Vorke V5 Plus Kaby Lake Mini PC Review with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04

The Vorke V5 Plus mini PC just goes to show how initial impressions can be very misleading. Arriving in a plain manila-coloured box with the protection film on the top of the device starting to peal-off the minimalist contents only included a round-pin (European?) power supply and a small B&W ‘user’ manual.

The mini PC has an Intel Celeron Processor 3865U from the Kaby Lake mobile range which is a dual-core (dual-thread) non-turbo 1.8GHz processor. However this SoC also includes an Intel HD Graphics 610 processor capable of 4K support at 60Hz through DisplayPort, although only 4K@24Hz on HDMI (1.4). Additionally the SoC supports DDR4 RAM in dual-channel configuration. The V5 Plus model which comes with both memory and storage although it is sold without them as a barebones V5 model.

Physically the V5 looks similar to a NUC and the pre-populated V5 Plus included a single SODIMM stick of Samsung DDR4 Synchronous 2400 MHz memory and a HOODISK 64GB M.2 SSD. Also included is a licensed pre-installed copy of Windows 10 Home. The full specs are as follows:

The initial boot of Windows revealed that an administrator account already existed and I was welcomed with the System Preparation Tool:

Given that I’m naturally wary of pre-configured Windows, plus I didn’t want to go through all the updates typically required to get to a working system, I re-imaged the SSD drive using Microsoft’s Windows ISO written and booted from a USB. I find this approach normally cleaner and quicker although the very latest updates are still required to be downloaded once the installation is complete.

Unfortunately while Vorke have a zip file of the drivers on their webpage, it is still missing the driver for the ‘Thread Firmware Extension Device’. So I had to restore the original image and run ‘Double Driver’ to extract the driver, which I’ve made available here.

Finally after a somewhat shaky start a quick look at the Windows hardware information shows it is aligned to the specification:

As usual I ran my standard set of benchmarking tools to look at performance under Windows:

Performance was very good compared with other mini PCs and is arguably the best mini PC tested so far:

Turning to Ubuntu I first ran my benchmarks on an earlier release to allow comparison. Installation was straight forward and directly from a USB created by ”dd’ing” a standard ISO.

This time no clear winner is obvious however the V5 Plus performance was one of the best.

Ubuntu’s Octane result was better than in Windows:

Given the M.2 slot takes only a ‘2280’ sized SSD I thought it would be interesting to see if a smaller ’2242’ would work:

After carefully replacing the base of the device I found that the shorter M.2 was recognized on boot. So I installed Ubuntu 18.04 upgraded with the latest Canonical build of the v4.17 fourth release candidate kernel and ran some basic commands to look at the hardware in more detail:

For real-world usage I tested playing videos under Windows using both Edge and Chrome browsers. With both browsers both 4K@30fps and 4K@60fps videos played without issue:

except that ‘Status for Nerds’ didn’t get updated when playing the 4K@60fps video in Edge and 4K@60fps in Chrome was initially stuttery before playing okay.

In contrast playing videos in Ubuntu was a similar story to previous Intel processor-based mini PCs with 4K videos being unwatchable but okay when played at 1080p:

And even though 4K@60fps were unwatchable even 1080p@60fps still resulting in a 50% loss of frames:

Playing videos using Kodi on Windows resulted in VP9 codec encoded videos using software for decoding generating high CPU usage and a slightly higher CPU temperatures:

whereas a H.264 codec encoded video used hardware to decode:

as did videos encoded with H.265 or HEVC:

The result in Kodi on Ubuntu 18.04 were different in that only one format of HEVC used software to decode and was unwatchable:

whereas hardware was used to decode the others:

For both Windows and Ubuntu sound worked for each of HDMI, the internal speaker and headphones:

The device is cooled by an internal fan which is normally quiet under both Windows and Ubuntu. It kicks in only when necessary but it does have a high speed setting which is audible but this only seems to be required for occasional short bursts:

The device also has a digital clock display on the lid:

which initially takes the time from the BIOS but can get overwritten by timezone settings as defined within your OS depending on the configuration.

Network connectivity throughput was measured using ‘iperf’:

which was very good in comparison with other mini PCs.

Power consumption was measured for Ubuntu:

• Powered off – 0.2 Watts
• BIOS* – 8.0 Watts
• Boot menu – 4.2 Watts
• Idle – 4.1 Watts
• CPU stressed – 9.8 Watts
• Video playback** – 8.2 Watts (1080p in Chrome) and 11.1 Watts (4K in Kodi)***

* The fan was running at medium speed
** The power figures fluctuate so the value is the average of the median high and median low power readings.
*** A slightly higher power reading given the video was running from USB

with the results again being very favorable for a mini PC device.

The BIOS appears to be fully unrestricted:

Overall the device performs extremely well. It is competitively priced and represents good value for money given the performance and flexibility. The V5 Plus in this review was kindly provided by Geekbuying and is available for purchase on their website, and after using the coupon ‘YBFUJZXV’ the final price is $229.99.

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