GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus mini PC review

GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus: 30-second review

Based on the number of NucBox designs that GMKtec makes and those that have made it into our best mini PCs round-up, business is booming for this Chinese company.

From the outside, it appears that GMKtec wants to make a NUC for every subtle market slice, and the new NucBox M5 Plus addresses those who liked the price of the M5 design but wanted a little more power.

In a compact 127mm square box, the M5 Plus sports an older Ryzen 7 processor, but it can have up to 64GB of RAM and 16TB of internal storage.

GMKtec offers some basic SKUs with less memory and storage, but this equipment is designed to be easily upgraded by the owner. A barebones option is available for those who want to provide an OS, memory, and storage.

There is one killer feature that should interest IT professionals, and that’s the dual 2.5GbE LAN ports. That makes the M5 Plus an ideal candidate for a custom firewall with a suitable Linux distro in place.

Overall, this is a low-cost system with plenty of positives and relatively few weaknesses. It has more than enough power for a wide range of applications and can be easily repurposed should requirements change.

GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus: Price and availability

• How much does it cost? From $230/£184
• When is it out? Out now
• Where can you get it? Aliexpress, Amazon and direct from GMKtec

Available in Black and Blue colour schemes, the GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus has three basic SKUs, starting with a barebones option.

For those who want to use Linux or have Windows licenses, the barebones require the addition of memory and storage but can be bought for as little as £183.84 ($229.99)  directly from GMKtec. The middle order comes with Windows 11 Pro installed, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage for only £223.80 ($279.99), and paying £263.77 ($329.99) increases the RAM to 32GB and storage to 1TB.

For whatever reason, possible stock control, the blue version is a few pounds/euros/dollars more than the black edition.

Unless you have spare DDR4 SODIMMs and NVMe sat around, there seems no point in paying the small amount extra to have the machine come ready to run.

Those prices seem cheap, but buying it via AliExpress can reduce that cost even more, and through that channel more SKUs are available, including a model with 2TB of storage.

From AliExpress, a barebones machine can be sourced from around £161 or $190, and a pre-installed machine with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage costs only £200 or $236.

To put this pricing into perspective, the Beelink EQR5 model, which uses the same processor and has remarkably similar specifications, is £280 from Amazon.co.uk and $280 via Amazon.com.

It should be noted that Amazon matches GMKtec’s direct selling prices in most regions.

An obscure brand might offer a similar machine for less, but from the known brands, this is an exceptionally competitive price.

GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus: Specs

GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus: Design

• Plastic construction
• Relatively easy access inside
• Dual M.2 2280

This case seems oddly familiar, mostly because it’s the same one that GMKtec used in the M6, K7 plus, K8 and K9. It might be used elsewhere, but it’s a design that this brand is happy to repurpose.

The shell is entirely plastic, but the paint finish on GMKtec hardware makes it look quite professional, at least when you first unbox it.

What’s good about this design is how easy it is to get inside, with no silly exercise where you are forced to pull the feet off to find screws hidden underneath.

The top of the case can be prised off with any blunt knife or spatula, and once that is removed, the four screws that need to be extracted are clearly visible.

With those out, the fan shroud on the top can be removed, and the small fan connector detached to have unlimited access to the memory and storage.

Our review hardware came with two 8GB DDR4 3200MHz SODIMM unbranded modules in place and a single 512GB NVMe SSD with a heatsink attached that was made by Foresee. Changing either of these takes seconds, and the inclusion of a second free m.2 2280 slot allows for the easy cloning of the resident drive for those who want more drive space for the boot drive.

Anyone with PC building experience should be able to increase the RAM and add extra storage in under 10 minutes, including the time to reboot the machine to make sure everything is good.

Cooling is provided by two fans, one sucking air from underneath and then out of a vent on the back, and the other is on top, pulling air from the sides before ejecting it at the top. Fan noise on this system was barely noticeable when in balanced performance mode. More on that later.

 While the M5 Plus doesn’t deliver the class of a metal enclosure, its enclosure is good enough to keep the internal system safe and cool under most circumstances.

GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus: Features

• AMD Ryzen 7 5825U (8 cores, 16 Threads)
• 16 PCIe Lanes
• Radeon Vega 8 Graphics

Every Ryzen 7 mobile CPU seems to have eight cores and sixteen threads, and the differences between them can be subtle.

