Review & Teardown - £78 "Z83" Windows 10 Mini PC from Banggood.com
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- Опубліковано 5 вер 2024
- In this video I take a look at the Z83 Mini PC that was kindly supplied by Banggood. I do a full review and demo of the machine before taking it to bits to see what it's like inside. This machine retails for £78 and has a Quad Core Intel Atom X5-Z8350 CPU, 2gb of RAM, 32gb of eMMC storage and comes preinstalled with Windows 10.
Z83-V Intel Atom x5-Z8350 2G/32G TV Box: www.banggood.c...
Banggood: www.banggood.c...
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Instant like for mentioning the bigclive deathdaptor
Same here. Deathdaptors are so much fun!
Good to see I'm not the only one having that reaction to Cortana and the installation process...
Senseless Cortana woke me up! I didn't expect my computer to f*** start talking in the evening or night or whatever....
Thanks for checking out linux on it, I would have had to beg you for it otherwise ;)
Everything I needed to know in one video, thanks for the upload, great as usual !
Company: Let's put Intel Logos all over the place
Also Company: We can't write HDMI due to licencing
Person on the internet who looks at memes all day: I need to do a colon based format for my comment because that's what everyone is doing, then I'll make a line break and write: "Also me:" and think that I'm being on point, fresh, at the end of the day, tbh, lol... because that was fire, right? Did you do a Tik Tok Wednesday dance? Snort a tide pod? Dump water on your head in the ice bucket challenge? Stand still like an idiot for the Mannequin challenge? Perhaps you are running to buy a crate of Prime drinks and toilet paper, but.....
Nobody:
Me: This is cringe
Also me: This is cringe
The internal USB can be used for software key fobs. Keeps the key fob from being lost, broken or stolen. This can be use useful in business deployments. Great review!
Thanks for mentioning H264ify, I have a tablet with an Atom Z8300 and it's definitely improved the performance when watching UA-cam videos
Ashton it's handy for the likes of Celerons and low end AMD processors too. Oh and Raspberry Pis. That's where I first heard of it actually.
yeah been using that a while on a sempron 2650 all 1080p work easily now
Never heard of it, just tested it on my 11.6 inch convertible with the Z8300 and Firefox (Windows 10). But performance went down the drain. Works much better here without H264ify. (Atom Z8300 1,44 GHz, 4 gb RAM, 64 gb storage and a 1920x1080 panel built into it).
I use these, they're extremely reliable I've found, even with the preinstalled Win10 running it sits happily for days streaming online from events or showing content on screens.
Regarding the driver issues: use on the included Win10 Home a program called Double Driver, save those "magic" drivers. And on your own install of Win10 you can easily restore those drivers with Double Driver. Nice and easy solution. I used this method on my Windows 8.1 tablet to upgrade to Win10 :)
Before doing a clean install on a oem machine, ALWAYS backup the drivers, i use double driver to that 4 me and it never lets me down ;)
I bought this mini pc January 2018 to stay powered on 24/7 and monitor my solar system. After few months something happened with it and it couldn't keep the time correctly which was vital for me as the PC had to update data of inverter to PVOUTPUT and having correct time was crucial for this. I even got Microsoft Support to help me fix this issue and they tried but couldn't fix it, as I later found out it was more of a hardware issue. Anyway once I moved this PC to a different room, the issue was gone itself. Perhaps the CMOS battery had moved from its place. Great and very detailed review by the way. 👌
I am a simple man.
OP mentions Big Clive, I subscribe.
Upholding the age-old British tradition of reviewing Chinese tat.
the mans got good taste
The Spy is not a simple man.
btw - the internal USB is usually intended for a KBAM transceiver. That's why they wouldn't have bothered with USB 3.0.
The stamp on the Elpida is the logo of Spectek, a Micron subsidiary (so is Elpida) for disposal of substandard rejected chips that are not good enough to be branded Elpida or Micorn. They will still work, but usually with higher power consumption or higher latency or lower bandwidth or narrower temperature range or a combination of them. Foresee is a Chinese company packaging managed NAND, not exactly the top notch company compared with Micron/Samsung, they use liquidated lesser grade chips from Spectek or other liquidation companies.
"Big Clive-esque deathdapter" haha! Love the reference. Big Clive is pretty great.
1. Use Reflect to make a image of emmc (from factory) and make usb recovery stick (if you ever want to go back to way it came from factory). 2. Use double driver to get all the drivers off the factory emmc of windows. 3. Do a clean install of windows and then reinstall drivers you saved using double drivers.
Nice touch with that internal USB port! That's actually really bloody clever!
