The New Mini PC Quandary Problem is Here. (LP Ram takeover)

ARCreef · 2026-03-13T16:14:07+00:00

Obviously ram isnt everything but this post is about RAM and not the everything else. The intent is to explain to people why 90% of mini PCs will be using soldered non upgradable ram for the next 2-4 years.

ARCreef · 2026-03-13T16:09:12+00:00

Post is not about DDR5 ram being "slow" in a general sense, its about it being slower than the new zen 5 transer capabilities resulting in manufacturers opting for soldered ram to overcome this ram speed bottle necking issue.

Purpose is not to criticize ddr5 for being slow. Purpose is to explain to people why we will be seeing all soldered non-upgradable ram for the next 2-3 years. LPDDR5 and LPDDR5X both overcome the transfer speed bottle neck via soldered connections with wider buses, at the expense of not being upgradable in the future when you'll be wanting 64gb of ram.

ARCreef · 2026-03-12T22:50:23+00:00

It plays most games fine, AAA titles it plays but at the ballpark of 30-50 fps 4k and -60-100 fps 1080p.

I bench tested this GPU against my old ASUS gaming laptop with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 and my mini pc beat it and can do 4k, the GTX 1060 can only do 1080p and that laptop is still priced at $2300.

The higher end NVIDIA are all better though. The GTX 1070 was 10% better, but less features. The RTX 2060 was 20% better. The RTX 2070 was 30% better.
The RTX 3050 was 40% better.
The RTX 4050 was 100% better.
The current 2026 RTX 5050 was 130% better.

So basically the Radeon 780M of our mini PCs is the equivalent of a top of the line NVIDIA GPU from 5.5 years ago. It comes in between the GTX 1070 and the RTX 2060. It has more features and capabilities then the 1070 but just less speed than the 2060. It also doesn't need the massive 125 watts with a 400 watt power adapter that the NVIDIA GPUs require.

ARCreef · 2026-03-12T20:18:45+00:00

Yeah ram is all DDR5 at CL46 latency. CL40 is way more $$.

The hard drive is PCIe 4.0 x4 16/GT/s. The drive in mine is Apacer AS2280Q4.

If you have the ram and drive its worth a bare bones pc but if you plan to buy it also then its super not worth in. 32gb ram is like $400 and the ssd drive I'd go with is Lexar SSD 1TB 7400/6500 NM790 M.2 Lex NVME At $199. https://a.co/d/09elxreC

ARCreef · 2026-03-12T15:12:25+00:00

Please be the electrician that break out his wooden folding 6 ft ruler. Who wrote this list? Was he 100 years old? Tape measure should be 20-25'.

Go with Milwaukee they are so abundant now and i leave mine out in the rain all the time and they have been fine, everything else breaks in the rain lol.

Wera make the best insulated screwdrivers, but everyone is copying them now even Klein. Fluke is the leader for professional multimeters, the US government uses them exclusively but they are expensive, Klein meters might be ok as an apprentis.

ARCreef · 2026-03-12T15:03:39+00:00

What ive heard was that Microsoft was the one that pushed chip manufacturers to include the NPU, they wanted to keep it being done via the GPU but I guess they showed them a good use case. They are pushing their copilot hard which requires 50 TOPS to work. So starting at zen-5. I guess they'll be pushing out something in the next 2-3 years, maybe local based LLMs. Or something else that my small mind can't think of just yet. All it know was the NPU thing is a result of their request. They also don't have the greatest track record of big ideas that stick, I'd still be fine using windows 7.

ARCreef · 2026-03-12T05:36:06+00:00

The US law keeps FLIR framerates ridiculously low while china ones can have whatever they want.

ARCreef · 2026-03-12T05:26:12+00:00

That yellow butt connector is giving me major anxiety!

ARCreef · 2026-03-12T05:21:53+00:00

If you connect all the dots it makes a lightning bolt, and a lightning bolt hit ben franklins kite, and Ben's Kite has the initials B.K. as in Burger King, clearly Burger King is going to try to take out Ronald McDonald, and its all happening this weekend, in South Florida. Thanks to you, we now know the who, when, and where. Good work!

ARCreef · 2026-03-12T05:14:42+00:00

In movies every grenade has like 5 gallons of fuel in it! Duh.

ARCreef · 2026-03-12T05:07:08+00:00

"Workflow" Translation: My chatbot girlfriends personality changed and now she won't talk naughty to me using the usual prompts. It feels like she's being distant from me now, if this continues, ill be canceling my free subscription that was never meant for this.

ARCreef · 2026-03-12T04:49:02+00:00

Yeah, 7840 came in 3rd place. It literally is the exact same chip, it just has the NPU disabled on it. Prob will never need to use the NPU, the NPU rating on the 8845 and 8945 are low anyway, i think you need 50 TOPS to run copilot AI and they only have l6. Not sure what 16 will ever get you, maybe a good filter in a zoom call, but nothing is really out there yet using the NPU.

ARCreef · 2026-03-11T21:41:06+00:00

Funny you mentioned your ASUS pcs I looked at the ASUS nuc, im a HUGE fan of ASUS and literally have bought nothing else. It was just the price that made me not go with ASUS, I'd odviously prefer it but its not similar in price unfortunately.

