand-specific driver software. While MonsGeek have, as many before them, put together something that covers all your essentials, I can still say it hasn’t won me over. Functional is the name of the game, and they’ve managed that well enough. Every key can be remapped relatively easily, as well as the function layer accessible by holding the Fn key. You can assign macros or just simple key combinations, though notably cannot edit any default function layer options that relate to keyboard. You can still remap the function keys and what they do while holding Fn past their default setup, but I do at least wish it would tell you what the otherwise unmappable keys actually do from inside the driver software. There’s a good number of these inaccessible keys, and it would just be handy to have an easy place of reference outside of keeping the manual (or its PDF counterpart) to hand. If there is one saving grace here though, it’s in the fact that you don’t need the driver software running in the background for the changes to persist. It’s always a big point for me and it is a area of redemption if you only really have to use the driver software once to get things setup how you like and then never interact with it again.

Looking beyond what’s available now, there does appear to be a flavour of this keyboard in the works with QMK/VIA compatibility according to MonsGeek’s official site. This is something I really do feel is worth the wait, with VIA being one of the simplest and most accessible packages I’ve used for remapping a keyboard.

Closing Thoughts

MonsGeek’s M1W is undoubtedly a solid package, supported by a great assortment of variations to meet whatever needs you may have. At $110 as a barebones kit ($100 if you’re happy to forego wireless functionality) you have a fantastic base for what I can only imagine to be a great keyboard. The pre-build model I have on hand also offers some pretty decent value, with the keycaps and switches only adding an extra $30 to the price. The M1W is a great keyboard, and it’s certainly put MonsGeek on my radar for future projects.