Very useful review and really handy to learn about the internal USB socket which I have used to add a 128 GB flash drive. This makes the whole thing much more useful as otherwise Windows 10 takes most of the 32 GB main memory. The two external USBs remain free this way.
What would be interesting is to tear down is TV boxes. It is something no one does I mean you see a flood of reviews on TV boxes but it would be nice to see how well they are put together and perhaps the ones that are flimsy cheap.
Great and thorough video. Oh and great comments too. So friendly it's surreal by UA-cam standards.
Thanks for posting this. I may have to get one of these for my mother to replace her old Laptop/docking station that she's using now. (she uses it as a desktop PC and doesn't need to take it anywhere)
i never knew about h264ify you just sorted play back on my netbook thanks
That internal USB port was certainly a surprise. I expected it to be one of those "for OEM use only" ports like so many other devices have nowadays. That's not too shabby a machine for its price.
Extremely interesting! Thanks for the tear-down.
Nice review. As a side note, I wonder if these asian companies ever consult a native speaker of English to make sure their names can't be misinterpreted. The good people at Bang Good might have benefited from such consultation.
Great video ! EXCELLENT. I have 2 of these Minisforum fanless computers. One has Linux Mint installed on it. They both been working great for about a year now.
I've wanted to look inside them ! Thanks for the video. 👍
Does the sound/WiFi work on Linus Mint?
I got mine running on Ubuntu 20.04 but no WiFi. Then after 2 days trying to figure it out a guy from a forum said it would work on Ubuntu 18.04, which it does very well except for sound.
@@paulh262 Yes and No. The sound does not just automatically work on Linux mint I've done so much to get that sound to work I honestly can't remember what we had to do I even used a USB sound card with it at one time. and I remember from time to time the sound would stop working for no reason only on Lenox! It's set up to dual boot and when I boot into Windows sound works great
Thanks for the quick reply Raymond. I will let you know if I find out how to sort it 👍
the flickering is the fluorescent light you are using to light the room. Notice the flicker is also on the wall. if you get some tissue paper and use it as a light filter, it can reduce that quite a bit. Or throw in a bit of incandescent light as well to soften the flicker.
It's the same lighting system that I use in all my videos so it's definitely the TV, also notice that it's flickering in the same way during the part where I reinstall Windows where the TV is in a completely different location under different lighting. Think the background flickering is just due to the camera trying to adjust.
i've seen around that if you can change your camera's shutter speed, and put it under the screen's refresh (or the backlight's refresh, which may be different) you can eliminate that, even if the frame rate is the same or higher than what's causing the flicker, though you might get weird smearing on fast action if you have to put it below the frame rate?
While I'm not a big fan of Cortana, this does show I might be able to use IVONA text to speech, the small foot print and low power consumption has me thinking of a robot project I could do, thanks for the review and information.
Well before you blow away your working out of the box Windows 10 you search the C drive for a Drivers folder. Copy that to a USB and when you load your new Windows OS you can then refer to those drivers.
Would be interesting to see the thermals if one would replace the thermal pads with either normal paste or liquid metal.
Just a tip for running VLC on any PC: Go to the preferences, enable advanced settings, choose Output Modules under Video, change from automatic to something more suited to your setup like OpenGL, SDL, DirectX, or whatever works best. I know on my super old PC I use to stream movies on it will default to OpenGL and cause the whole system to slow to a craw, but changing that to SDL or XVideo takes up WAY less system resources.
Automatic is fine if you got a fairly new system and really have no issues with playback, but I'd still suggest changing this setting to better fit your system.
Vlothx Think of it the Linux counterpart to the Windows GUI video overlay. As long as your system has some kind of chip that handles extended video fuctions, most any CPU after 2000 will do, it can decode and display video at the expense of CPU usage. The big issue with SDL, DirectX, and OpenGL is the need for a decent video card, something older and cheap laptops most likely won't have. So as long as you don't mind high CPU usage, you can watch videos with little to no skipping.
Vlothx I should also say that I think XVideo can use the GPU also, but it is not required. It is more of a protocol, so I can theoretically use just about anything for playback. That is my understanding of it and I can confirm it works well on my dual core Atom system.
NoName This PC uses crappy HD 4000 video card which is super useless fro HD streaming specially the CPU are
weak , Sadly old AMD APU from this Atom era consume alot of power and heat or else my old Radeon HD 3430 can handle these task so smoothly , Intel killed 2K/4K HPC experience even before people notice it
I guess ARM TV boxes doing more better with much cheaper price 30~60$
One of these has been my main web browsing and NAS storage PC for about a year now. The 2gig of ram is the main drawback but it only draws about 5 watts of power.. great for a NAS that is left on 24/7. I used to see some sold with 4 gig of ram and that might be an improvement, but I have not found one for sale lately.
