Rowwwwr! The CHUWI RZBOX Ryzen 9 Mini PC
Two Litres Of Metal Encased Processing
The CHUWI RZBOX’s all metal enclosure measures 7.25 x 7.25 x 2.5″, roughly the size of four paperback novels if ServeTheHome’s measurement of two Project TinyMiniMicro 1L PCs stacked on top of each other doesn’t help. Inside you will find a Ryzen 9 4900H, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB NVMe SSD from Netac, plus WiFi connectivity, which will run you $750 to pick up. There is another empty NVMe slot which supports SATA or PCIe, but no 2.5″ bay.
The power consumption is interesting, at full load it consumed 80W which is somewhat higher than other similar devices and part of the reason the RZBOX outperforms those devices. This mini-PC generally idles at 11-14W but with a little BIOS tweaking that can be dropped to around 8W if you are looking to reduce power usage.
The price is a bit steep considering the ~$500 launch price, but that is something which can be said about most products on the market now. Finding an Intel AX210 WiFi chip was a nice surprise which helped offset the price, then again the plastic sides and questionable choice of provider for the RAM and SSD detract from that bonus.
As the first one in this series, we have the AMD Ryzen 9 4900H powered RZBOX that has some interesting features not found on Project TinyMiniMicro nodes. Let us get to our review.
