Xulu XR1 Review: The BIGGEST Little PC! Ryzen 7, GPU, 64GB, 2TB, 16 Threads

Dave takes you inside and behind the Xulu XR1, a powerful PC in a tiny form factor. Includes teardown, parts replacement, performance benchmarks and analysis. For information on my book, Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: amzn.to/45ZzcFW
For more Xulu information and to order: xulu.store/
Wera screwdriver set: amzn.to/3F5K6ho

[@somethinlike23]

I love that you're wearing gloves.

[@patrickhovsepian4368]

Dave, love your content - thank you! When are you hosting an AMA?

[@asserzayed1902]

Everything in video looks clean, high quality and well prepared and you commentary is great. I love watching you videos. Thanks for the quality content.

[@DavesGarage]

I appreciate that!

[@vaffangool9196]

​@@DavesGarage *The background music* has me expecting to see you swap out the differential in a 1970 Dodge Coronet. 😂

[@Terribleguitarist89]

I definitely echo that, efficient while being jam packed full of details and data without bloat or rambling.

[@avalagum7957]

It's so small that I want one.

[@adokce]

wow, you are literally the best reviewer instantly. i'd watch your reviews over other channels every time.

[@DavesGarage]

Wow, thanks!

[@ronm6585]

Thanks Dave.

[@josephphillips9243]

Thanks for the review. Well done Xulu 😀

[@XuluPC]

Cheers!

[@wtmayhew]

This PC looks seriously worth considering for mid level work. Even though this Xulu product s an Indiegogo campaign, it looks like it may well deliver as promised. Everything in the unit appears to be beautifully packaged. It would be cool to time travel back and show this PC to the 1968 version of myself and witness the reaction.

[@rx80]

32Gb ram and 1Tb drive, in 1968, that would have been mind blowing. Not to mention the CPU specs on this thing, and all under 100W :D

[@dalrob9969]

Whoa! That, is a cool sounding engine.

[@XuluPC]

Thanks for the time and effort you put into producing this thorough XR1 Max Review! The Xulu XR2 will be powered by Intel N100-N305...... Cheers again to you are your team!

[@Spirch]

go get UL certification, this will help to sell more unit

[@Look_What_You_Did]

@@Spirch Go get lurn English.

[@maxgood42]

Might help if you removed the OURS vs Others off your website. It makes it look like a scam. I thought you were a professional company.

[@Look_What_You_Did]

@@maxgood42 If it walks like a duck, writes like a duck, farts like a duck... It's a duck.

[@maxgood42]

@@Look_What_You_Did I was a little interested at first but after what I found I think I'll pass , shame because I do like the Orange ones...🤣

[@derekcasanares4785]

Nice little power box

[@ryanlemere4212]

Excellent review, always awesome! Thank you!

[@MsDuketown]

Powerful machine! Or power an USB-powered 12V monitor, from the Xulu AMD, and have a portable workstation. And a little undervolting mostly suits the small form factor use cases better.

[@chad_levy]

Incidentally I'm literally configuring a new N100 NUC to replace my current Plex server as I watch this. My current Plex server is my old dev machine which is way overkill for what it does. Going from 400+ watts of power to 8w without giving up any performance is going to be great!

[@MichaelMantion]

What are the benifits of plex over Jellyfin?

[@-Yogo]

@@MichaelMantion client support and polish are the biggest issues .... i run both, and just waiting for JF to come up to par so I can dump plex

[@SirSomnolent]

Last I tried jellyfin, I couldn't manage to control when transcoding occurred even over a simple 1 gigabit lan.

[@f18hornetm]

im looking at doing the same replacing my old i7-920 unraid server

[@GoTeamScotch]

​@@SirSomnolentodd. They have settings to control transcoding. Was it a bug or was that a long time ago before they had options?

[@MrCWoodhouse]

Thank you Dave for all the computer help and help with ASD.

[@epicpartytime]

Very cool Dave

[@Smirnoff67]

That's quite impressive how that little things is on-par or just better than my old 6700k and my gtx980 .. damn wish i was able to change my computer.

[@aleksandrbmelnikov]

980TI is better, and doesn't run jerky. Me, i don't care what it does in the background, only what's on the screen and coming out of speakers.