Nice job Cam!
While i have Cortana completely turned off on my Win 10 setup, i do think its cool that Jen Taylor provides the voice for US Cortana in the OS, so there's that i guess.
That bootlogo looks like something you would see in a bootleg machine
well, it is
Tempted to slap one of these in an old xbox case. :D
Thank you for this extensive review. It showed me absolutely everything I would want from a review. Linux install; getting the key (so I can use Win10 in a VM sometime never), internal USB. Damn sir!
Looks like I'd subscribed ages ago.
Thanks for mentioning H264ify really helped me out on my old laptop for youtube
That'd actually be pretty useful as a NAS with the USB 3.0, hide it in a closet and never bother with it.
Alexander Wedlin wish it had eSATA
Big Clive reference, instant sub! Oh and you make great videos as well. You need 10x the subs you have. Good luck good sir.
If you wanted to make some kind of mobile data terminal for a delivery van or service vehicle, you could install an LTE dongle inside the unit and not have to worry about it getting lost or stolen. One of those cheap uBlox GPS receivers would probably fit also. It may be possible to get a really small USB hub inside and maybe get several dongles inside.
Eu comprei este mini pc e posso garantir que e excelente. Nao me arrependo.
I have 3 of these. So far, I am very happy, Price performance is very good. Thank you for the video. simple and clear. No Bla Bla. Now I know where to hide the keyboard dongle (internal USB) was wondering why it was there. Thanks again.
Please tel me if I hoockup a 32 GB UBS key to the Inside USB port would that DOUBLE the 32GB eMMC of the Z83? ( I am a french peaking from Québec, Canada so I dont always understand )
Unfortunately not, it'll work exactly the same as if it was plugged into one of the other USB ports - it'll just show up as another drive.
"does anyone use cortana in the windows installer?" NO! i hid cortana as far away as possible! o and btw you where right about the eMMC storage. you can desolder it, solder it to a compatible sdcard reader and just use it as an sdcard
The storage chip looks to be a BGA. Pretty sure you can't solder an SD reader there or resolder the chip to an SD reader.
Simon Tay yes you can! You need a hot air soldering thing to unsolder it. To solder it to the sd card reader you just need a couple of small wires to solder to the small balls on the chip and to the pins of the sd card holder on the reader. Its very complicated to get the chip back on the board but it is possible to do.
You have made the most interesting review, you are simply fantastic in this video (haven't seen others of yours), many thanks for sharing!!! :-)
It's not a thermal pad, it's a non-conductive foam spacer to prevent shorts should the hood get pushed in.
Who needs an Intel NUC, when you can have a Bang Good FUC. On a serious note, I have to wonder how they are including a Windows 10 license with a computer that costs 40 pounds less than a Windows 10 license. I guess that you could buy one of these instead of buying a copy of Windows, transfer the license onto the computer you need it on, smash a copy of Linux on it with Kodi, and hook it to your TV.
I have never transferred a 10 license. I have transferred lots of OEM 7 licenses with no issue, so I assumed that you could do the same for any other version. There has to be some 3rd party work-around that enables you to transfer it.
You could do it but you'd have to call up Microsoft and lie to them.
i just got on the microsoft live chat and gave the key (which cameron mentioned extracting i think? correct me if i'm wrong i cba to check) and it worked, i had a 7 oem license and now i have a regular home win10 license (wishing i'd got more than home premium for the oem 7 disc now though, since you need win10 pro to do full disk encryption, but ugh whatever)
Well they lie to us, so.....
Microsoft at one point (and probably still does) offer free licenses for computers 2GB of RAM and 32G or less storage. That's how I got a new 8" tablet for $40 that had Windows 8.1 (upgraded it later to 10). It had an atom cpu, 1G of ram and 16G of emmc. I later got a 10" RCA tablet with the same CPU for under $100 that had 2G ram and 32G of storage. (Also came with a keyboard with touchpad)
Well interesting, Jimmy! I think I could see what that angled pad was for, but.
That internal USB port is really handy. Id probably install Linux on it, so I'd use it for WiFi.
BIG UP, BIG MAN CLIVE!
instant thumbs up
Its not the TV or LED Backlight causing the flickering.
Its the shutter speed of your camera.
you plug a mic in and run setup it's that easy when it asks you a question you na say yes or no its not fully interactive on voice but its half keys half voice
This is great. I was looking at a cheap box to use as an FTP server and wanted Windows because I know Filezilla well enough and this seems perfect!
