PC Builds - Aerofara Tank56 First Look, Super Small From Factor Amd Ryzen Gaming Pc
It's ETAP primetime. Back here again today, we're going to be taking a look at a brand new mini PC from Aerothera known as the Tank 56. So in the past we've actually taken a look at least one aerofarm mini pc powered by an intel celeron n5105, which is relatively cheap on Amazon and a great little performer, but recently they released the tank 56 and I knew I had to get my hands on it due to the specs and the odd shape of this thing.
I actually really do like the way this thing looks, so yeah, what we have here is a pretty powerful little mini PC powered by a Ryzen 5 5600u. It does have a full-function USB Type C port up front. It's 3.2, so it will support display out of the box. You're going to get a 65-watt power supply. You've also got some mounting brackets, an hdmi cable, and some hardware to mount a 2.5-inch drive inside of the unit because it will support a mechanical or an SSD.
So far I've seen this offered in two different storage variants, so you can pick it up with eight gigs of RAM and 250 gigabytes of storage, or 16 gigabytes of RAM and 500 gigabytes of storage. Both of them are going to be using an m.2 ssd and, as you can see, this thing isn't much bigger than an Xbox controller, so we've got a really small form factor PC here.
When it comes to io up front, we've got a 3.5 millimeter audio jack, a full function USB type C 3.2, and two USB 3.0 ports over here on the right hand side. We've got a microSD card reader on the left hand side. There's not much going on over here, but when we move around back, we've got our power input, two full-size hdmi 2.0 ports, two more usb 3.0 ports, and gigabit ethernet, plus this does come pre-installed with wi-fi 6e and Bluetooth 5.2, and real quick.
I just wanted to show you the internals the way they have it. This setup is actually pretty cool given the case they have. It will support an extra 2.5-inch drive. I would highly recommend using an SSD. It slides right out with six screws, and it's actually using a Kingston m.2 ssd and Kingston ram here.
When it comes to the specs, this utilizes the Ryzen 5 5600U. This is based on the Zen 3 architecture. We've got 6 cores, 12 threads, a base clock of 2.3 gigahertz and a boost up to 4.2. Normally the 5600u runs at 15 watts in laptops to keep that heat down, but since we're working with a little PC here and we're not relying on battery power, as soon as you turn on high performance mode in Windows, this will be running at 30 watts and we should see some really good performance out of this little chip running at a higher tdp.
For the graphics, we've got a radeon 7i gpu at 1800 megahertz. The unit I have here does come pre-installed with 16 gigabytes of DD4 running at 3200 megahertz, but I suspect that the 8 gigabyte model will only be running on a single channel, so you might want to upgrade that if you want to get out a little cheaper up front.
It will help out with that GPU performance, but with this one we've also got a 500 gigabyte memory. 2 nvme ssd, wi-fi 6 bluetooth 5.2 and for the operating system, we have windows 11 installed on this unit, and here it is, so right now I've just got this plugged into a little 4k portable monitor, single usb type-c cable going in.
It'll enable touch. We can also do 4K 60 and this little monitor will do it. Overall, not a bad little experience, and I've tested the 5600 u in the past and the age. This is a great little chip as long as you can get those TDPS up there. And like I mentioned, in high performance mode, this is running at 30 watts, so it can send enough power to the CPU and the GPU side of things to keep the clocks up on both, and in turn, we should see some really great performance out of the 5600 u in this PC.
So the first thing I wanted to take a look at was some 4K article playback from YouTube. It actually does support free syncing, but we'll head over here to YouTube. I'll go to a demo article and we'll make sure we're at 4K. I've got stats for nerds up on screen, and the 5600 can definitely handle 4K article playback quite well, and we are at a true 4K 60fps here with no scaling on the initial load in.
We did get a few drop frames. I'm on wi-fi 6. Usually I run over ethernet, but overall these are frames you'll never see drop to the naked eye. This thing really does a great job with 4K, and this is just streaming from YouTube. I mean, if you've got a plex server set up, you could use that, you could run from an external or internal drive, and you shouldn't have any issues at all.
Even at a lower wattage, this will handle 4K 60. The next thing I wanted to take a look at were some benchmarks. First up we have Geekbench 5, coming in with a single core score of 1407 and multi 6055. With 3d Mark Night Raid we got a score of 14 out of 323 and the final one I ran here was Fire Strike with a 3524.
So these really aren't that bad given the form factor and power consumption of this little PC, but now I want to test out some PC games and see how this thing really performs, so the first game we have here is Kinshin and Pack 1080p, medium settings, and it's doing a great job. I think that's kind of shaders caching in the background, but in the last few months they have been doing some really nice little updates to this game, at least when it comes to performance on Windows and on these Ryzen chips.
You should get some great performances. Moving over to one of my favorite indie games now. I do like testing this on lower end hardware and usually I have to go down to 720p, which is low, but with this we're at 1080p, which is very high and we're over 60. This is fully playable here and it's so much fun.
I mean, if you're into racing games, then you'll love the art of rally. Definitely give it a try. I mean, it's so impressive how well this game runs on lower-end hardware. We're at 1080p with a medium-low mix now on the 5600h. Forza Horizon 5 at 900p with a low to medium mix and this will run at 1080p on all low settings.
You can get an average of around 65 fps, but I wanted to see what we could do with it. At 900p, low medium, we can get an average of 71 fps out of this game. It's pretty impressive, but it's another one of those games that's very well optimized. Next on the list, we've got Doom eternal 720p low settings with dynamic resolution scale turned on, so I was really hoping we could get a constant 60 out of this, and with dynamic resolution scale.
I usually set the frame limit to around 64, so it will scale it down a bit, but even with it set up like this, you can see that we are dipping under 60. I'd say the best setting for this would be to turn v-sync on with the static resolution scale set to about 80 percent. Of course, we had to test out Cyberpunk 2077.