[@acwbit2368]

The 980 is much stronger than the vega 8

[@ChadLuciano]

Such an awesome channel and an essential for the enthusiast. Thank you Dave.

[@michaela5311]

Hi Dave, first time watching your channel. Have to say I’m enjoying it as I like your no nonsense approach with the editing. Subbed.

[@maxgood42]

I like your review, very nice detail especially running 2 test at the same time to show a better load scenario.

[@DavidLee-cr4xv]

Two by two, hands of blue

[@volvo09]

I like these ultra small form factor pc's... it's like cramming a thin laptop into a little cube.

[@johnmicheal3547]

Your smartphone is a computer with screen/input device/ and speaker... extra are gps and a few other sensors and cameras.

[@johnmicheal3547]

I love them all. Only bad thing about smartphone is the privacy.

[@jondoe6608]

@@johnmicheal3547 yah if the bootloader was open & arm SOC makers where not the embodiment of evil and mainlined there drivers into the linux kernel. Your "smart" phone could be as good of a computer as a PC. But no we get locked down garbage and yes I am counting android (even the custom roms), the moment you try to do anything cool with it you get screwed, the android user space sucks & google play hardware attestation is demonic.

[@ChatGPT1111]

I prefer when they then take the cube and turn it into a trashcan shaped object. 😂

[@monad_tcp]

@@johnmicheal3547 except a real PC doesn't have a baseband blob circuitry that who knows what it does, it could give ring -3 access to your CPU for anyone over the LTE network

[@make725daily1]

This video is absolutely incredible! - "Every obstacle conquered brings you closer to success..."

[@Qsie]

Pretty cool to see how close to 2.5Gbps you got, only 20Mbps off from the spec. Impressive 😮

[@Ultimatebubs]

That thermal paste application was very pretty!

[@macethorns1168]

I love how you unboxed it and then you unboxed it.

[@adamludwick9931]

Two by two - hands of blue.

[@DavesGarage]

Join the Blue Crew!

[@anthonyblacker8471]

For the size of that nuc, I'll say this: those scores are NOT bad Dave. That thing seems pretty ok if you really need a teeny tiny box like that. What a sweet size for a little media center (very powerful one at that!) man..

[@Bob-of-Zoid]

Perfect for those tiny Japanese studio apartments!

[@michaelwills1926]

LAN party

[@NightOwlAmbient]

One caution, I found that the MINISFORUM Venus UM790 Pro Mini which has similar specs could not handle streaming live HD video from a HDHomeRun without stuttering. I tried it with Wifi 6 and 2.5 Gbit ethernet with every configuration of wired and wifi, and I used Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin. I think the limitation is the gpu, but I gave up and switched to Jellyfin running on my Asustor NAS with sata hard disks, not SSDs. I have no problems whatsoever streaming everything from live OTA HD channels to 4k HDR blueray rips with the NAS, so it makes me wonder why these NUCs have problems hosting media servers. I have a Xulu XR1 on order, and I'll be trying it out with Jellyfin whenever it gets here.

[@mojito6629]

Excellent. When everything can go as promised, with that nice specs and price points, they should be able to have solid sales around the world

What about the noise?

[@DavesGarage]

Pretty much silent, even under load. I've recorded with it sitting next to me, at least.

[@TheTastefulThickness]

I dont think the value is quite there vs the competition but love seeing these minis flood the market as powerful compute keeps shrinking. Gamers Nexus added ITX cases to its testing recently.

[@oisiaa]

I LOVE these mini-PCs. I use one as my daily driver that's way slower than this one.

[@GemcoreCom]

I like it!

[@mgancarzjr]

That's slick. I want a small box for Linux work, but the NUC options are too numerous to take seriously.

[@DavesGarage]

It'd be cool as a little headless server that you could throw in a backpack!

[@xlarch]

but can it run task manager...

[@vaffangool9196]

6:15

[@Milosz_Ostrow]

In the early 1970s, when computers were in racks and often occupied an entire floor of a building, computer engineers joked that eventually the computer just be a bump in the power cord between the wall outlet and the terminal. I think we have arrived.

[@jamesocker5235]

I like the AVE vibe tear down before tryout.😊

[@guilherme5094]

👍Nice!!