Pity it's only running a single 3.0 port, but still useful for PC media consumption/server. Might have to grab one of these and mod a few standoffs onto the front cover for hard drive mounting and slap it behind the TV as a media server.
It's well worth remembering that the lowest eMMC spec is around 6 times faster than SD cards on average.
V.good review, Only thing is a bit tricky is the 32gb storage -surely you have to juggle to fit the never ending windows 10 updates
also did it have any issue with over heating Nice big heat sink though :-)
That in case usb makes this little box very interesting for some diy work hmmmm
Nice review, thanks. I'm thinking about getting one to replace a circa-2008 laptop (with a defective screen) that I use with the TV. It's a little on the slow side, with a 2.2Ghz Pentium dual core, but it has 3gigs RAM and a proper SSD in it. Thing is, I'm not convinced one of these would be any faster despite it having two more cores. But, they're down as low as £65 so it might be worth a punt (I'm cheap and don't like spending money ha ha!)
I'd rather see how it does with MPC-HC with the internal LAV decoders and splitter. I'm still wary of these newer cherry trail Atoms because in performance, they perform a bit worse than the Bay Trail-T Atoms they replaced... all they did was up the abilities of the GPU to compensate for that fault. still, having owned quite a few Bay Trail-T Atom devices, and using a 100S-11IBY with such a chip in it (Z3735F), I can easily say that if I were to get a newer Atom machine for anything, it'd need to have at least 4GB of RAM. they are still to this day the perfect basic-use Win10 platform, and, so long as the cooling solution from your OEM of choice is skookum enough to keep it cool in a netbook application, are 100% the best thing you can get your hands on for something to keep on your bedside or whatnot and not risk starting a fire from the laptop's vents getting blocked.
I can recall such an event where I had my 100S with me at my grandma's and had nothing to put under it, so I had to deal with none. woke up the next morning with my pillow over the keyboard, laptop on, and underneath, the netbook was barely warm.
Also, I don't know if Intel finally changed it in Cherry Trail, but the Bay Trail-T Atoms start throttling at 65C or so. I've found that a lot of the thermal pads used by different companies are horrendously underdesigned to wick up the heat that they put out, and a copper shim with proper thermal compound (on both sides) made from a scrap copper heatsink comes in real handy here.
As for your driver issue, post #3 here: www.minixforum.com/threads/z83-4-windows-10-drivers.14297/ should contain the driver for the Ampak AP6255 SDIO module at the top.
Use doubledriver to rip the drivers from the original install and save them somewhere safe. A bit late now, but worth mentioning in case anyone else gets one of these, reinstalls and wants wifi.
Yeah, think I'll try this, I took an image of the machine before reinstalling it so would be easy enough to restore.
At work sometimes we see graphical glitches in certain media players (especially embedded videos in Powerpoint) using Intel HD graphics. It is almost always solved by installing the K-Lite Codec Pack.
The VGA port is more for Projectors. since most slightly older 720p and 1080p projectors still use VGA as the primary input.
Also these are used for office computers rather frequently. Maybe not this specific one, but ones like it. Since in office computers, most stuff is contained in the office internal network. ^_^ and not on the mini PC itself. :D
I'm seeing more and more of these replacing dell optiplex small form factor PCs
Very informative video, thanks a lot man 👍👍
It looks like you can ditch the thermal pads and just put artic silver 5 thermal paste or MX4 on that chip. It would certainly run cooler i think
I tried this but there is about 0.5mm of space that wont touch the heatsink.
I thought of soldering a copper shim onto it where it would make contact and then thermal paste between the CPU and copper shim.
I had some of those graphite thermal pads laying around. I put kapton tape around the area since these are electrically conductive and cut them to size and stacked a few of them. So far so good. Heat soaking the aluminum its tops off about 55C - 60C 😃👍
I was thinking of using that internal USB port for a tiny fan.
I have one of these as well (think it's z83+ii, think it has higher clocked atom cpu) overall they are good for the cost of them (it's still a atom cpu so don't expect it to be fast, be intresting how long 1709 November's 2017 feature upgrade happens )
I bought one for my grandpa and he is very happy about it
Internal USB Port is designed for keyboard and mice dongles which help prevent theft or tampering.
The bottom thermal pad is for mechanical support and electrical insulation.
They do do a larger memory model of it so that's probably what the internal USB is for
Hi there, at 14:50 when you showed a cartoon for testing on the screen on the top left screen there was a information box about resolution and details, can you tell me please, which software did you used, i mean what's the name of the software??
