MSI has sent over the Cubi 5 10M mini-PC kit for us to take a look at. Available in three barebones kits and a ready-to-go option. Let’s see what Dave has to say about it in the video review below.
MSI Cubi 5: Specifications
MSI Cubi 5 10M: Video Review
MSI Cubi 5 10M: Roundup
The MSI Cubi 5 10M is a small but very capable mini-PC designed for home, office, and commercial environments. At home it can be used as an HTPC/media centre PC, home office PC or general home daily use cases like Internet browsing, video consumption, word processing and email tasks.
It would also be right at home in office and commercial environments performing similar tasks and thanks again to its dual display connectors, dual monitor use is also available out of the box. The Cubi 5 10M was developed in conjunction with the MSI PRO MP221 monitor, a monitor developed for an office environment.
It’s quite the aesthetic piece too with a black plastic shell with a metal base and walls for reinforcement other than the MSI logo and I/O. It’s size also adds to its appeal with its small 0.66-litre volume that pretty much is the size of your hand.
Going back to I/O: 3x Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, 2x Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 1, 2x USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, and DisplayPort give you a plethora of connection options for its form factor.
Internally: Wi-Fi AC, Bluetooth 5.0, M.2, regular SATA and 2x RAM slots again give you lots of options to populate for your use case.
CPU temperatures under the heaviest PC Mark 10 workload peaked at 70’C. Even in a pretty warm room (26’C) at the time of testing the small heatsink proves itself well here.
PC Mark 10 was used to test the Cubi 5. With an essentials score of 6533, productivity score of 5689, digital content creation score of 2399 the overall PC Mark 10 score was 3202.
Highlighting essentials and productivity with good overall scores it’s clear the MSI Cubi 5 will be perfect for home and office environments.
Digital content creation scored considerably lower meaning while possible, large content creation projects e.g. photo and video should probably be left to more powerful systems.
Acoustics aren’t much of a factor here too. The low powered SOC’s offer a great balance between power and efficiency and can be cooled easily enough. Even during the high load sections of testing in PC Mark 10, the PC was barely audible on the desk and silent when mounted on the back of a monitor. The fan curve here is pretty much spot on.
Finally, the option of either the Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs are great depending on the customer’s situation and/or preference once again.
The barebones MSI Cubi 5 kit with the Core i3-10110U is £299, Core i5-10210U is £349 and Core i7-10510U is £499. A decent chunk of change.
Funnily enough, this review unit I’ve been sent came populated with the i5-10210U, a single stick of 8GB Samsung DDR4 2666, an Intel 660P 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD as well as an activated copy of Windows 10 Pro and MSI’s quick setting bar software right out of the box.
A quick Google search also found this model available at CCL in the UK with a price tag of £690.
So, if a complete system is something you’d prefer then this is also an option.
You could, of course, save some costs purchasing the barebones mini-PC of choice and populating it with M.2, 2.5” drive, RAM and OS of choice yourself.
Taking the use case, hardware, aesthetics, size, and acoustics into account. The MSI Cubi 5 10M walks away with Play3r’s Gold Award. It’ll make itself right at home in any home, office, or commercial environment.
Big thanks to MSI for sending in the Cubi 5 10M in for review.
Further Reading