[@mfgc2610]

Dell Optiplex Micro is a pretty robust small space box. Hooked to a big screen "smart"(?) TV is great to make a true smart TV. Thanks for your stuff Dave. Passing your knowledge on is great!

[@davivify]

Thanks, Dave, for a well documented tear-down and bench test. Was wondering, though, about those rubber gloves. Some folks wear a grounded wrist strap to keep stray voltages away from sensitive components. Rubber, being a fine insulator, just seems to me, would do the opposite and can actually generate static and such.

[@jdogi1]

Oh geez, Karen. I've been working on PC stuff for decades without doing anything except practicing the slightest awareness of the risks and NEVER have killed anything from a an ESD. Just don't be a fool and everything will be fine.

[@NightOwlAmbient]

A more polite reply is that discharging static electricity on something metal like a desk leg is all you really need to do. None of today's computers are so sensitive that you will fry one even if you did get a snap of electricity when you picked it up. There's enough grounding copper to bleed it off. I always turn off a computer's power supply and unplug the cord before I work on it so there's no path to true ground, and thus no path for electrons in my body to go anywhere. But that said, just touch something with lots of metal before you touch a computer, and you'll be fine. I was wondering about the gloves myself, and I hope Dave tells us why he is wearing them.

[@AchwaqKhalid]

Straight to the point review 🏆

[@cloudysky3614]

@Dave Thanks for the quick review! I really liked it. Short on on the Point but one thing is missing for me: Have you measured the idle power consumption of the device?

[@DavesGarage]

Yes! Running Heaven it was 60W, then with "windows very busy" it was 30W, and idle it settled down just under 10W I believe.

[@cloudysky3614]

@@DavesGarage Great, that's quite good to know. Since Raspberry PIs have worsened price value wise NUCs and thin clients are now better options for little smarthome servers. I moved from the PI to an old 4460 and the performance boost was dramatic. Mostly in Grafana (with 40GB of InfluxDB data) but it also allowed me to use AI detection for my security cameras to automate things around the house and I just love little powerfull boxes even though a big rackmount server would be the more logical choice.

[@Sylvan_dB]

I think unless you must have this small, the 1 liter PCs are the optimal SFF desktop. I'd like to have external PCI-E or at least eSATA to run 5 or more storage drives, and a nice chassis for them to make NAS storage competitive with mid-range Synology and other commercial offerings. I must be a niche market, because there is no SFF DIY NAS with integration comparable to those small 4-10 bay commercial offerings.

[@DavesGarage]

I think this is a good laptop alternative, but not a NUC replacement. If you travel with it, this is a great form factor. If it sits on a desk, I agree with you!

[@janwesten1317]

Finally someone who knows how to apply thermal paste correctly.😉

[@michaeljarcher]

What I like about Dave's Garage. no plugging of iFixit overpriced tools, and always a titbit of tips, as well as alternative testing tools and thoughts. Something these so called tech channels need to get out their tiny brains is not being clones of each-other. But hay some of us are also old-school and know how to programme a device from a hex input pad. :-) Nice little NUC system.

[@markclark787]

I would like to see more viedos like this.

[@svegetax]

With these little units, the big selling push will be usb/pcie passthrough. It would also free up power for the cpu if an external GPU dock was able to be used. A big little features like this will give way to beginner kid units or small office space with extra GPU power if needed for productivity. Nice overview.

[@RandomFish-gx7pj]

I remember seeing some kind of weird tiny PC with similar size and look, but it has an exposed PCI-e slot. You can install a high-performance graphics card on it, dangling outside of the case. I can't remember its name though.

[@brentjohnson6654]

New subscriber here. I like the form factor and performance for a HTPC application. I see it is not available yet. All the best and thanks for the video.

[@Andrew-rc3vh]

What you want is a standard square cross section box, say 3.5" sq and then your peripherals, like additional drives and the like, just snap on the bottom to make the box a little higher. You could do the same with cards, which could be made to be very thin boxes.

[@felixal]

fair and insightful review

[@Dom_Mason]

Love your channel Dave, looks like a promising little NUC. Been looking to get something like this to run Debian. Be cool for Proxmox as well. Take care and thanks!

