Khadas Mind Premium review – Part 3: Ubuntu 22.04 tested on an Intel Core i7-1360P mini PC

Khadas Mind Premium is an ultra-thin mini PC powered by an Intel Core i7-1360P Raptor Lake processor and supports various docks through the Khadas Link connector. We reviewed the mini PC with the Mind Dock in Windows 11 a few weeks ago, and we’ve now had time to install Ubuntu 22.04 to check out the mini PC with Linux.

Installing Ubuntu 22.04 on Khadad Mind Premium

We decided to install Ubuntu 22.04 alongside Windows 11, so we shrank the Windows partition by about half before inserting a Ubuntu 22.04.3 USB drive to install the Linux distribution.

This went smoothly, and in no time we could run Ubuntu 22.04 on Khadas Mind Premium with just two cables, one for power, and the other for the display (both video and power) as we used a wireless mouse and keyboard for user input.

Ubuntu 22.04.3 system information

The system information in Ubuntu 22.04.3 shows we have a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-1360P system with 32GB RAM and 1TB  SSD as expected.

Let’s type some commands to get more information about the system:

Inxi reports four P-cores as 4-mt (multi-thread) and the eight E-cores as 8-st  (single-thread) with the maximum frequency reported to be 5.0 GHz (for the P-cores). Idle temperature is shown to be 45°C.

Ubuntu 22.04 benchmarks on Khadas Mind Premium

Let’s run some benchmarks starting with the server-focused sbc-bench.sh script. Thomas Kaiser, the script developer, asked me to test with “MODE extensive” and review mode in order to test performance and efficiency clusters individually, as well as disable i7-1360P detection to be able to differentiate between performance and efficiency cores by cache sizes.

I was also asked to connect as many USB peripherals as possible to the Mind Dock in order to test for code flaws for USB devices, especially USB devices, so I obliged…

All five drives could be mounted fine, but I did notice one that popped up from time to time under load (when sbc-bench was running), so we may getting close to what the Khadas Mind Premium+Dock combo is capable of in terms of power draw.

Let’s run sbc-bench.sh now:

CPU throttling did occur and for example, there’s a significant performance difference between the first 7-zip run (50,396)  and the second (41,152). Note that the test was performed in a room with an ambient temperature of about 28-30°C, so the performance hit may not be as high in cooler rooms. For reference, the operating temperature room of the Mind is 10°C to 35°C, so it’s not designed for extreme temperatures.

We’re also told to check the power limits:

PL1 (Long duration) is set to 28W, and PL2 (Short duration) is set to 64W.

The script also reports from NVMe error which we can check with smartclt:

But everything looks fine as far as I can tell.

We’ve also run Geekbench 6 64-bit.

The multi-core score is only  4.25 times higher on a 16-thread  Core i7-1360P processor, so throttling likely occurred, and most of the work may be done by the 4-core/8-thread performance cluster. You’ll find the full results at https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2329557.

We tested the GPU performance with Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0.

That’s 53.5 fps and a 1,3496 score at 1920×1080 resolution.

For real-world testing of the internal GPU (iGPU), we played some YouTube videos in Firefox at 4K 60FPS and 8K 30 FPS and everything worked fine without issues with just a few frames dropped at the beginning.

I was really confused while playing the videos as adjusting the volume on my TV or A/V receiver did not have any effect. It’s at this point that I realized the Mind Dock has built-in speakers something I completely missed during the Windows 11 review !!! Nevertheless, it’s possible to switch between “analog audio” (built-in speakers) and HDMI, and both work fine. The knob on the Mind Dock can be used to adjust the volume or mute the currently selected audio output.

We also ran Speedometer 2.0 with Firefox 116 to evaluate web browsing performance.

Let’s compare Ubuntu 22.04 benchmark results from the Khadas Mind Premium (13th Gen Core i7-1360P Raptor Lake) against relatively other recent and powerful mini PCs we’ve recently tested, namely GEEKOM IT11 (11th Gen Core i7-11390H Tiger Lake) and GEEKOM AS 6 (AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX) in similar environmental conditions (28-30°C ambient temperature).

Here’s a quick summary of the main features of the three mini PCs.

