So, I've got my topton mini pc in the mail. It's a pentium gold 7505 variant, with 4 2.5gbe ports.
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The unit is quite large (18x12x5,5cm) and absolutely heavy, about 1200g with just the ssd installed. The power brick appears to be a 48W 12V 4A LiteON.
I've installed a single 8gb ram stick I had around and a small sata ssd to test with. Without modifications, cpu temperatures would skyrocket into the 70-75°C under light loads in Win 10 and reach 100°C and throttle under stress test even with the default 15W PL1 power limit.
So I've decided to open the machine and oh boy, was I in for a surprise. The thermal paste is abundant as usual with those devices, and looks a bit too thick on the core and iGPU. The contact plate is aluminum instead of copper (like other devices) and there's nothing to get contact to the NIC chips. Also, upon removing the cpu plate, the thermal paste application was even worse, and the aluminum below looks straight out of the sandblasting machine with no further milling or cleaning. At least there's no paint.
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Once I had cleaned the cpu and heatsink and mounted everything together, I was presented with a rather nasty picture.
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Looks like there's at least 0.4mm of gap between the cpu's silicon and the heatsink. Instead of using a spacer, I've measured the four standoffs on the heatsink with a calipber and slowly filed them back about 0.35mm. Having the cooler out, I took some time to wet sand the contact pad with some 600-800 grit sandpaper and clear any visible residue.
Once I had the heatsink dry, I heated it up with a blowtorch to 60-65°C to allow better thermal compound flow, repasted with some arctic MX4 and appled back the aluminum spacer. The standoffs got some more work with fine sandpaper to clean up the edges and a bit of electrical tape on top to protect the board from scratches.
Assembled back everything, set the power limits in bios to 22W PL1 and 30W PL2 and started testing. After a few minutes of Linpack, the heatsink had soaked a lot of heat and stabilized at 77-78°C at 25W power. Running at 15W the unit never passed 60-63°C in 20°C ambient.
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Running Cinebench R23 at 25W, in a single run I've got a score of 2660. Passmark CPU test around 5400.
Tomorrow I'll install proxmox and ready the system for it's final use, a router / home server mix for a future FTTH installation. Overall I'm happy with the build, it does require a fair bit of tweaking to fix the assembly and thermal issues.
According to AliExpress they've sold a number of units - but nobody has spoken up about the quality and reliability . . . . Hard to find ANY information except for a nice Chinese video : Ryzen 5825U i226 Firewall and here and here at least we are getting some good visuals from the inside!!
