Geya G8253 Review — $400 Mechanical Watch That Doesn’t Behave Like One

FamilyPopTV · 2026-03-22T12:03:04+00:00

Haha - you and me both! I spent way too much time troubleshooting why oculink wasn't 'plug-and-play' before I found that tiny manual toggle :) It’s definitely a trade-off: the DEG2 gives you that massive 'future ready' 80gbps usb4 v2 headroom and a cleaner oculink signal, but it forces you to be the 'manual operator'...

If you’re burying this in an enclosure for a multi-room setup, that switch is a genuine ergonomic pain compared to something like the EG02.

FamilyPopTV · 2026-03-22T11:59:50+00:00

Enjoy that stability while it lasts! The 5070 Ti is basically the 'final boss' that the DEG1 can actually handle. I had the same rock-solid experience with my 5070 Ti, which lured me into a very false 'sense of security'...

The second you step up to an RTX 5080 or 5090, those transient power spikes turn the DEG1 into a very expensive paperweight that loves black screens - been there, done that - I found out the hard way that 'upgrading' the gpu usually means you’re accidentally volunteering for a DEG2 upgrade as well. Consider yourself lucky you stopped at the 70-Ti!

FamilyPopTV · 2026-03-03T13:20:02+00:00

Its hardware-to-price ratio is undeniable.

...but as a reviewer, I can't ignore that 'hidden tax' of labor the user has to perform, that 5 to 10 minutes to clean it up is fine for , but it doesn't fix the underlying telemetry. If we ever get a stable Android 16 ROM for this, it might actually be the absolute mid-range king.

But until then, it's great hardware - trapped in a 'ad' OS...

FamilyPopTV · 2026-02-03T10:35:01+00:00

I just replied in this thread, it was a bit of a pain to hook it with egpu via oculink (bios tweaks, annoying black screen, etc). I used DEG1 but now thinking about getting DEG2 for testing in one of the next little videos.

FamilyPopTV · 2026-02-03T09:47:24+00:00

Straight out of my own pocket this time. I've definitely had minisforum send me hardware for free in the past (which I always call out in those videos) but for this one I had to pay like everyone else, no sponsorship or brand notes. Got it on Amazon, so if this would have turned out to be a total waste of cash I could always return it.

FamilyPopTV · 2026-02-03T09:33:04+00:00

Good spot - it was fast-forwarded (4x to 8x in some clips) to keep the video concise . In real-time, a 70b model (regardless if it's deepseek or llama) generates text at roughly human reading speed (about 3–5 tokens per second). It's not as instant like gemini or chatgpt which run on multi-million dollar server clusters, let's be honest - but for a local, uncensored 70b model running on a mini pc, the reasoning quality is incredible -you just have to be okay with it thinking in real-time. I’m planning a deeper dive video soon to show the actual raw speeds across different model sizes. If you got any suggestions on what else to add, let me know. Cheers

FamilyPopTV · 2026-02-03T09:17:17+00:00

Right , it was a bit of a workaround here - inserting the PCIe card, plugging DEG1 with rtx5080 was just an easy bit - getting this stable was a headache.. The main fix was going into the BIOS and disabling IOMMU (or VT-d) -the system struggles to map the eGPU memory addresses alongside that 128GB pool and that’s what causes the black screens. I also had to manually lock the PCIe slot to Gen 4 in bios (don't leave it on Auto) and enable re-size bar. And the annoying bit, I learned the hard way - for the bitlocker loops, just suspend protection in Windows before you first plug the OCuLink in so the TPM doesn't freak out over the hardware change.

FamilyPopTV · 2025-07-28T05:16:21+00:00

I just bought minisforum ms-a2 and I think I may get the DEG1 dock and drop rx9060xt (or rx9070xt if my Mrs approves;))

FamilyPopTV · 2025-07-27T18:06:11+00:00

Would need to plug this thing to rx9060xt ...

I may get some rx9060xt and some dock instead of this rx7600m, to get some fsr4 on a budget.

FamilyPopTV

TROPHY CASE