[@giljesusseraspe9225]

Exactly what I was thinking of for Debian

[@fmlazar]

You say that it wasn’t sponsored, but the unit was labeled “Review Unit” for your channel.

[@Denvermorgan2000]

I like the way you do thermal compound I think it's a better way than just putting a drop in the middle and hoping it spreads evenly.

[@ronboe6325]

I was seduced by a very small form factor PC a year ago and promptly put it to work as my Ham Radio computer - so nice to have power in such a little foot print. Now, if only they would look at a pancake form factor vs this cube design.....

[@leetucker9938]

the display is Oled not vfd

[@DavesGarage]

You're likely right! The blue color fooled me, as you often see VFDs in that color.

[@YammyBoh7]

Finally someone that knows whats up with applying thermal paste!

[@bartsquared1398]

Hi Dave, Great video - thanks for posting. Have you considered running the benchmarks before you do the teardown? Your teardown could potentially affect the performance of the PC (e.g. If your thermal paste application beats the factory compound then the thermal performance could improve and be less representative of the out of the box performance someone would get)

[@GoatZilla]

nonsense.

[@jasonmackenzie3052]

Great video, loads of power and ram, can't wait for Ryzen 8000 apus then loads of graphics power can't wait. for small factor

[@MrGingGangGooly]

Great video Dave 👍 BTW, you mentioned your monitor has an inbuilt KVM. Can you tell me the Make/Model? Cheers

[@DavesGarage]

It's a Dell 3818DW, but there are newer models of it now. 4K 38", recommended.

[@rickharms1]

Glad you wore gloves, I do not want you to pass on any viruses.😍✌️😍

[@bilalazhar4495]

man used "THERMAL PASTE APPLICATOR" from the iconic verge video love to see it

[@anechoicspace]

FWIW - the iperf3 command you showed is outbound from the client to the server (and thus analogous to the write benchmarks) you'd want to run with -R for reverse for server->client or --bidir to test both directions.. possible it's some sort of RSS (receive side scaling) issue on the receive perf in SMB if iperf3 looks good on receive as well.

[@valveman12]

A nice small computer that has some limitations, but what computer dosen't have limitations. Not a bad price either. Great review Dave👍👍

[@captainprototype187]

I have only used mini pc s since about 2012 starting with my dual core android minix box. These little things have come a far way. I remember dreaming of these little formfactors in 1996 when I bought my clone w95 pc. Pentium 100 mhz!!!!!

[@MrHacross]

“I’ve noticed a trend on KZbin where others are afraid to put thermal compound on while people are watching. Not me - I don’t care what you think.” ROTFL - Bravo! Cheers

[@the_dude182]

Thumbs up for the termal paste.

[@lucasrem]

I was planning to build a minimal system, or buy the new Intel NUC, only running a RTX 4070 Ti was needed. Bought the 25liter by OMEN, the best prebuild ever !

[@copescale9599]

Hot little PC

[@nickvirgili2969]

I love sbc's and micro form factor.

[@geroffmilan3328]

Thinking of grabbing this for audio recording with Reaper. The 12 year old laptop I currently use only has 4GB of RAM 😂 and 250GB of SSD, yet meets my needs, so this should be a straight step up.

[@user-ec6kt2fg7m]

Well this is...odd. Never been this quick before.

[@DavesGarage]

We waited for you!

[@volvo09]

I was waiting for the day you'd be here early 😂

[@ghostmantagshome-er6pb]

@user-ec6kt2fg7m= BOT ACCOUNT

[@Alex-zi1nb]

comparison to other small formfactor builds regarding power, noise, performance would be nice. testing before tearing down and repasting too, as most consumers wont be repasting (unless there are issues found with factory paste). a few gaming benchmarks too maybe. anyway...for someone on the run, or a htpc this seems pretty legit for the formfactor and price

[@irbaboon1979]

Would be cool to compare this against an intel NUC13 i5 as you can only find the higher level cpu variants reviewed… maybe new racing project to consider?

[@IraQNid]

Linus Tech Tips ran that test in real time with the same accelerated results using a top of the line ThreadRipper Pro with 64 cores 128 threads.