	GEEKOM IT11	GEEKOM AS 6	Khadas Mind Premium
SoC	Intel Core i7-11390H	AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX	Intel Core i7-1360P
CPU	4-core/8-thread Tiger Lake processor up to 5.0 GHz	8-core/16-thread processor up to 4.9 GHz	12-core/16-core Raptor Lake processor with 4 performance cores @ up to 5.0 GHz, 8 efficiency cores @ up to 3.7 GHz
GPU	96 EU Intel Iris Xe Graphics up to 1.4 GHz	AMD Radeon Graphics 680M	96 EU Intel Iris Xe Graphics up to 1.5 GHz
Memory	32GB DDR4	32GB DDR5-4800	32GB LPDDR5 @ 5200Mbps
Storage	1TB NVMe SSD	1TB NVMe SSD	1TB NVMe SSD
OS	Windows 11 Pro	Windows 11 Pro	Windows 11 Home

Ubuntu 22.04 benchmarks comparison table:

	GEEKOM IT11	GEEKOM AS 6	Khadas Mind Premium
sbc-bench.sh
- memcpy	19,734 MB/s	19,131.7 MB/s	25,389.5 MB/s (P-core)
- memset	45,636.7 MB/s	16,781.4 MB/s	24,731.8MB/s (P-core)
- 7-zip (average)	25,167	54,592	44,430
- 7-zip (top result)	25,401	56,251	50,396
- OpenSSL AES-256 16K	1,707,917.31k	1,249,203.54k	1,771,334.31k (P-Core)
Geekbench 6 Single	1,977	1,992	2093
Geekbench 6 Multi	5,729	9,535	8,891
Unigine Heaven score	1,079	1,553	1349
Speedometer (Firefox)	N/A	202	242

Storage testing (NVMe SSD and USB ports)

We tested the internal NVMe SSD using iozone3:

The results are excellent with about 4.8 GB/s sequential read speed, and 4.3 GB/s sequential write speed. This compares to 5.2GB/s and 4.9 GB/s respectively in Windows 11.

In order to test the speed of all USB ports on the Khadas Mind and Mind Dock, we connected an ORICO M234C3-U4 “USB4” M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure and formatted the drive with EXT-4 file system then used lsbusb and iozone3 to confirm the speed. These are the results for the front port on the Mind Dock:

A 5Gbps USB connection is detected and iozone3 reported a 411MB/s read speed.

Here are the results for the Khadas Mind’s rear panel (left to right) in Ubuntu 22.04

• USB-C #1 (Note: same behavior as in Windows)
  • Fail – Green LED on (Orico enclosure), but the drive never shows up.
  • MINIX USB Dock with 480GB SSD – 480 Mbps – 43.03 MB/s.
• USB-C #2 – 10 Gbps – 838.50 MB/s
• USB-A #1 – 10 Gbps – 834.04 MB/s
• USB-A #2 – 10 Gbps – 836.24 MB/s

I did the same test for the Khadas Mind Dock:

• Rear panel – Left to right
  • USB-A #1 – 5 Gbps – 426.96 MB/s
  • USB-A #2 – 5 Gbps – 454.10 MB/s
  • USB-C – That’s a power port only.
• Front panel – USB-A – 5 Gbps – 411.19 MB/s

The results are exactly the same as in Windows 11, except the read speeds reported by iozone3 are lower than in CrystalDiskmark.

Networking performance on Ubuntu 22.04

The Khadas Mind mini PC does not come with any Ethernet ports, but the Mind Dock does offer a 2.5GbE RJ45 port implemented via USB 3.0. Let’s test its performance using iperf3 and UP Xtreme i11 mini PC on the other side.

• Upload

• Download

• Full duplex (bidirectional)

Amazing… full speed and no retransmissions. What’s really odd is that it’s using the cdc_ncm driver with which I had many issues with a Realtek RTL8156B USB 3.0 to 2.5GbE dongle and had to switch to r8152 in the past

It’s also much better than in Windows 11 where it reached 2.30 Gbps for download (OK), but only 700 Mbps for upload.

Let’s switch to WiFi 6 performance:

• Upload:

• Download:

Again excellent performance on the WiFi side, and it’s the fastest download speed I’ve ever seen with 1.40 Gbps. The previous record holder on CNX Software was the GEEKOM IT11 mini PC with a 1.24 Gbps upload speed.  I’m not quite sure why upload is always faster than download in my environment… As a side note, Khadas Mind Premium would only reach 712 Mbps DL and 590 Mbps UL in Windows 11 with the same test.  So if you want better networking performance with the Khadas Mind, no matter with wired or wireless networks, you should switch to Ubuntu or another Linux distribution.

Stress Test and CPU temperature

We’ve also run a stress test on all sixteen threads of the Intel Core i7-1360P hybrid processor while checking out the package temperature.

The CPU temperature will quickly reach 81-83°C and stabilize there as the fan tries to cool the system.

The sbc-bench.sh -m command can help us check the CPU frequencies of the P-cores and E-Cores under load:

The stress test in Ubuntu may not be as demanding as the Aida64’s stress test in Windows which was set to stress the CPU, FPU, cache, and system memory, as the P-core and E-core frequencies are about 3.1 GHz and 2.4 GHz under load in Linux, while there were 2.6 GHz and 2.1 GHz in Windows.

