Wave Cube Mini PC

Details

The first machine this house designed, and the one everything since has been measured against. A 1.4 litre case in 6063-T5 extruded aluminium, anodised 15 micron, holding 3.1 GHz on all eight cores at 28 W package power after thirty minutes of load in a 30 C room, at 34 dBA measured one metre away. A mini PC is where a specification sheet does most of its lying, and it lies in four places. The boost clock on the box is real for about twenty-five seconds in a box this size, after which the number that matters is the sustained one, which is never printed. The word upgradable is printed on machines whose memory is soldered to the board, so the machine you buy is the machine you are stuck with. The 512 GB SSD is very often a DRAM-less QLC drive that writes at 4,000 MB/s for ninety seconds of SLC cache and then falls to about 180 MB/s for the rest of a large copy. And boost, brightness and capacity across this whole category are quoted as up to, which is a number with no condition attached and therefore not a number. It ships with LifeOS, Shuunnya's own operating system, built on a long-term-support Linux base with our own desktop. LifeOS is in final testing as this page is written, and we would rather say so than call a first-generation system finished. What it does today is in the specification below, and the firmware is unlocked with the boot order in your hands, so if it is not what you want then another system installs cleanly and the warranty is unaffected.

• Sustained figures, not up to figures: 4.6 GHz boost for about 25 seconds from cold, then 3.1 GHz on all eight cores at 28 W, held for thirty minutes at 30 C ambient
• Nothing is soldered: two SO-DIMM slots, two M.2 2280 slots, a socketed M.2 wireless card, and a fan that changes in ten minutes with a Phillips driver
• Storage is TLC with an on-board DRAM cache, not DRAM-less QLC: 4,100 MB/s into the cache, then a sustained 1,450 MB/s, which is the number you feel on a large copy
• Every unit is new. No returned mainboard, drive or adapter is ever fitted into a new machine; a returned unit is sold as marked open-box at a lower price or dismantled for spares
• The configuration step is priced against our own published spares, so choosing the small one and upgrading later costs you the same Rs 6,000
• The honest limit is the chassis: 28 W sustained is what 1.4 litres of aluminium and one 60 mm fan can carry, so this is a desktop for work and not a machine for heavy 3D rendering
• There is no Shuunnya service-centre network yet. A warranty claim is handled by sending the unit to us, and we do not print a turnaround time because we have not run enough of them to have an honest one