[@darkwaveatheist]

I run all of my stuff on an old Beelink thingy. It runs both my monitors/graphics tablet fine although I do most of my real work in WSL

[@denvera1g1]

I cant wait for the Ryzen 7000 series APUs to make it to AM5. Those lenovo/Dell/HP miniPCs are so amazing for servicing Dont get me wrong, i love the compact form factor of the xulu, i also have a beelink and a minisforum. But nothing beats being able to pull the CPU out if something goes bad with it. now to be fair we've only had like 2 out of 1000 units need a CPU/integrated GPU replacement at work, but it is a nice thing to have, just sad that most of these OEMs dont release updated BIOS to support future processors, if you bought a 3400GE you're stuck with 3000G, unlike companies that make motherboards for the DIY market that will let their Zen 1 based 2400G system also run a 5700G Zen3 based CPU

[@samserious1337]

The Minisforum EliteMini B550 has an AM4 socket!

[@denvera1g1]

@@samserious1337 my problem with AM4 APUs is that the CPU is great, but the GPU is a design from 2016 with only 8CUs, when older AM4 had 11-12CU

[@trogscave]

I think this is a typo: "my problem with AM4 APUs" should read "AM5 APU's" correct?@@denvera1g1

[@Geenimetsuri]

Excellent review. It almost seems like they did a bit of an overkill with the CPU and a higher clocked Ryzen 5 with fewer cores could have been better overall with lesser "natural" TDP.

[@maxgood42]

Agreed. On the website they have a lite version set at a max 3.8ghz (Pro 4.4ghz and Max 4.8ghz) but I think it's still the same CPU/GPU I have an AMR5 with lots of numbers on the box and arrows pointing up (Marketing Joke) and it often throttles when hot. More cores is not always a better system. We forget that 99.9% of games run on single and dual core units and if some one wanted to run an 8 core 16 thread to it's maximum they would probably have it in a tower with Liquid cooling and a Titanium class power supply . 🤣 ...edit after some more digging I found the Lite is a Ryzen 3 4core 8thread and the Pro is a Ryzen 5 6core 12thread .

[@NoName-zn1sb]

@@maxgood42 its maximum

[@maxgood42]

@@NoName-zn1sb BIGGEREST MOST FASTEREST 🤣🤣🤣

[@CurtisHoareau]

Can you adjust system/gpu ratio for allocated RAM in bios.. Nice quick review. Good stuff.!

[@lordbacon4972]

Same here, my monitor is essentially a KVM with built-in usb-c hub, so I am looking for USB-C/Thunderbolt ports that can support display/data/power simultaneously with 1 cable. I would say this is the minimum requirements for any pc right now.

[@soulGrafitti]

This => "with great serviceability comes great responsibility."

[@daviddempsey8721]

Nice unit. Can you say more about the heatsink paste spreader - cool.

[@timwhite7127]

Hey Mr. Dave...Have you ever thought about doing a tutorial series on Visual Studio..? If ever there was a topic which could use a basic but GOOD series that would be my nominee.

[@jamesevans3492]

Impressive Little Fast Computer, Which Fits In Your Hand . . . :-)

[@NoName-zn1sb]

Impressive little fast computer, which fits in your hand

[@charlestilley2576]

Nice little PC for the price, even if restricted by PSU!👍 Several versions beginning at $409 with PCIe lanes (for M.2 NVMe SSD), lowest price with M.2 SSD (no NVMe) $309, at a steep discount. Total of 16 models listed, the max being $3299 & that's quite a bit high (IMO) for a tiny PC, would say the same for the $999 offering. It's very unfortunate that the CPU's are soldered to the MB, hope the RAM isn't too, because there's at least one 8GB model listed. A 32GB (or 64GB) set of performance DDR4 RAM (if compatible) would hold a lot of browser tabs & improve benchmarks at a low cost today. However, I'd say that the NVMe options below $500 would be great for a 1st time user. Who knows, there may be a way to improve the (non-UL) PSU to one which would bring out the performance of these CPU's, which are decent & used mostly in laptops with lots more power in benchmarks.😀 Thanks for the well presented video!💯

[@AdenMocca]

On TrueNAS with SMB (SAMBA) becuase it isn't running synchronous writes - should be asynchronous with SMB - I think the writes are just hitting memory on the NAS while the reads could be pulliing from the disks so likely disk latency on the NAS side. Normally not seen wtih 1 GbE, but can occur with 10 GbE. Pure network tests, perhaps iperf3 would be closer to measure - not real-world, but helpful when looking at network storage issues as a sanity check. Great video. Oh posted too fast.....

