Tag: PC

AceMagician T8Plus Tiny Windows Mini PC Review

A few weeks ago we looked at a surprisingly decent little mini PC from AceMagician – a PC maker I hadn’t heard of before. In my latest video we take a look at another one called the T8Plus which is even smaller and powered by an Intel N95 processor.

The price point of the T8Plus is around $199, but with a coupon on Amazon, it can be brought down to $150. Inside, it houses an Intel N95 processor, a lower-end chip that is not as powerful as the Ryzen version we looked at a few weeks ago but still fast enough to be useful. It comes with 8GB of RAM, which is soldered on, and a 256GB NVMe that can be replaced. There’s a slightly more expensive version that has 16GB of RAM soldered on. Both versions boot to Windows 11 Pro which is licensed and pre-installed on the unit.

The T8Plus has three HDMI outputs capable of delivering 4K at 60 frames per second out of each independently. It also has three USB 3 ports, two gigabit ethernet ports (powered by Realtek chipsets), a headphone/microphone jack, and a Kensington lock slot. Unfortunately there are no USB-C ports.

Performance-wise, the T8Plus is surprisingly snappy. Basic tasks such as loading up Microsoft Word or browsing websites are handled with ease. It also performs well for media playback either locally or via streaming services. Because it has an Intel chip with Quicksync on board it should perform well as a Plex server.

For gaming, the T8Plus can handle older games like Half-Life 2 which we were able play at 30fps at a 4k resolution. However, it struggles with more modern games like No Man’s Sky, which could barely get 15 frames per second at 720p. Ryzen Mini PCs do much better and often deliver playable framerates with AAA titles.

But due to its video processing prowess the T8Plus exceled at game streaming, delivering a 4K 60 stream from the GeForce Now service.

The T8Plus also performs well with Linux, with Ubuntu 23.04 running smoothly on it. All the hardware was detected successfully, and the performance feels snappy, making it a great solution for those looking to experiment with Linux as a desktop.

The AceMagician T8Plus is a capable and inexpensive mini PC worth considering. It offers good performance for its price point, making it a suitable choice for basic tasks or even as a mini server. However, if you’re shopping around, it might be worth looking at some of the Ryzen mini PCs, which may offer significantly better performance for just a little more money.

My College Dorm Tech Circa 1998

25 years ago I was just finishing up my senior year of college. I was just as much a nerd then as I am today so of course I had quite a bit of tech in my on-campus apartment. I recently found an old video from that time with some of the gear visible. Check it out:

The PC

The PC pictured began its journey as a Pentium 166, assembled with parts procured from local computer fairs. It was the first PC I built myself. By the time I graduated, the PC had undergone an upgrade to a Pentium 233 MMX that was just a simple CPU swap.

My PC was pretty decked out – it had a Creative Labs Voodoo2 GPU which was lightyears beyond what game consoles could do at the time. This is when the PC really started to prove itself as a gaming platform with Quake II and many other games really pushing the graphical hardware available at the time.

You’ll notice on the front of the case that I had both a 3.5″ floppy drive and an IDE Zip drive. Thanks to its IDE interface the Zip drive ran much faster than than the external parallel version that was more widely used at the time. I recall that this particular zip drive required a version of Windows 95 that was only sold with OEM computers which took a little bit of work to acquire!

The CD-ROM drive was actually one of the first DVD drives available for PCs also from Creative Labs. The drive came bundled with an interface card that included an MPEG 2 decoder for watching DVD movies. It also came with a custom version of Wing Commander IV which had DVD quality cut scenes that were a major step up from the regular DOS version.

My video also caught the computer’s screen running Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 4 and Winamp that was playing some tunes while my girlfriend was reading her email.

Earlier that year I discovered the wonder of MP3s. The fact that such a small file could produce such high fidelity sound was nothing short of miraculous. Remember, this was a time when storing uncompressed CD wav files on a hard drive was an impractical endeavor due to file sizes and high storage costs. The advent of MP3s represented a significant leap in music technology, enabling us to enjoy our favorite tunes without worrying about running out of disk space.

That year my campus rolled out a residential ethernet network for all of the on-campus housing. That gave us a direct pipe into the University’s T1 line running at a whopping 1.5 megabits per second. It was a huge step up from the dialup modems we were using up until that point. Transitioning back to dialup after graduation was a major bummer – it would be another three years before DSL service was available at my house.

It was scary too because there were zero security safeguards with many student computers openly exposed to others on campus and the rest of the Internet for that matter. Personal firewalls were still a long ways off.

My Cell Phone

1998 was also the year that saw the introduction of digital cellular phones. I owned a Qualcomm QCP-820 phone that operated on Bell Atlantic’s CDMA network. Fun fact: Bell Atlantic later became Verizon. The QCP-820 was a dual band phone meaning it could operate in digital or analog mode. Digital coverage was few and far between when I first got the phone. But when I was lucky enough to find myself in a digital zone the quality of the call was substantially better.

Here’s another shot of the phone next to the iconic solo cup design of the late 90’s:

The Living Room

Despite the PC Powerhouse in my bedroom we still had a few game consoles on hand which were more fun for local multiplayer games. At this point in 1998 the Sony Playstation had become the dominant home video game console. You can see it sharing space with our VHS VCR that we used as our DVR to record our favorite shows when we were out and about and of course for Blockbuster rentals.

Also on hand, but sadly less frequently used, was my Sega Genesis (the very same one you’ll see on my YouTube set!) along with the Sega 32X attached. A year earlier the 32X add on was discontinued and liquidated so I picked it up for only about $30. The Genesis underneath was purchased in 1989 right when it came out and was almost 9 years old when this video was taken.

Concluding Thoughts

What’s remarkable is how many technologies came to be in the short span of time between my freshmen and senior year (1994-1998). Today’s technology is certainly better than it was back then but what we have today has mostly evolved from all of this 90’s innovation.