Battery testing with Ubuntu 22.04

I also tested Khadas Mind Premium’s built-in battery in Ubuntu 22.04. It works well for short power outages of a few seconds to minutes, as the system enters standby shortly after detecting the power source has been removed.

I tried to use the mini PC with the CrowView laptop display connected to one of the USB-C ports (the one that happens not to work well with storage devices) and disconnect the power as shown above, and since the default behavior is to go to standby, the display goes dark after a few seconds.

The behavior is the same in Windows, but if I set the power button to “do nothing” then the mini PC will stay on even when the power is disconnected. The system will just run at a low frequency (around 400 MHz) and last 30 minutes, or enough time to save the files or quickly send an urgent email, before turning off the computer. I tried to reproduce this behavior in Ubuntu 22.04.

So I first set the Power Button to do Nothing in Ubuntu 22.04, but the behavior did not change, and the computer went into standby within a few seconds are I disconnected the power.

I tried to play with some other settings, but it did not change anything. The good thing is that the Khadas Mind Premium wakes up easily in Ubuntu and comes back as soon as the power is restored and I press a key or move the mouse. I had some issues in Windows with waking up, or maybe it’s because I did not wait long enough before trying to wake up the mini PC. That means the battery works great if you want to carry the mini PC from your desk to the meeting room, or even from your home to work, and restart your work immediately. The same can be used if you want to switch to different docks like the Khadas Graphics (eGPU).

Khadas Mind Premium Power Consumption

In order to measure the power consumption, I reproduced the setup I had in Windows 11, meaning I did not connect anything to the dock, while the Khadas Mind had two RF dongles for the keyboard and mouse, an HDMI cable connected to a 4K TV (but video output was set to 1080p60), and the USB-C power cable. All power measurements were done with the Dock except in power-off mode. This time around I used the Khadas USB-C power adapter since I found another adapter, and the prongs are long enough for this one. (For reference, I  had to switch to a MINIX USB-C power adapter in the Windows 11 review).

Power consumption measurements in Ubuntu 22.04:

• Power Off
  • Khadas Mind only – 0.6 to 0.7 Watts
  • With Mind Dock – 2.8 to 2.9 Watts
• Idle – 14.2 – 14.7 Watts
• CPU stressed – 53 to 54 Watts (stress -c 16)
• Video playback – 37.4 – 42.2 Watts (Youtube 4K60fps in Firefox)

Conclusion

My overall impressions about Khadas Mind Premium with Ubuntu 22.04.3 are about the same as in  Windows 11, with the Intel Core i7-1360P mini PC delivering amazing performance thanks to the CPU, but also the high-bandwidth 32GB DDR5 RAM and ultra-fast NVMe SSD storage. Video playback in Ubuntu 22.04 worked well at 4K and 8K resolution, and all features of the Mind Dock worked as well as in Windows 11, including the 3.5mm audio jack (tested with speakers), the volume knob, and the full-size SD card slot. Its compact size and built-in battery make it suitable to carry around the home and/or office and switch to a dock for gaming (Mind Graphics) or convert it into a laptop (Mind xPlay) once it becomes available.

An improvement over Windows 11 was the network performance with the 2.5 GbE port working perfectly, and the WiFi 6 delivering 1.4 Gbps upload speed and around 1 Gbps download speed with iperf3. The two main downsides in Ubuntu 22.04 remain CPU throttling under demanding multi-core workloads and the fan which can get noisy at those times. But those are tradeoffs of getting an ultra-thin mini PC is a sleek design and great portability. If you don’t care about size and carrying the mini PC around, you may achieve greater performance under load with larger devices.

The Khadas Mind Premium and its little brother the Khadas Mind Standard (Intel Core i5-1340P) have just launched on Kickstarter along with the Mind Dock and Mind Graphics with the following pricing:

• Khadad Mind Premium – $799 on KS. MSRP: $1,099.
• Khadas Mind Standard – $599 on KS, MSRP: $799.
• Khadas Mind Premium + Mind Dock (as reviewed here) – $928 on KS, MSRP: $1,248
• Khadas Mind Premium + Mind Graphics (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060Ti eGPU) – $1,489 on KS, MSRP: $2,098

The Mind xPlay portable display is not available on Kickstarter yet. Deliveries are scheduled for October 2023 right after the crowdfunding campaign is over, so it’s more like a pre-order than to fund product development, as we’ve seen the mini PC works already well in both Windows and Ubuntu.

Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress