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This is literally my first Panther Lake mini PC. It's the Copilot Plus QBN AI Plus from MSI. Uh 3MG. Well, the model name is MSB211. It has Thunderbolt, Wi-Fi 7, Windows 11 Pro. It's Core Ultra 9 386H. This is the 32 gig DDR5 configuration. Yes, it is upgradeable for whenever RAM is affordable again. Maybe. Look at it. It's so tiny. The ports for rear IO, you have two Thunderbolt type-C ports and two HDMI ports, two 2 and a half gig Ethernet ports. You've also got your 19volt DC input jack that does require a rather substantial 120 watt external power
brick. There is also a cable retention mechanism. Some of you in the forum have said that you won't buy many PCs unless you can get a lack a latching or a locking power cord. Well, MSI's got that for you. You can screw in a thumb screw and it'll mechanically hold the power cable in place. On the side is a Kensington lock port which does lock the bottom door as well if you have a lock inserted into the hole. And there's also a remote external power button which is included in the box. MSI likes to add this remote power button and that plus the HDMI CEC means that it can just wake up the display. This is actually kind of a nice customer service thing. I covered this kind of thing in another video
where you get a mini PC mounted on the Visa mount, which it does include a bracket for that. You can sort of build your own upgradeable all-in-one. It's not really all-in-one. It's just the computer's mounted to the back of the monitor. But sometimes that can turn into a tech support nightmare because it's like the computer goes to sleep and you sit down and you hit the power button to wake it up. But the power button actually puts it to sleep because you move the mouse and it was already waking up. So when you hit the power button, it goes back to sleep. The remote power button solves a lot of those problems because it just does everything. Like you hit that and it just it wakes up everything if you're in
the ecosystem, which is nice. Maintenance on these is also absurdly easy. You just loosen the screw, slide the latch, and pull and then you're in. but it's got a nice copper thermal connection for your 2280 M.2. The Wi-Fi is just under that. And then your DDR5 with heat spreaders is located here. And again, upgradeable. That is pretty much the extent of the full upgradability though. Uh now, this particular one's rocking a Fison ESR 1 TBTE CCZ model. These are low power, but still pretty fast. I believe I reviewed this Fison controller when it first came out. I was pretty happy with it. And Fison does pretty good work. On the bottom, there are two slide mounts to go with the
included 75/00 millimeter visa mounting bracket. So, you can mount this on the back of your monitor. You don't have to use all four screws. You can use two. So, you can do offset mounting or something like that. And then the PC is designed to be held sideways in either a left or a right orientation. So, you can do cable management however you need to. It is nice the lock port locks the mini PC so that no one can steal your RAM or your SSD for that matter or at least it's harder. On the front, we have a USB 2.0 port, a USB 10 gig port, another type-C port. This one is 10 gig USB, not
Thunderbolt, and a power button, which has a built-in fingerprint reader. And the little hole there is a power LED, not a frontfacing microphone. All right, let's get this thing booted up and see how it does, remembering that this is the first Panther Lake device that I've actually gotten my hands on. Thanks, MSI. Look at the multicore go. Some of you in the audience can be excited about getting a 386 for the second time. It's a 386A. It never mind. That's a fair bit before my time. We're using just about 50.8 watts on our Cinebench benchmark. 16 cores at 3.81 GHz with a total score of 16,494 on this run. Just for comparison, I've added the Minis Forum Mercury EM680, which is a 6800U AMD processor and a
first gen, the Core Ultra, the first gen Core Ultra, you know, after like 12th gen Intel, all that stuff. Mini PC, uh the Asus Stuck 14 Pro. So you can see Intel has improved things quite a bit. I actually like Panther Lake a lot for laptops and mini PCs because of its power efficiency. And so it's nice to see that it has been well implemented here. It's also really nice to see how much power savings this thing has. This is half the power worst case scenario of our Asus Nuck 14 or at least well there are other configurations of that processor that can juice it up to 100 watts. We can turbo up to 100 watts, but this thing 50 watts all day long and it'll it'll sustain on all the cores.
It's easier to cool. It's very good power efficiency for Panther Lake. And that's very good for truly portable systems like laptops. But this is the first Panther Lake system I get to take a look at. So, ah, you know, I'll take it. There's one drive. That rascal. It's like no, no means no one drive. No means no. Cage 2023. Over 2,000 points single core and 17,000 points multi-core. It's nice to see this much of an improvement in both single and multi-core scores on a machine that's just a couple of years newer than our comparison systems. Cinebench 24 is pretty much the same story. Although the multi-core score is a little better than I would have expected from our Asus Nuck 14 Pro.
