I think we need more systems like this. Dedicated gaming machines with standard hardware that developers can target and taylor their games for. Making AAA games for top of the line hardware leaves a lot of gamers behind, because most of us don't have access to that kind of hardware, especially these days. Now, I know you're probably thinking, "what you're talking about already exist, they're called gaming consoles." Yes, but gaming consoles have at least one major drawback: they lock you into one company's software ecosystem.
A game developer can accomplish mini miracles once they understand the limitations of the hardware they're working with. There are countless tricks up their sleeves for working around issues of fidelity with slick hacks. Look at what Unreal Engine 5 does with Lumen. They're "emulating" ray tracing for a fraction of the compute cost.
Dude killer video, thanks for using some racing games. By the way I wonder if the 2 that clobbered themselves in skate 3 were viewers kinda funny to think about
Hey Everyone, Based on ETA's Videos I pulled the trigger, followed the link in the description and Purchased the i9 version with 16gb of Ram. it came to £623.23 (GBP) with free shipping to the UK. I ordered today and is scheduled to arrive on 6th of July. I used a credit card via PayPal so I think I'm covered if things go south. I wanted a small form factor PC to run high end emulation on my home made arcade cabinet and like most I was cautious about getting something like this sent from China. So if any of you fellow "Primers" want to know what a real average Joe's experiences are with this please ask, and I'll keep you all posted.
Hi @tom reed That describes me, friend! I’m want to do the same thing - I need an emulation pc such as this one for my own home built arcade cabinet. Yes, please keep us posted. Thanks!
I got the i9 version as well. I've had it for a couple of months now. It is really nice. Quite loud at times with PS3 emulation but otherwise not bad at all.
@@mauleymaule Hey Liam! What do you mean "not bad at all? I don't know if i just buy this mini pc or waiting for a intel 11th generation mini pc. Which games did you test and did you also test it with yuzu and xenia?
I've had a confirmation email that it's on its way. I kinda wish I'd asked them to put 2 x 8gb of ram rather than 1x 16gb. I hope running single channel ram won't cost much in performance.
Hi everyone, my parcel arrived today! I've plugged it in and checked everything is in order. The items packaged are exactly the same as ETA Primes 1st video. My initial thoughts are: 1. The parcel was left outside my door in the hallway of my apartment building while I was at work. On it was a printed label saying "not signed for". 2. It took a little longer than I would expect to boot up. It lingered uncomfortably on a black screen with some writing on it. But booted eventually. 3. The 512 SSD has been partitioned into two 220gb storage spaces. One for the OS and the other is free space. 4. When the fans kick in they are like jet engines! Don't expect whisper quiet. I haven't tried running any programs, games or emulation yet. I will keep you posted. I also intend to install a sata storage drive inside in the near future. So far, so good. No regrets yet. If you have any questions, let me know. 👍😃
Great review bought one after ur first vid thanks! I went top spec just gotta wait for it to arrive! Love to see vid on redoing thermal paste and cooling.
Great video as always. You are so blazing fast with quality reviews. So fast that there is almost nothing in this field to be done. WELL big tech giants are already slow since 2011 cause of proces shrinking problem. I suggest if you can afford to properly round up 11gen Intel especialy 11960 series for laptop. 12 gen is coming with ddr5 finally and is to be expected that Igpu will benefit strong.
I always see you display games when it gets to PS3 emulation that may be harder to run but aren't as graphically Intense or don't require as much rendering or shaving or texturing xcetera...like your skate games. I'd love to see you show off more more intense gaming like your God of War style games...and maybe some more in depth action and RPG Games. Show me the Final Fantasy 7 remake running on a system like this on the PS3 emulator.
Mine should get here tomorrow. I really hope I get what I ordered. I'm always nervous ordering from AliExpress. I got the bare bones, no SSD, memory, or OS. I got the top one, the midrange you got is sold out. My notebook uses the same memory so I'll use it until I get new. What is the max speed of memory would make sense for this system?
I'm glad they made it easy to disable those freaking annoying red LEDs at the top! Just unplugged them from the power button board. They are not good for immersion. . .
ETA, have you tried "Ishiiruka Dolphin"? I can't recall seeing it in any of your videos, and I know in this specific video I'm commenting on, regular Dolphin worked just fine. Anyways, if you're unfamiliar with it, Ishiiruka Dolphin is a fork that optimizes Dolphin for lower-end devices, and could be beneficial on many computers you test using iGPUs only. Would love to see some tests using it!
Crazy thing is a couple years ago I build to gamming PCs with some old Dell Optiplexs, one with GTX 1660 and one with GTX 1650 for about $450 each including the PCs. Now you can even get either graphics cards for the price of my entire builds.
Bought the GMK NucBox 2 (Intel i5-8279U CPU) earlier this week during the Prime Day sale at $370. If using dual channel 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM maybe it can run GameCube, PS2, Wii games etc @ native res with not too much frame skipping (if any?). Too bad ETA Prime only tested DC and PSP games on it which it runs flawlessly. I really think mini PCs at the price range of $350 to $500 is the sweet spot for retro game emulation. Those cheaper models run intel Celeron CPUs which sucks big time and those costing $500 to $900 of course can run PS3, WiiU games etc but in terms of value for money also sucks big time.
So I have the Droix branded version (same machine) and for whatever reason my PCSX2 just doesn't stay at a steady 60FPS. Been trying to play a childhood game Chamber of Secrets and the frame rate constantly drops below 50 FPS which results in slow down but my CPU and GPU are nowhere near being maxed out
I just received the PC the other day. PS3 emulation plays great but for some reason retroarch and dolphin emulation is running really bad. On dolphin I'm getting 24 fps with choppy audio.
Where did you get it at $550? The AliExpress link you posted doesn't seem to go below $900, but that might be because of shipping to my country being included in the displayed price
I was wondering as well, he seem to quote the lowest price possible with no ram or SSD. Maybe if he quote the actual price of his spec people won't watch the video as it will be expensive to buy. As it stands many didn't click through to the store and assumed the price is for the spec he had. That is more than a bit misleading.
Great video mate, I've got one of these and have had some really good results with it but I noticed in your latest video "Ultra Small Water Cooled 5700G Gaming PC Build!" you were able to get your hands on a 240w PSU, I was wondering if there's a chance that you could test that power supply with this box to see if you could get better overclocking results? I saw a youtube video not too long ago where someone was maxing out the 150w PSU that came with this unit.
Anyone that has one of these get 4K 60 i can only get 30 so when i set it to 1080 i need to adjust the overscan but its nowhere to be found not having a good time with this so far.
It was thermal throttling during skate 3, interesting. Can you boost fan speed manually to offset this? Is undervolting enabled also? Thanks! Great little system.
Hi. I have the same PC. The limitation with Zelda BOTW is weird. It happens no matter the resolution, and it doesn't happen with other unlockable games like Xenoblade X or Tokyo Mirage Sessions. @Eta, does the 3,5mm jack in yours work correctly? Mine doesn't work, doesn't matter what I do.
For emulators they're all pre-packed into a disc image for you to flash into a bootable SDcard, e.g. Batocera or Emuelec images, which contained the OS and all the emulator software and drivers etc. For game ROM, you'll have to source it yourself. Some sellers do post on Amazon or AliExpress a complete SDcard filled with ROM files which is an option if you don't want to go through the trouble of finding the ROM files yourself, but I think they target Rasberry Pi hardware. Still, it's one way to get the ROM files as they can be copied out and used on Batocera, EmuElec or Windows PC etc.
OMG can you please stop making videos I feel like i keep getting robbed every mew video☺️😂 now I have the ryzen 5 x400 which is beast since the bios update and you can dedicate any amount of ram to the graphics, and now I have an i7 with the GTX in it I have three raspberry pis one of them the 400, a modular power supply a full size 1080 OC with the riser for m.2 insertion.... You and this channel are my go-to for all things mini and emulation but you're also the reason I'm up at 3:13 a.m. calling my credit card asking why they're denying China $1,000 charges to my card hahahaaa 😂I've been doing this since the original raspberry I had to wait 7 months to get my first raspberry it was the first batch ever launched it seems like yesterday but was so long ago.... Keep up the good work 💸💸💸🥧🦆💰🧘🍖
I think we need more systems like this. Dedicated gaming machines with standard hardware that developers can target and taylor their games for. Making AAA games for top of the line hardware leaves a lot of gamers behind, because most of us don't have access to that kind of hardware, especially these days. Now, I know you're probably thinking, "what you're talking about already exist, they're called gaming consoles." Yes, but gaming consoles have at least one major drawback: they lock you into one company's software ecosystem.
A game developer can accomplish mini miracles once they understand the limitations of the hardware they're working with. There are countless tricks up their sleeves for working around issues of fidelity with slick hacks. Look at what Unreal Engine 5 does with Lumen. They're "emulating" ray tracing for a fraction of the compute cost.
5:49 best part of the video. That shii had me dying.
I love how now days an i7 is considered midrange
I guess is i7 9th gen processor is equallent to i5 10th gen ? That's why maybe a mid range 🤔
@@mhhocane3513 mid range to me on the intel side would be the 10400 and the 2600/3600 amd side
@@mhhocane3513 idk, I'm still rocking a 4790k and a ryzen 1700x.
@@ryanblackwell8321 *_4790k is a solid CPU. One of the best Intel has ever made._*
@@kevindie I have 2600k I maybe will be upgrading
You rock man...grabbing this!
Dude killer video, thanks for using some racing games. By the way I wonder if the 2 that clobbered themselves in skate 3 were viewers kinda funny to think about
Emulation Rocket... whahaha that is a fun way to say it 😂
You are creative with the naming of your titels 😄
"Titels"
Finally given in and ordered one today!
Hey Everyone,
Based on ETA's Videos I pulled the trigger, followed the link in the description and Purchased the i9 version with 16gb of Ram. it came to £623.23 (GBP) with free shipping to the UK. I ordered today and is scheduled to arrive on 6th of July. I used a credit card via PayPal so I think I'm covered if things go south.
I wanted a small form factor PC to run high end emulation on my home made arcade cabinet and like most I was cautious about getting something like this sent from China. So if any of you fellow "Primers" want to know what a real average Joe's experiences are with this please ask, and I'll keep you all posted.
Hi @tom reed That describes me, friend! I’m want to do the same thing - I need an emulation pc such as this one for my own home built arcade cabinet. Yes, please keep us posted. Thanks!
I got the i9 version as well. I've had it for a couple of months now. It is really nice. Quite loud at times with PS3 emulation but otherwise not bad at all.
@@mauleymaule Hey Liam! What do you mean "not bad at all? I don't know if i just buy this mini pc or waiting for a intel 11th generation mini pc. Which games did you test and did you also test it with yuzu and xenia?
I've had a confirmation email that it's on its way. I kinda wish I'd asked them to put 2 x 8gb of ram rather than 1x 16gb. I hope running single channel ram won't cost much in performance.
Hi everyone, my parcel arrived today! I've plugged it in and checked everything is in order. The items packaged are exactly the same as ETA Primes 1st video.
My initial thoughts are:
1. The parcel was left outside my door in the hallway of my apartment building while I was at work. On it was a printed label saying "not signed for".
2. It took a little longer than I would expect to boot up. It lingered uncomfortably on a black screen with some writing on it. But booted eventually.
3. The 512 SSD has been partitioned into two 220gb storage spaces. One for the OS and the other is free space.
4. When the fans kick in they are like jet engines! Don't expect whisper quiet.
I haven't tried running any programs, games or emulation yet. I will keep you posted. I also intend to install a sata storage drive inside in the near future.
