what's going on, everybody? It's ETA Prime back here again. Today, we're going to be taking a look at one of the most interesting mini PCs that Minus Forum has released this year. Now, this was actually announced at CES, and it's known as the S100, coming from their Mercury series. And what makes the S100 so interesting is the size and features we have here with this new Mini PC. As you can see, it's really small. This is more of a stick-style PC. We've actually got some full-size USB ports. It's got 2.5 GB Ethernet, and it supports PoE (Power over Ethernet). So, you could actually power this directly from your Ethernet connection. But it does come with the wall adapter. And I've been really excited about showing this off. I've actually had it in my possession for about 2 months. Unfortunately, I was unable to kind of show it to the public, but Minus Forum now has the S100 up on their website. And, you know, through my time testing this out, I'm actually really impressed with

the performance here when it comes to Indie gaming, old school PC gaming, and especially emulation. It's also really great for web browsing and 4K video playback. So yeah, obviously we've got a super small form factor PC stick here. And inside of the Box, basically what you're going to get is a user manual, the S100 Mini PC. We also get an HDMI cable, USB type-c cable, and a 65w power adapter. Now this is not going to pull 65 Watts, it's much lower than that. In fact, this out of the box is set at a 6 wat TDP, but we can go up to 9 Watts from the BIOS pretty easily. I'll show you how to do it. But taking a look at the I/O here, they've given us a full size HDMI 2.0 Port, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 type a port. So we've got two full-size USB ports on this unit, 2.5 GB ethernet that supports Poe. We've also got USB type-c now

Unfortunately, it's not USB 4, but it is full-function USB 3.2. It supports alt mode, otherwise known as single cable operation mode, and this is one of my favorite things about these newer mini PCs. This monitor does support USB Type-C video, plus it does 65 watts PD out of that USB port. So, we can actually power this up with a single cable and also send our video signal right back to the monitor itself. So, we don't need to plug in power or anything like that. One cable does it all. With a monitor like this, we've got Windows 11 installed, and I just went ahead and plugged in a wireless keyboard and mouse. Boots right up into the operating system. There are a few things that I'd like to show you in the BIOS because we can get a bit better performance out of this unit. But before we move over there, I want to give you a quick rundown on the specs. So, for the CPU, this is utilizing the Intel N100, four cores, four threads, up to 3.4 GHz.

we've got 8 GB of LP DDR5 at 4800 MHz, 256 GB of internal storage, and this is UFS 2.1 storage. Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, we've got that 2.5 GB Ethernet port that supports PoE, and this is running Windows 11 out of the box. So first things first, I wanted to give you a look at the BIOS and show you how to up the performance here. Over on Min Forum's website, they state that this has a 6-watt TDP, but we can actually take it up to 9 watts. That's what they state. We could go higher with a third-party app, but we're going to keep it up at 9 watts there, given the cooling system. It's choosing Min Forum's brand new visual BIOS. While the system's booting up, just press delete on your keyboard. We're going to go to Setup Advanced, and from here, we've got a few things that we can change, but the main one is going to be our CPU configuration.

so from here, we want to go all the way down to the bottom power settings. And yeah, power limit is set at 6 Watts here. So, we're actually going to take it up to 9 Watts. All we need to do is change this out, save and exit. And once we boot in Windows, we should be at a 9 watt TDP. So now that we've got the BIOS situated, give you a look here. We've got the Intel N100, four cores, no extra threads. And this is boosting up to 3.4, 8 gigs of DDR5 at 48. We've got that UFS 2.1 storage here. And we will run a speed test on this. It looks like it's Samsung branded. And of course, we've got those UHD graphics. Since we've changed the TDP from the BIOS, I just wanted to make sure we are boosting up to that 9 Watts right here from CPU. We'll stress it out and we're locked right there at 9 Watts. But even with the BIOS set to n

Watts. I have seen this boost up to 12 Watts when I'm gaming, not all the time, but we get a quick little boost up there, I think just to help out that GPU. Either way, this thing is sipping power the way it is. And when it comes to everyday desktop usage at that 9-watt TDP, this thing isn't bad at all. We do have Wi-Fi 6 built-in. Heading over to Minus Fors website, everything loads up really quickly. Head over to the S100 page and just scrolling on down, everything's already populated, ready to go. Web browsing on this thing is pretty awesome. I mean, this thing isn't pulling much power at all from the wall. And the other thing we've actually got some really good performance in is 4K video playback. Here's a 4K 60 HDR video. I've got stats for nerds up in the top left corner. And on the initial load-in, we had four drop frames. If I was to kind of refresh this and let it buffer.

