Cubi 2 Intel Kaby Lake Core i7-7500U DDR4 mSATA HDMI Wifi Bluetooth SFF Barebone PC (Cubi2-005BUS)

Update 11-26-2015: IF YOUR WIRELESS KEYBOARD AND MOUSE LAGS ON THIS DEVICE, READ THIS.I installed a 2.5 inch SSD. It works fine, over 500 read and write speeds on CrystalMark Blah, Blah, Blah. It's fine.But my wireless keyboard and mouse were lagging badly now all of a sudden. I tried all the troubleshooting tips I could find on Google. Nothing worked. I bought a new Keyboard and mouse combo figuring my old one was busted. Nope, the new upgraded and different brand didn't work either. So I said to my self I wonder if this will work. I took a spare 10 foot USB extension cable and plugged the dongle in remotely using the cable. Problem solved.The best I can tell the larger tray and 2.5 SSD installation caused excess RF interference somehow on the dongle plugged into the USB port. By having it plugged in via cable away from the device itself; there is no interference. Working like a champ. The cable is laid behind furniture so it's no big deal aesthetically.I was going to upgrade this to five stars despite previous minor negatives. I has been a solid machine. But, this dongle RF interference problem keeps it permanently knee-capped at four stars. I'm not too upset because the keyboard/mouse combo Microsoft 900 is much nicer than the Logitech bottom of the line I was using. It is more stout.Original Post:This unit works as intended. It's small. It makes a great HTPC for things like Netflix and such. I does light gaming well. If a full windows machine is desired with some laptop quality horsepower this does a great job.I looked up the CPU on Intel's website. It is the new gen I3. It is dual core with hyper-threading; four threads total. It does laptop grade multitasking fine. I have a legacy game (SWGEMU) running in the background ALWAYS. I can then watch Netflix and surf the web at the same time just fine.It is more powerful than my laptop. That has an AMD A8-4500m true 4-core in it. All synthetic bechmarks I've used on both my laptop and this unit confirm this unit is more powerful. To test graphics I used Unigene Valley. I get 3-4 FPS higher at 768p than on the 4500m. To test CPU processing I used Google Octane. In octane it did almost double what the 4500m can. It is a very powerful processor. But it is still a mobile processor. It is not a full desktop processor. I would not recommend this for heavy rendering, like video creation. It is for entertainment and light processing. My laptop plays Minecraft, Saints Row Four, Halo legacy, The Spacials all at 768p with medium settings fine. The HDMI TV this new unit is plugged into is native at 768p. So I'm sure they will play fine as well on this. I'm just waiting to get the second 2.5 SSD.I put in 8gigs of 1600ram. It is the max. If you buy the I3 version, don't go cheap on ram. Get the 8gigs. Don't use 2 or 4 gigs. Just use 8gigs. The cost is only 20 to 30 $s more. It's worth it, trust me. The graphics are integrated. My unit was using 1.6 gigs for graphics alone on one of my tests. Where you can cut cost is on the mSATA internal SSD. I used a ADATA brand 128gig card. It only has 380 read and 130 write. This is plenty fast for this machine. It is the "Boot" drive. I get a 35 second boot, from pushing the power button to a fully loaded and stable Windows 7 desktop. When I click on programs they come right up. The only latency I get is from the internet. The SSD is fine. But most importantly it was cheap. Since I can add a 2.5 SSD later I will reserve the money for that. I have steam and plenty of the games will play. But I am waiting for the second SSD to install for those.Building the unit. It is barebones. You must add RAM, SSD, and OS. You must configure everything yourself. I installed Windows 7 without a bios update. I used a USB DVD drive and an OEM disk. In order to load I had to disable two factory enabled settings in the UEFI bios. 1. Turn off secure boot. This will allow the comp to boot off of the USB DVD drive. If you don't do this you will just get a red dialog box saying incorrect signature. You can find instructions on Google. 2. You must turn off Windows 8 fast boot mode. If you leave it enabled it will just lock up and hang when first loading the OS install. Once I figured out these need to be disabled it was smooth sailing. Working as intended.Mechanical. Fit and finish overall is very good. The bottom plate doesn't sit perfectly flush with the bottom of the outer casing in spots. Since these are electronics, I not going to try and force it to. Ding. The fan is a little louder than expected. Higher pitch as well. Ding. Not a deal breaker. But I have a Celeron Chromebox this replaced and it's fan was lower in pitch. This unit is not louder than a standard laptop. When running Netflix or something of course you can't hear it. If it is in a quiet room it is hardly audible. It is mostly because of the higher pitch tone. Heat wise it is very cool. Both my laptop and Chromebox feel like hair driers under load. This unit under load is just luke warm at worst. I haven't checked core temp at load with the downloadable Intel tool yet, but I can tell by the hand test it is fine under load.minimal heat. Intel's website did rate max TDP at 30 watts. So this makes sense.Since initial build, I have had this unit turned on for a solid week without powering it down. It has been absolutely 100% stable. I have done tests, games, streaming, and SWGEMU in the background 24 hrs a day. Very solid unit.The reason I give it for stars right now is the Fan, bottom plate not a perfect fit, and in none of the literature does it mention the bios is optimized for Windows 8 and certain pre-checked options must be disabled for a Windows 7 install. In the long run if it proves durable I will up the rating. Plus I still have the second 2.5 SSD to install for Steam. If that works well I will probably up it to five stars then, despite the minor laws mentioned here. Look for about two months on that.Overall a nice quality unit from MSI.