So far, so good. No regrets yet. If you have any questions, let me know. 👍😃
5:46 "With a lots of people walking around..." *BAM!*
I need one...
For my 12TB HYPERSPIN!
Thanks for featuring the Xbox emulators. Good work.
Great review bought one after ur first vid thanks! I went top spec just gotta wait for it to arrive! Love to see vid on redoing thermal paste and cooling.
Let me know how it goes for you! Very interested
Any good?
Great review
thats what im talking about thats a great pc im loving it great video thanks.
That intro....I like it!
Omg it has a 1650 🤯
Great video as always. You are so blazing fast with quality reviews. So fast that there is almost nothing in this field to be done. WELL big tech giants are already slow since 2011 cause of proces shrinking problem. I suggest if you can afford to properly round up 11gen Intel especialy 11960 series for laptop. 12 gen is coming with ddr5 finally and is to be expected that Igpu will benefit strong.
My pc feeling shy with Intel core i3 5005U without a dedicated graphics card 😭😅😅
Do you have an intel from 35th generation? Does it have 128 cores?
@@uweball813 Hell yeah 😂😂😂
I always see you display games when it gets to PS3 emulation that may be harder to run but aren't as graphically Intense or don't require as much rendering or shaving or texturing xcetera...like your skate games. I'd love to see you show off more more intense gaming like your God of War style games...and maybe some more in depth action and RPG Games. Show me the Final Fantasy 7 remake running on a system like this on the PS3 emulator.
?
Mine should get here tomorrow. I really hope I get what I ordered. I'm always nervous ordering from AliExpress. I got the bare bones, no SSD, memory, or OS. I got the top one, the midrange you got is sold out. My notebook uses the same memory so I'll use it until I get new. What is the max speed of memory would make sense for this system?
@Usman Bamgbola is it good?
You the man! always finding something new to entertain us with!
I'm glad they made it easy to disable those freaking annoying red LEDs at the top! Just unplugged them from the power button board. They are not good for immersion. . .
Pzl make a video about ps4 emulation ! Also let us know what sort of pc specs are required. Your videos are so much helpful. Thank you 🙏🏽
I don't think there even is software that emulates the PS4.
Gps4 ! Not still perfect
goodness. your videos always make these things sound cheap until i check the price.
I think this is the first review you didn't go over fan noise. You went over heat on the windows games video of this unit but not fan noise.
Yo! It’s an updated Alienware alpha!!
No link in the description to earlier video.
I'm just gonna stick with my original plan to get Deskmini X300
this is awesome for emulation. I think, better Hardware is not necessary
ETA
E: emulation
T: try
A: all days
Imagine if something like DLSS or FSR becomes possible for emulators. Sure hope so.
switch and ps3emulation have now
ETA, have you tried "Ishiiruka Dolphin"? I can't recall seeing it in any of your videos, and I know in this specific video I'm commenting on, regular Dolphin worked just fine. Anyways, if you're unfamiliar with it, Ishiiruka Dolphin is a fork that optimizes Dolphin for lower-end devices, and could be beneficial on many computers you test using iGPUs only. Would love to see some tests using it!
Damn! Superb
I wish I had $600+ to pick this one up. It would make for a great retro console/HTPC in the TV wall unit
Crazy thing is a couple years ago I build to gamming PCs with some old Dell Optiplexs, one with GTX 1660 and one with GTX 1650 for about $450 each including the PCs. Now you can even get either graphics cards for the price of my entire builds.
Bought the GMK NucBox 2 (Intel i5-8279U CPU) earlier this week during the Prime Day sale at $370.
If using dual channel 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM maybe it can run GameCube, PS2, Wii games etc @ native res with not too much frame skipping (if any?). Too bad ETA Prime only tested DC and PSP games on it which it runs flawlessly.