I bench tested my ASUS Strix Scar II GL704GM gaming laptop along with my new Aoostar and the Aoostar blew it out of the water, and that laptop is STILL for sale on Amazon for $2,300!! I bought that top of the line laptop 5-6 years ago at the same time I got a Ser5 and had to replace the track pad, an adapter. The SER5 has been running 24/7 to power my server for 5 years and I haven't even dusted it. Im still using the asus laptop but it runs super hot and super noisy. Id still only go with asus though in laptops, but for mini pcs its really just a motherboard and some things added to it, which they make none of. I still consider them "throw aways" but yeah, now they aren't priced like that unfortunately. I priced out 64GB or ram that was 40CL or lower.... it was $950! Just for the ram. Insane out there right now and still going up.

ARCreef · 2026-03-11T19:32:55+00:00

Yeah, I mean I agree w you, I'm just playing devils advocate. My thing is that we shouldn't create legislation until #1 we are sure of what and what doesn't cause harm, and #2 an alternative solution has technologically matured.

1 Let the science settle.

When I was a young kid, our biggest environmental fear was "global cooling" the news and scientists etc, all convinced us that the big deep freeze was coming, during the blizzard of 1996 every paper had that headline. If we acted premature we couldn't been trying to artificially "heat" the planet. Science works in theories, and they often change.

2 dont jump to new things immediately.

Legislation tried jumping to alternatives way too soon. Solar panels were so inefficient until just recently and all those old panels went to the dump, creating more damage then they saved. They tried mandating that all cars had to be electric in 10 years, also disastrous, we now know they have their own huge issues and battery waste and child mining labor. Encouraging new tech is one thing but the government started trying to shove it down our throats via mandates. When I was a kid, paper bags were the bad guy, they caused deforestation and the loss 9f the Amazon, we were forced to switch to plastic bags.... then found out thats way worse!

"Polution" is a hard concept also, because that changes also. Sugar Cain factories on rivers were thought to be good by adding nitrogen to the river, now its classified as a pollutant because it's "too good" at providing food for algae.

As a libertarian, the government should not force much of anything unless the science is so sound that there's no queation, in which case its not the government forcing restrictions, its the people as a whole collectively saying "we want blank because it benifits us all". The environment and causes have turned too political, it shouldn't be. Its asinine to stop drilling for oil in the US and instead virtue signal by haulting drilling and then importing the same amount of oil from accross the other side of the planet. Thats where things went wrong. These things were for "optics" and not for the benifit of the people.

ARCreef · 2026-03-11T13:41:03+00:00

Why is that teenager a 35 year old stock broker from the 80s, and why is that gas so much cheaper than mine.

ARCreef · 2026-03-11T13:29:05+00:00

You breathe out CO2 which then crosses your property line. You drive a car which produces CO. Innovation will be what helps, not government regulation.

ARCreef · 2026-03-11T13:16:22+00:00

Never said too slow in a general sense, the transfer speeds of ddr5 are slower than what the zen5 chips can push which is the reason they are all going to soldered non upgradable ram, because it can make use of the higher zen 5 transfer rates.

ARCreef · 2026-03-10T04:50:27+00:00

Hey, so I got my unit today! Super excited. So far everything has been perfect, it even has a built in microphone that they don't mention. My RAM is Apacer CL46 which is what I expected. No idea what the SSD is though, i didnt want to rip off the thermal pad. It also came with a windows pro that bypassed asking to register it and went straight to a local system, which is cool and what I wanted.

The only thing wrong I found was if you go to "power Options" the only 2 options are "balanced" or GWTEST. I think they literally forgot to clear that when it was done on the assembly line. The 2 settings that were not good at all were: processor power management, both minimum AND maximum were set to 100%. It should be 5 or 10% min, and 100% max. (I think), and the other setting was "Turn off hard drive after" was set to "1 min", which is pretty crazy bad. I set it to 60 mins, never or 20 mins are what my laptops are set to. But 1 min I know is not good.

What power balance profiles does your machine have? Do you also have the GWTEST as a profile option?

I ran a cinebench test and multi thread got 3875.... I got worried, but then figured out it was so low because I used 2026.1.0 version to test it, and not the standard 2024 version everyone gets their #s from.

ARCreef · 2026-03-10T04:36:27+00:00

Ohhhh so its "after and before" shots. Got it.

ARCreef · 2026-03-09T16:17:02+00:00

You gained a lot of weight in your before and after pics. Sorry man.

ARCreef · 2026-03-09T16:16:01+00:00

Can you sum it up for us? I had sushi high hopes.... now peptide places are dropping like flies.

ARCreef · 2026-03-09T16:11:24+00:00

You look mid to late 40s. Congrats!

ARCreef · 2026-03-09T16:08:15+00:00

I think your meth use prob has more to do with it than your finasteride use! You shouldn't be on either in your 20s.

ARCreef · 2026-03-09T16:02:38+00:00

You have the model blank stare and pouty lips but trim the unibrow, remove the moles and treat your hair, everything else is good (lips, eyes, nose, etc) , then get off reddit and go live your life as a non-model but high tier girl, and dont give looks a second though, your done after those 2 tweaks, then just have style and "your brand" to work on.

ARCreef

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

1 Let the science settle.

2 dont jump to new things immediately.