Initial Review... then my hi-tech review to follow..I installed several different SSD drives in this model of the Cubi. The slowest being the Kingston Fury... with the Sandisk Ultra II and OCZ Arc 100 both faring much faster... and then with the fastest, the Samsung 850 EVO mSATA.Most users will be hard pressed to tell the difference, all boot to desktop within 10 to 20 seconds. Mind you, this box is NOT for gaming. It is a Kodi TV box or home office light duty system, that behaves like a much more expensive pc.The box is easy to open, but moody to reassemble.- If you use the Msata drive, the footprint is smaller, but you must carefully fit the rear lid back on again just right.- If you install the 2.5" SSD, you will fuss with a delicate 'press-on-notebook-style' motherboard sata cable. Position and snugly press that into place... with the long wire part of the 'harness cord' up against the WALL of the case. Orientation of this piece is a bit frustrating. Go slow, be gentle.If you do not connect the delicate SATA cable correctly, the SSD will NOT show in the Bios. This happened to me one time and I had to reopen the box and fuss with the connector.Keep in mind that such accessories change from time to time and I reporting EXACTLY what I experienced with the equipment I bought. Bios versions change as well.If you need 4k monitors on this puppy, buy dual 4 GB RAM modes, preferably G Skill DDR3L 1600. The dual channel RAM is essential to smooth playback.Finally, Win 7 and Win 10 run equally the same.When I installed the Samsung SSD, Ieft the bios in Win 7 mode (non EUFI) and then installed Win 7, activated the license and then ran the update to Win 10. This system boots in 10 seconds.The boot using the OCZ Arc 100 did NOT like the Win 7 non-EUFI so much.. boot to desktop took 20 seconds. To remedy that, I did the following.Wiped the SSD clean with Parted Magic (do NOT use other hard drive wiping software) Set the Bios to Win 8.x and left all defaults, except removing excess boot drives and made the USB key first boot, then SSD second boot.Downloaded from Microsoft the Media Creation Tool. To get the right version, you must use a Win 10 Pro machine. Then you can select the option of making a boot media with a USB stick.Upon loading Win 10 Pro version 1511 (this came out Nov 12) you can then add a Win 7 Pro or Win 8.2 Pro license key to activate. Subsequently, if you only have a key for Win 7 Home or 8 Home, just follow that plan.The Arc 100 now boots Win 10 Pro in 10 seconds. The EUFI Bios enabled does make a big difference in this case.This product is amazing for the price and the two year warranty, adds a bonus yowsa to my five star review.

Good product, i am very happy with this product.

Excelente para trabajo Casero de edición de foto, video y CAD. Muy pero muy silencioso, la mejor compra que puedes hacer, depende del procesador que elijas. No incluye HDD, RAM, ni SO instalado. Funciona perfecto con un SSD.

Excelente, poderosa para su tamaño. Con un rendimiento estupendo en tareas de todos los dias, ademas de una capacidad gaming basica.