ReachingStar 5900 #MiniPC evaluation

ReachingStar 5900 #MiniPC evaluation

So I had this product for going on 3-4 weeks and so far I am impressed. Let me preface this review by stating that I did upgrade this machine by swapping out the 500 GB M.2 NVME drive with a 1 TB M.2 NVME drive and added a 2.5 inch 2 TB SATA3 SSD drive. Reason being is that the 2nd M.2 slot in this machine is for a M.2 Sata SSD drive which offers the same iOPs speed as a standard 2.5 inch SATA3 SSD drive and since the 2.5 inch drive (same storage size) is a bit cheaper, I went that route.

My use case is as follows:

- Replaced my old linux workstation. From a hardware perspective, this was much better, far quieter and I have more hardware resources.

- Mainly used workstation for Physics and ML/AI (light deep learning).

- Light gaming (think old SNES and Sega ROMs) so can‘t comment on the hardware gaming.

Pros:

- This small beast seems to function well when I put it through it‘s test. Right now I have 3 VM‘s (running on VirtualBox) as well as watching/streaming movies and the CPU and RAM usage is barely at 50%.

- Uses far less space and is so much quieter than my old lenovo workstation (CPU finally died)

Cons:

- When doing Machine Learning, since most software takes advantage of TensorCores, since this machine is not using #Nvidia GPU‘s, it does consume alot of memory resources for medium to large learning models. It should be noted that I already knew of the limited capabilities of the GPU on this machine so I have no problems dumping this workload to the Cloud.

- When running all 3 VM‘s and trying to do anything CPU intensive (physics simulations), you finally see the load hit it‘s limit. (surprising iOPs load is low)

- Getting Linux as your main workstation is a bit of a hassle. Thankfully in my younger years, I was a linux admin so I knew how to navigate around the issues for using Linux as your main OS on this little beast. Note that you have to use a Linux kernel 5.11 or higher otherwise some of the components (networking and GPU) will not work correctly. Since I use Linux Mint as my main OS (by default it uses an updated 5.4 kernel but that version doesn‘t have the built in kernel modules to support the networking and GPU fully).

- For M.2 storage slots, why include 1 x M.2 NVME (Gen 3) and 1 x M.2 SATA SSD slots? It makes no sense and confuses people since they try to buy 2 x M.2 NVME drives. Thankfully I did a bit of research as I was going to buy 2 x M.2 NVME GEN3 Drives.

If you are an average user (mainly uses for light gaming, streaming/video editing, college work, etc), it‘s a great machine. I would even recommend this for light to medium development (nvidia users steer clear) use case.

I would definitely recommend this (try to get the storage upgraded and if you have the money, you can upgrade to 32 GB of RAM.