for a second, we wouldn't get any of those, but throughout on the S100, no extra drop frames. And this is kind of normal, just loading into a video. Every once in a while, you will see some drop frames, even on the higher-end system. And I have not tested 4K video playback at 6 Watts. I'm sure we'd get some pretty decent performance. And by the way, I am using Chrome here instead of the Edge browser. Next up, I wanted to take a look at some benchmarks, and I was actually worried that the storage on this would be super slow. And of course, it's not NVMe fast, but this is much faster than a mechanical drive. And they're saying that this is UFS 2.1. With these speeds here, it actually might be a little faster than that. Next, we've got Geekbench 6 single-core 1,198, multi 3,90. And I have seen the N100 at 15 watts outpace this in single and multicore, but given the form factor.

it's not looking bad, and finally, 3D Mark night rate for that built-in UHD GPU got a pretty low score here of 4,681. I do want to mention that the S100 is not advertised as a gaming machine, but I think we can get some light gaming out of the way on this, and especially some emulation. I think up to GameCube. The first one I tested here was Hades 2, and I wanted to go up to 1080 High. We do have some settings with this, and by the way, this is Early Access. If you pre-order it, you can get it now. We're at 1080, and I dropped it down to low just to get that steady 60. So if you wanted to use something like this for light Indie Games, dead cells, cuphead, Hades, Hades 2, it's going to work great. Next up, I went with Left 4 Dead 2, an older Valve Source game. Just wanted to see what we could do here, and at 900p medium, we're getting an average of around 91.

FPS. I knew we'd be able to play this, but I wasn't expecting around 90 FPS with this unit. I also went with Dirt 3, where at 900p medium, and with this one, I figured we'd be up in the 80s, but we're right there getting an average of around 64. Still super fun, really glad to see that it's playable here. And the final PC game I tested was Fallout 3. Now, unfortunately, I couldn't do 900p with this, and I'm sure with some performance mods, we could. This is the vanilla version, 720p low, and it's trying its hardest to keep it right there at 60. Got a couple dips down around 58, but it is playable on this system. And all of this was done at a 9-watt TDP, so we've got some PC gaming out of the way. Older stuff, indie games are going to work. Now we need to check out some emulation, and the first thing we have here is some Dreamcast using Redream. We at 1280 by 960, DOA2.

looking great. Constant 60 checking out some PSP using PPSSPP 4X resolution using the DirectX 1 backend. And you could go with Vulkan if you want to, but it was already set here and played just fine with this. Some of these games may need to be taken down to 3X, but for the most part, we're seeing some decent performance. And of course, I had to test out some GameCube here using the Dolphin Emulator. Soul Caliber 2, 720p, DirectX 1 backend. Now, there are some games that are still going to struggle on this at native resolutions. That's just how it is with this. Something like F-Zero GX will struggle on some of those tracks, but even a game like Automobilista can run at 720p on the S100. And again, checking out After Burner up in the top left-hand corner, we haven't gone over 9 Watts. I mean, obviously, we've got that TDP there. And like I mentioned, I have seen it boost up

to around 12 Watts, but it's few and far in between. Most people interested in picking up a PC like this will be concerned about power consumption. So, while I'm doing my testing, I've got this plugged into a kilowatt meter. We can get a good idea of what this thing's going to pull, and it's not much at all. Remember, we did take the TDP up to 9 watts in the BIOS. Keeping it at that 6, it'll be much lower across the board. But at idle, we were only at 2.1 Watts. While playing back 4K video from YouTube, it's drawn around 8 watts from the wall. An average gaming and emulation through all of the testing you saw in this video, no more than 11 Watts from the wall. So yeah, if you're looking for an ultra-low power consumption Windows 11 PC, you might want to think about this one. Now, of course, it's not putting out the kind of performance of other many PCs on the

market. We're seeing much higher scores, better gaming, and everything like that, but there's not much on the market that matches the form factor and power consumption given the performance we're getting here. You can use this as an everyday desktop PC. I wouldn't go editing any kind of 4K video, but web browsing, 4K video playback, you want to do some emulation, some light gaming, document editing, email checking, the S1 100 can definitely do that. But that's going to wrap it up for my first look video. If you're interested in learning a little more about the minus Forum S100, I'll leave some links in the description. And if you'd like to see Linux running on this, just let me know in the comments below. I think turning this into a little Linux machine would be pretty awesome. So if that's something you want to see, make sure you hit that like button and think about subscribing so you know when I post the next one. But that's it for this one, and like always, thanks for watching.

The All-New S100 4K Windows 11 Mini PC Stick Fits In The Palm Of Your Hand

The All-New S100 4K Windows 11 Mini PC Stick Fits In The Palm Of Your Hand