[@markcollard9326]

@1:50 They look like fine dust filters for the top and backplates.

[@erikkarsies4851]

Maybe the overhead is slightly less on 2.5 gbit and thus you can divide by 9 instead of 10 to get the amount of max transfer bytes ? 2.5Gbit per sec /9=0.277Gbyte per sec = 277 Mbyte per sec

[@DavesGarage]

I guess it depends on packet formation and MTU and any number of factor. I guess I'm old school enough that I just assume 10 bits byte byte because that's what it was for 8N1 serial transmissions :-)

[@ddevienne]

You might comment on the noise level too Dave, on idle and under load.

[@MisterSiga]

reminds me of my little skullcanyon Nuc

[@mikem9536]

Exactly what my girlfriend could use.

[@overbuiltautomotive1299]

the cpu being solder to the board is why i ignore all the mini pc amd rigs out now and just go to the full sized pc mini deal from hp and others made with 2400g or 3400g and so on till a newer full sized CPU option pops out it will do fine

[@gadfly5741]

Performance of write over the network is better than read very likely because you are CPU-bound. Write (sending traffic) consumes considerably less CPU cycles than Read (receiving traffic). In particular, if your network card does not support Receive Side Scaling, or it only uses 2 cores for receive, then you will be bottlenecked on receive. And if you are using only one TCP connection in your tests, then even Receive Side Scaling will not help you. Apologies for the long explanation.

[@denniskomeshak9082]

I'd like to know your thoughts on the Minisforum UM790 Pro, since I just got one of them a month ago. Mine has 64GB DDR5 RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD. So far, I'm liking it. It's much faster than the Intel NUC I7 it will be replacing.

[@BrianPixelPinTaylor]

Hi Dave, great indepth review, thank you. I use an ASUS gaming laptop for VR Steam driven flight simulators and it is running about as good as it can, leaving the in headset video quality a little fuzzy. Do you think this unit could improve on that please, as for the price I'd jump at it. Thanks.

[@Bob-of-Zoid]

I'm on a system with only slightly higher specs in a Cooler Master HAP X case, and it's like a 30 gallon (114 l) case!!

[@robertcgage]

For anyone wondering the Xulu XR1 goes for between 3 and 400 dollars US.

[@DavidNationSr]

i have same processor

[@DavesGarage]

Let us know what you think of it!

[@erkinalp]

@@DavesGarage What are your Ryzen's boost settings? Mine are all core -30 plus an additional 50 millivolts down (amounts to 1.05-ish volts of operating voltage in average, rather than 1.4V that is provided in the default settings).

[@emolasher]

@3:50 did you miss the drive, looks like it there in the top right.

[@frixyg2050]

Love your videos. In this one, the background music was cool at first but it's a short loop and it got annoying after a while. My humble suggestion would be to start off with the music during your introduction but fade it out once you 'dig in' to the meat of the video.

[@tkarlmann]

This is the second review of yours I've watched. I'm finding a decided limitation in these single-board PC's. Is there some reason these small computers cannot/do not include at least two eSATA ports for external hard drives? As a photographer I need to handle _HUGE_ amounts of data -- right now my previous generation hardware includes a 3-4 2T hard drives for data storage. I need the newer generation of external 16T hard drives to keep up with demand. I need at least (2) eSATA ports (preferably hot-swappable) to be able to copy from one drive to another. Does such a single-board PC exist? Have you reviewed any in the past? Please share your thoughts -- I typically build my own Desktop PC's and I am ready for a new generation, and hope to utilize the Single-Board PC's as secondary or tertiary Backups for my Wedding Business. Your thoughts would be appreciated -- realize that I can do all of my image processing/manipulation on the newest gen Desktop PCs -- the SBPC's would be used mostly as backups; and I am NOT a fan of "The Cloud". Thanks!