i'm new here and found this board after ordering an AM06 pro to try out. Unfortunately i missed the opportunity for a free test but i will share my experiences with the device here anyway
Overall look & feel
The cuboid form factor looks nice and fits great on a desk.
For I/O we have:
- 2 USB-C (1x front and 1x back)
- 2 USB-A 3.0 in the front
- 2 USB-A in the back
- 1x HDMI out
- 1x DisplayPort out
- 2x Gigabit LAN
- AMD Ryzen 5 5500U (6C/12T, up to 4,0GHz)
- 16GB DDR4 RAM
- 512GB M.2 SSD
I played around with the preinstalled Windows 11 first. It came with the 21H2 branch of Windows 11 Pro preinstalled.
The overall experience for any basic task was great! The builtin fan was not noticeable and i only know it exists because it spins up on the first boot.
WiFi speeds are acceptable for browsing and streaming but i noticed bad drops when playing games.
Games
Rocket League:
Possible to run at 1080p with 60fps. I had to change a few settings to performance but after that it worked just fine
CS:GO
It runs but struggles to keep the framerate high with the default High preset. The game crashed on me every time i tried to lower the settings
Using it as a server
This is where it gets interesting. My to-go benchmark here was a dedicated server for the game Satisfactory as that requires a lot of RAM and a decent CPU.
Within Windows 11
While Windows 11 takes up about 4GB of RAM just to run i was still able to host a server and load up an endgame save that should benchmark regular use pretty good.
The overall RAM consumption rose up to 13GB when running the server with a player connected. The power draw settled at around 11 Watts with a player connected.
Windows Server 2019 (desktop experience)
Installing another operating system is pretty easy but you will face issues with missing drivers on Windows Server.
The base RAM consumption with Windows Server 2019 was around 1.5GB with me connected via RDP. For my game server management i use Cubecoders AMP which is easy to set up and use.
Unfortunately i was unable to test Satisfactory because i ran into a bluescreen issue whenever i tried to download the game via SteamCMD. And the times it worked i was unable to get it running. This was probably a driver/software issue that needs some troubleshooting.
The AM06 Pro with Windows Server would be a great fit as a homelab Domain Controller. It features plenty of resources so it should be possible to use it as a backup server with a tool like VEEAM Backup & Replication with ease. You can fire up some fileshares too and won't see the performance dwindle as the 5500U offers great CPU performance!
Ubuntu 22 Server
Once again i've set it up to be barebones with the latest updates and installed Cubecoders AMP.
This is where i was most impressed. I was able to easily set it up with the provided bash script and get my Satisfactory server up and running in no time.
With a player connected i've seen the overall RAM usage go up to 12GB once again but the power draw was only around 7.5 Watts!
Power Consumption
Windows 11
While playing Rocket League i had a peak power draw of 40Watts. Idle was around 11-15W
Windows Server
The overall power draw was lower and hovered at around 11 Watts when in use. Idle power draw was below 10 Watts at times
Ubuntu Server
Idle power draw 5-6Watts
Satisfactory Server with a player connected and Minecraft Server running in the Background without a player connected: 12Watts!
Things i could not try
I'd love to use network teaming to get even more power out of the 2 Gigabit LAN ports. Maybe even try using more than one device in a Cluster for virtual machines....
Overall
The AM06 Pro is a great device for Office and light gaming tasks. You will probably be able to emulate older games just fine as well!
The GPU Performance is not the greatest but where the device really shines is with CPU performance!
Using it as a server for your home or to host games is no problem at all.
I will probably have to send the device back though as i cannot afford to keep it
But i hope my insight is useful for some. Feel free to ask questions in here (or pm me)