The internal usb maybe is for that sort of dongles that come with some professional softwares, that act like a phisical key, and in that case is a smart idea.
Do you think is possible replace the X5-Z8350 to another processor? obviously with a very good soldering process by an expert.
Excuse me if my question is silly, I don't know much about these issues. Thanks ;)
Doubt it. This system uses a specialised Intel Atom SoC with almost everything on one chip, it wouldn't be possible to fit a regular CPU in its place. It might be possible to swap it for a different Atom SoC of the same generation and pinout but no idea how the BIOS would deal with it. Plus the cost of the replacement chip and time/effort to fit it would be way more than the machine is worth.
Lool... the first time ive seen Cortana in action. Thank God, that the hungarian windows 10 not supporting Cortana. :D
My RCA Cambio W101SA23T1 tablet has exactly the same specs!
It seems that this hidden USB is for DVB-T adapter, maybe they sell it as an option.
Thank god I am in Finland where cortana isn's available
Or you can disable cortana like I did
Lucky swine
I'd crack a joke about taking the forest but youre all probably sick of that by now....
Note: other voice assistants / spyware is also available. ;)
The integrated graphics in the processor can only support resolutions up to 1920x1080, so it doesn't actually support real 4k
Reminds me of my Wintel mini Pc tv box.
hi, can anyone tell me if it has a power button or a power switch? Thanks
Yes on the side
Great vid very detailed thanks
internal USB port. I'd probably bodge in a small 4-port usb hub(remove the plastic cover to take less space) to add more storage or make small holes into the outer case and mount the usb hub so you suddenly have 4 more usb ports outwards to the device.. options options
Wish they had one with Windows 7
I'm looking for this machine only for study (video lessons on 720p, Wikipedia, google search), and also to see netflix on fullHD or torrent movies in fullHD too. Is this a good choice for me? I already have a really good PC for games but the energy in my. country is too expensive (Brazil), so a just wanna something economic...
those thermal pads look like they were in the wrong spot but they were attempting to have them directly over the chips.
Thanks for the detailed video. Does the minijack audio also do optical out?
thats a pretty big heatsink for the small Atom. I like.
Did you leave it alone for like 4 hours so it could finish updates (the a cumulative security update can Peg the CPU for some time) , telimently scan and store updating
best to open taskmanager and set screen time out to 30 mins and turn off auto sleep so it can compleat the updates
I got one off Amazon, it had dual english/chineese language support, but it was FULL of spyware out of the box, and security settings full of holes, it makes an ok media pc, but it will often loose the ability see ethernet or wifi for hours (when all other devices in the home are unaffected and still working fine) and its fan can be VERY noisey! I had to get a USB wifi adaptor, since its built in Wifi has never worked. Inexpensive yes, but it's definitely a case of "you get what you pay for", so I'm probably just switching over to a raspberry PI...
we bought one of these and used the mount to attach it to a monitor and dubbed it the "getto mac" since it looked like a rip off imac
This video is perfect sir, thanks a lot!!
I see from the Banggood Web site that there seems to be a Z83-II model with a different WiFi adapter included.
Would it be worth getting one of those in for review and teardown to see if it works any better, especially with Linux? :-)
This should work now with Ubuntu 18.04 OOTB with WiFi and Audio!
yes, and a light distro like Lubuntu, Xubuntu, or MX-Linux would run MUCH better/faster than Winblows 10.
Did you figure out if that USB port inside is 2.0 or 3.0? You could boot a persistable Live CD from it and use the internal eMMC as storage or something. I also wonder how this thing handled h.265?
Would make a very nice HTPC, or Plex Player.
Matt Booth Running from a Live CD USB environment is much too slow in reality to be practically useful for anything more than testing/maintenance/rescue etc. You'd be much better off just installing to the eMMC and using flash drives and the SD card slot for additional storage.
I'm not sure about you, but I'd sooner have a faster running OS and slower storage access than the other way round. Just mount a USB 3.0 drive at /home and keep root on the internal. Should work fine.
But yes, a Plex player is definitely one of the best uses for this I can think of. :)
Nice Clive reference ;)
i have the same model Z83,but on mine there is no vga output,and no usb inside the pdb
Just because it's released that year doesn't mean its up to date
Great for a home theater on the cheap then, hopefully Linux will work on it soon as that will make it better as when windows 10 goes EOL you know windows will not allow this kind of device to be updated to a new OS.
Windows 10 runs on a 2003 Athlon 64 or The Socket 775 Pentium 4 CPUs. These Intel Atom CPUs should be fine for a long time
DUDE!!! THAT HAND! ARE YOU OKAY??.
I had the same issue with the wifi on mine.