I really think mini PCs at the price range of $350 to $500 is the sweet spot for retro game emulation. Those cheaper models run intel Celeron CPUs which sucks big time and those costing $500 to $900 of course can run PS3, WiiU games etc but in terms of value for money also sucks big time.
I first subscribed to your channel when you're around 100k subs. Congrats on the 700k
Awesome little machine! With regard to emulation, would you recommend separate emulators for each platform or retroarch?
Separate always
Would launch box be usefull in that so it can use diffent emulators for different platform's?
mine died in less than 30 days...idk
ETA Prime: 4K Wii emulation
My internet: best I can do is 144p
Very good for the price
It would be nice to see how well this performs with games supporting AMD's new FSR.
If you want upscaling don't hope for fsr to be amazing. It won't be as good as dlss 2.0
@@adrianrylski8794 maybe not but I'm curious about it.
Bro good video 👍 can you test some pc games mortal Kombat 11 or x on this device ?
ETA, how many machines do you have for emulation?
ETA's reply: "Yes.."
ETA: "Yes"
How well is Switch emulation on this mini pc?
Why not try teknoparrot when testing emulation?
teknoparrot isn't emulation, it's technically more like a native pc game
Temps were pretty decent
ETAPRIME when are you going to review the Lenovo legion 5?
Which one?
@@DOHA104p3 I said it legion 5 dosent matter what model of legion 5 or 7
@@VOLTRONDEFENDER4440 there are thousands of legion 5. I want to know which specific one. There are some using an ryzen apu and other intels cpu
@@DOHA104p3 well my laptop which is a legion 5 from Costco has a intel i5 cpu and a nvida gtx 1060
@@DOHA104p3 but I recommend amd ryzen legion 5 it’s much cheaper than intel legion 5s
So I have the Droix branded version (same machine) and for whatever reason my PCSX2 just doesn't stay at a steady 60FPS. Been trying to play a childhood game Chamber of Secrets and the frame rate constantly drops below 50 FPS which results in slow down but my CPU and GPU are nowhere near being maxed out
You should've tried yuzu the switch emulator...
That you for making an emulation video for this PC.
Can you upgrade the GPU to an RTX?
No, the GPU in this thing is the mobile (laptop) variant of the GTX 1650 and therefor not replaceable.
Please make a video on ryzen 5 3400g vs ryzen 3 5300g
No artwork and no screen bezels?!
Would you be playing Guilty Gear Strive?
I just received the PC the other day. PS3 emulation plays great but for some reason retroarch and dolphin emulation is running really bad. On dolphin I'm getting 24 fps with choppy audio.
Were all these running w/ the TDP at 45W or 65W?
Would you also be able to share how loud the fans get when running at 45W vs 65W?
Thanks!
I would also love to know this….
This is the I7 9750H do you think it would make a lot of difference in performance if you had chosen the i9 9880h?
This mini pc is including the games or i need to download ??
I really miss some Yuzu and Citra emulation in this review =(
Wow gt4 looks great ps2 I'm so surprised
What about fan noise?
how is the i9 cpu compared to this ?
This or a 6900hx from miniforums with rdna2?
does this come with games pre-loaded or do we have to do it ourselves?
Where did you get it at $550? The AliExpress link you posted doesn't seem to go below $900, but that might be because of shipping to my country being included in the displayed price
I was wondering as well, he seem to quote the lowest price possible with no ram or SSD. Maybe if he quote the actual price of his spec people won't watch the video as it will be expensive to buy.
As it stands many didn't click through to the store and assumed the price is for the spec he had. That is more than a bit misleading.
Nice system. Can you taste PUBG Steam and Witcher 3
Why not test Yuzu?
Legal issue with Nintendo. They take down videos.
they take down cause of copyright
@@SRC267 He tests Cemu, however.
@@ZeoWorks cemu games are older, yuzu is more recent games and Nintendo are more strict
Did he stop putting prices in the specs list?
I was watching this on aliexpress and it seems "buyable", considering only a normal gtx 1650 is around 380USD in my country right now
Laptop gpu btw
Have you tried any Sega Dreamcast Emulators?