The AMD Ryzen 7 5825U in this Mini PC is one from the Ceznne Zen 3 generation. It runs at a base clock of 2GHz, turbo boosts up to 4.5GHz and has an integrated Radeon Vega 8 GPU. Made originally for laptop use, it has a standard TDP of 15W, although it can be tweaked to consume 25W.

That makes it ideal for an embedded role, since it shouldn’t get too hot even after prolonged operation with sufficient ventilation.

The 15W TPD mode is the one that the machine is delivered with, labelled in the BIOS as ‘balanced’, but by setting that to “Performance” it consumes more power, delivers better results and it also generates more fan noise. How much better it is in Performance mode I’ll cover in the benchmarks, but for those wanting extra punch it’s a relatively each change to make.

The weakness of this chip over later Ryzen 7 chips is that the CPU provides all the PCIe lanes, and it can only use 16 of the Gen 3 variety. Later chips have 20 PCIe lanes, some of which are Gen 4, giving this NUC limits on what it can do with those lanes.

As eight of the lanes are allocated to the two M.2 slots and another two for the WiFi adapter, that leaves only six for all of the I/O, including the two 2.5GbE LAN ports.

I’m not sure all those PCIe capacity numbers add up, so it may be that this machine uses a PCIe switch to smooth out any excessive bandwidth demands.

The final part of this jigsaw is the Radeon Vega 8 GPU, something of a throwback to an era when AMD had the best integrated GPU solution. This GPU has been superseded by the Radeon 680M and 780M, but other changes in the chip architecture also combine to make the Vega 8 seem slow. This system uses DDR4 memory (dual-channel), and compared to later silicon, which uses DDR5, the amount of bandwidth available to the system is somewhat restricted.

The double whammy is that not only does the DDR4 brandwidth limit processing performance, but as the memory is shared by the Vega 8, it also caps graphics speed.

Therefore, this NUC isn’t a candidate for being a Mini gaming system, even if it can be configured to support three monitors using HDMI, DisplayPort and a single USB-C port.

The M5 Plus is a modest system, but it’s not remotely a slug like the Intel N100-based machines.

GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus: Performance

Many systems these days come with a setting in the BIOS that has three options for silent, balanced and performance modes. In many circumstances, selecting performance has a marginal impact on the overall speed of the system.

Typically, the laws of thermodynamics call the shots, and the extra heat from the performance mode tends to end up either making the system horribly noisy or the processor throttles when it gets too warm.

Except in this system, there are some significant performance improvements to get from Performance mode, which I’ve documented in the benchmarks.

There are some benchmarks almost entirely unaffected by the change, notably those that are single-core tests that don’t involve graphics.

Windows Experience Index has a graphics score of 9.9 in both cases, so it doesn’t move that needle when the system improves. The biggest impact is seen in video-related tests, where the improvement is around 20% typically, but 30% in a few scenarios.

The trade-off is that there is almost no fan noise in balanced mode, whereas the machine can be easily heard in performance mode. I didn’t test for silent mode, because in a balanced setting, the machine is effectively silent.

It should be stated that the numbers, even in performance mode, wouldn’t worry any more modern Ryzen 7 chip. The modern Ryzen 7 8845HS used on the Maxtang FP750 scores 18696 on 3DMark WildLife and 2937 for Steel Nomad Lite.

That said, the Maxtang FP750 costs over $600 with that chip, compared to less than $280 for the GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus.

Therefore, for the performance it delivers, the M5 Plus is of substantially better value.

GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus: Final verdict

What’s not to like in a small, cleanly designed system that uses older laptop technology effectively?

The GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus is an inexpensive solution to a myriad of problems with relatively few vices. It’s probably not the right choice for a power user, but for general office use, embedded presentation, firewall and mini-server roles, it ticks plenty of boxes.

The lack of faster ports than USB 3.2 Gen 2 might be an issue for some, but USB 4.0 or Thunderbolt will cost more than this hardware is priced.

For those looking for a no-nonsense NUC system that can be easily deployed, upgraded and repurposed, then the GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus makes plenty of sense.

Should you buy a GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

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