Geekbench 6, however, it's a pretty big difference in our Geekbench tests owing to the fact that newer instruction set, more optimizations, better software. Open CL is doing a little better on our older platform, but this is a pretty respectable result. Again, this really isn't meant for gaming or anything like that. The Vulcan benchmark is pretty much the same, but because of this result, I decided to try, you know, let's try Shadow of the Tomb Raider. 1080p 62 FPS average at 1080p low. That really isn't bad. That's a pretty good result for this mini PC. And our AD 64 memory benchmark. This thing leads
the pack with 82 GB per second memory bandwidth. Well ahead of both other platforms. Now, I mentioned Thunderbolt support. What can you do with Thunderbolt? Well, you can add an external GPU. It is Thunderbolt 4, not five. So, if you're planning on adding an external GPU for gaming, I wouldn't recommend anything faster than a 960 XT or maybe a 970 uh or a 5060 Ti, maybe a 5070, but like there's no sense in adding something higher in that unless you're adding it for other purposes, like you want an external GPU to do AI. You could do that. and it would run okay because most of the computation is happening on the GPU.
The link to the GPU doesn't have to be fast unless you got more than one GPU. And then yeah, it does. Another use case for this in the AI section or like the AI like an AI idea is you could use this with an AI agent. So you pick this up and you run an AI agent on this or you allow an AI system to orchestrate this remotely and so you control what's on it and it is reasonably sandboxed there as a result. Typically I would say that Linux as your host operating system more than Windows would make sense and Intel has gone all in supporting Linux on Panther Lake. So if you wanted to run Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this or 26.04 4 LTS that is very well supported on this hardware. In fact, I may actually do
some other content over on the Linux channel specifically with this device. So, if you want to see that or you have some questions about that kind of a workload that you might run on this, let me know. Otherwise, this thing's pretty zippy. It's a pretty solid mini PC. It's a pretty solid upgrade if you've got a mini PC that's older than two or three years old. For traditional workloads, there are a lot of businesses out there that are transitioning from tower machines or like big box OEM machines to things like this. Partly owing to cost, but also partly owing to look how good it performs in a relatively small package. It's easier to manage in a lot of context. And there are many PCs out
there that have Intel VRO for uh fleet management and remote management and that sort of thing. Let's take a quick look at the BIOS and wrap this one up. Now, as a reminder, our 386H platform here is four performance cores, eight efficiency cores and four low power efficiency cores. 16 cores total, but four of those are performance, eight of them are reasonable performance e- cores, and the other four ecores are really meant for background tasks. This does have a full UFI boot network stack. So, if you manage your fleet with boot from network or not boot from network or default boot from network and then
refuse to boot from network based on MAC address and then boot from the built-in SSD, this does support that, but it is disabled out of the box. So, make sure that you enable that in the BIOS. It's resized bar support out of the box and enabled 64 megabytes of memory configured for the built-in graphics. Now, it can grow to more as we saw when we were running Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but that's pretty reasonable out of the box setup, I think. Power management setup. ERP ready enabled. You can disable that for a little bit more performance. Restore after AC power loss. I generally recommend power on, especially if this is used in a business case. And MSI power link. That means HDMI CC. They don't call it HDMI CC. If you're, you know, our audience looks for HDMI CC,
you can call it that. But at least they put that in the help text. You can also set up by a real-time clock alarm. So you can set it to wake up at 7:00 every day if you want. It also supports VTD trusted execution and virtualization technology. So you can run virtual machines, Windows Subsystem for Linux, full support, all that stuff. Trusted computing and secure boot is also available. You can use secure boot with Linux. There is nothing in the BIOS blocking you from using a signed kernel, which is fantastic. It might take you two reboots, but you can get it done. And that's pretty much all the options actually in the BIOS. Well, I think that's pretty much it for this one and
the first look at Intel's Panther Lake 386H. I'm a little slow on the draw for the 386H, but this is an inordinately powerful mini PC for third generation Core Ultra on the portable side. I think this is maybe a portant of not good things for desktop processors because why would you get a desktop processor especially in these economically challenged times when you can get this? You can do some expansion through Thunderbolt. This processor will be available in other configurations unless you're building a gaming PC. But for business class machines, things like this probably going to replace the rank
and file business desktop if it hasn't already. Yeah, we got to add Intel V Pro and some more management features. But MSI can do that. I mean, this is a dual WAN solution. So, I mean, you could even use this as there's a lot of Linux use case options. There's a lot of use case options in the Aentic AI, but you're going to have to wait to another video for that. If you have questions about that, definitely engage below. Or if you want to see me try this for some specific use case, definitely engage with that. And uh definitely let me know what you're looking for there because I don't know. But this thing is shockingly good at a nominal power usage of on the order of 50 to 60 watts. Worst case
power usage, 100 watts. I couldn't get it to go really and stay over 100 watts of usage when we're looking at that on our kilowatt meter. Uh the Thunderbolt expansion is nice. Might be nice if it had a couple more USBA ports, but eh, it's not bad. It was also really hard to get it louder than the noise floor in here with the air conditioning like 27 28 dB behind the monitor. You'll scarcely even know it's on. I'm model this level one. This has been a quick look at MSI's co-pilot plus, you know, QBN AI plus that's based on Intel Panther Lake. If you have any questions or I miss anything, hit me up in the forum or engage below. I'm signing out and I'll see you there.