Did this come with all those games/emulators preinstalled?
Great video mate, I've got one of these and have had some really good results with it but I noticed in your latest video "Ultra Small Water Cooled 5700G Gaming PC Build!" you were able to get your hands on a 240w PSU, I was wondering if there's a chance that you could test that power supply with this box to see if you could get better overclocking results? I saw a youtube video not too long ago where someone was maxing out the 150w PSU that came with this unit.
Want to get one pf these gtx 16500 mini, for emulation and mid gaming, is it really worth it? Or nah
Would a laptop with same processor and spec, able to perform same 🍿
Anyone that has one of these get 4K 60 i can only get 30 so when i set it to 1080 i need to adjust the overscan but its nowhere to be found not having a good time with this so far.
You always use vulkan in dolphin, is it better than the other options? I've had mixed results personally
It was thermal throttling during skate 3, interesting. Can you boost fan speed manually to offset this? Is undervolting enabled also? Thanks! Great little system.
COST?
Can anyone tell me which the small xbox controller that is on the THUMBNAIL
Wanna know too
is there any way to make these emulators run this good on a 1650 pc
Whatever happened to you doing a video on Oculus Quest emulation 🤔
Hi. I have the same PC.
The limitation with Zelda BOTW is weird. It happens no matter the resolution, and it doesn't happen with other unlockable games like Xenoblade X or Tokyo Mirage Sessions.
@Eta, does the 3,5mm jack in yours work correctly? Mine doesn't work, doesn't matter what I do.
Interesting, but: can it do 4K 60FPS over HDMI? The website lists 4K@30fps…does it not support HDMI 2.0?
Can this run front ends well?
Will it allow you to upgrade to DDR6 RAM?
Ah..too expensive for me…even at bare is still quite high…so I’ve opted for Asus ROG w/ 1660 super
Nice choice. The SUPER cards are good for the money.
Where do you get the emulators and games at
Is it hard to set up all the emulators and roms
No. It's pretty easy if you know what you're doing.
For emulators they're all pre-packed into a disc image for you to flash into a bootable SDcard, e.g. Batocera or Emuelec images, which contained the OS and all the emulator software and drivers etc. For game ROM, you'll have to source it yourself. Some sellers do post on Amazon or AliExpress a complete SDcard filled with ROM files which is an option if you don't want to go through the trouble of finding the ROM files yourself, but I think they target Rasberry Pi hardware. Still, it's one way to get the ROM files as they can be copied out and used on Batocera, EmuElec or Windows PC etc.
OMG can you please stop making videos I feel like i keep getting robbed every mew video☺️😂 now I have the ryzen 5 x400 which is beast since the bios update and you can dedicate any amount of ram to the graphics, and now I have an i7 with the GTX in it I have three raspberry pis one of them the 400, a modular power supply a full size 1080 OC with the riser for m.2 insertion.... You and this channel are my go-to for all things mini and emulation but you're also the reason I'm up at 3:13 a.m. calling my credit card asking why they're denying China $1,000 charges to my card hahahaaa 😂I've been doing this since the original raspberry I had to wait 7 months to get my first raspberry it was the first batch ever launched it seems like yesterday but was so long ago.... Keep up the good work 💸💸💸🥧🦆💰🧘🍖
No storage or RAM? 😔
How does this perform with open gl on ps2? I want to use one of these for batocera.
next video title : This [device] is an emulation GOLIATH
Dose this have thunderbolt?
For $753 CAD it damn well BETTER kick emu ass.
Squawk!
Can it be used for I-racing?
Does it come preload
Does this support windows 11
why not red dead on ps3 emulator?
What kind of controller is on the thumbnail? It has an Xbox button but the analog stick is swapped?
i think its the 8bitdo xbox controller
@@KYepic thanks. I found it.
Can it be taken off the case?
make a video installing holo iso on this mini pc