Installing Windows on an Xbox One APU: The Chuwi Aerobox Review
by Dr. Ian Cutress on December 24, 2020 9:45 AM ESTCPU Benchmarks, Power, Temperature, Noise
For office productivity, there’s no getting around the fact that these are Jaguar cores. Coupled with the memory bandwidth means that flicking between the basic documents can be somewhat laggy, and this isn’t really a system for anything other than email and web browsing. We still put it through our test suite, and the full range of tests were conducted. A few of them are highlighted here.
For reference, the Athlon 5370 mentioned here is a quad-core Jaguar.
Power, Temperatures, Noise
I will say a few words on power and temperatures.
Our normal tools for extracting power do not work on this embedded processor, likely a function of its age (similar Jaguar desktop processors that were public have the same issue), however we were able to take some wall measurements.
At idle, we saw power consumption in the 65-70W range. This is fairly high for a HTPC, so we would suggest not leaving it turned on when not in use. During our Borderlands 3 gaming, the system power hit 150 W, which should actually be clipping the power supply that is only capable of 150 W. This may be a limiting factor in gaming performance as a result. During high CPU loading, the total system power only went up to 85 W or so, showcasing that the GPU is the key component here.
For temperatures, before we replaced the paste, the system would peak at 75ºC regardless of load, and still offer full CPU frequency. After applying our own paste, that dropped to the 62-68ºC range. All throughout, the fan on the cooler never ramped up enough to be noticeable at a distance of a couple of meters. The one time the system had an odd boot, the fan did spin to 100% and was very loud, but after rebooting it came back as normal.
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Ian Cutress - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
It looks like Chuwi is making sure that their hardware all meets 2.35 GHz and 896 SPs. The Aliexpress ones seem to vary in what is actually unlocked.Chuwi made this for the Japanese PC market. It's a very unique market.
zodiacfml - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
That is impressive, I think they're paying a lot more for this part/spec. I don't expect this be affordable, maybe $500 though cheap for Japanese market.AMD and MS should do something about this console/PC for current and the future, maybe bundle 2 or 3 games to the console plus the price of Windows OS...
orangpelupa - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
Have you tried manually update the driver thru device manager and manually browse to the inf driver file from official amd driver that's the closest to this weird apu? (r7 or rx).Windows will complain blah blah blah, just ignore it. Keep ignoring it and try each driver one by one (in the same family).
Also try to disable windows driver signature enforcement, then manually edit the official amd driver inf with this gpu VID.
I used to to those things to update Radeon gpu on my old asus laptop.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
I didn't go too deep. The Chuwi Aerobox was working as-is, so I left it there when it wasn't as straightforward as it could be.BushLin - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
I'd bet it would take less time to paste the PCI identifier into a recent driver .inf file than it'd take to figure out which games don't run and write the article section about the drivers.Lord of the Bored - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
But the article section about the drivers still needs to be written. You can't just gloss over a complete lack of drivers on the internet, even if you do get to provide driver modding instructions.abufrejoval - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
And here I thought this was going to be a piece on how to recycle discarded consoles as Windows 10 thin clients... (or Android-x86 for that matter).Because there is going to be a lot of these going into most likely rather eco-fiendish recycling very soon.
Still, what I find puzzing is that 8-core code must have become the norm with that generation of consoles, yet even the latest and greatest like Microsoft latest Flight Sim never seem to touch more than perhaps 2-3 cores, while they take ages to get going and perform rather mediocre even on slightly above average hardware (using a Ryzen 7 5800X/RTX 2080ti combo).
Eirikr - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
Would love to see you this performance under Linux with the latest open source graphics driversEirikr - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
Meant to say would love to see you review the performance.Ptosio - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
If Microsoft really cared about the environment to 1% extent of their greenwashing attempts, it would allow Windows software to be run on their Xbox machines.This time people who already own powerful x86 and GPU units in form of a console, would not be forced to essentially buy the same thing twice, cluttering the planet in the process.