The Chuwi AuBox 8745HS

As regular readers will know, I am quite fond of the various Ryzen APUs that have hit the market over the past couple of years, and I take a look at them whenever I can, since they have proven to be quite popular options—partially because of the high core counts and partly because of their increasingly powerful iGPUs.

However, not all of them are interesting to me—I prefer to look at machines that can be both a decent personal workstation and a good platform for homelab servers, which means that besides a good CPU core count, I look for hardware expandability and good connectivity.

And, of course, a little bit of style never hurt.

Disclaimer: Chuwi sent me an AuBox 8745HS free of charge (for which I thank them) and this review follows my review policy.

In the box, you get the mini-PC itself, a VESA mounting bracket and a pretty hefty 120W adapter, as well as a quick-start guide.

To me (and being openly biased towards Apple hardware aesthetics), the AuBox stands out from most mini-PCs for the understated look of its aluminum chassis, which feels solid and premium while remaining compact (roughly 150mm on a side, less than 50mm tall) and relatively light (about 800g).

That alone gives the AuBox a much nicer look than, say, the AM18 I reviewed last year, and, as an anecdote, the AuBox has spent a fair bit of time on my desk and alongside my living room television, while the AM18 (with its gaming-centric, RGB-laden design) has been living in my server closet for quite a while now.

The machine has a pretty good selection of ports, including:

• 1 USB-C 3.2 Gen2 and 2 USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A on the side
• 1 USB4 (40Gbps, DP1.4 Alt-mode, PD and eGPU support) and 2 USB 2.0 Type-A on the back, alongside:
• HDMI 2.1 (4K@120Hz, up to 8K output possible)
• DisplayPort 1.4 (up to 4K@144Hz)
• Dual 2.5GbE Realtek LAN
• And the ubiquitous 3.5mm audio jack/stereo out

But what I really liked was that there is zero hassle involved in opening the machine—instead of the usual rigmarole of un-gluing rubber feet and fiddling with screws and connectors to reach the RAM and NVMe slots, Chuwi has thoughtfully designed the case so that you can unscrew it through the rubber feet and lift off the cover single‑handed:

There are no cables, battery connectors, or hidden adhesives complicating things. Compared to the various mini-PCs I’ve looked at, this is wonderful.

Inside, you get easy access to the Wi-Fi card, two M.2 2280 PCIe slots (one occupied by a 512GB NVMe in my unit) and two SODIMM slots, one of which is occupied by a single 16GB DDR5-5600 module—which means the iGPU is running in single-channel mode.

The rubber feet are also prominent enough to provide airflow clearance for the bottom fan, which has a decent-sized intake vent. However, this means there is no active cooling for the SSDs or RAM—I wasn’t able to heat soak the machine to the point where that would be a problem, but it is something to be aware of.

The DC power input is via a standard barrel jack, but the USB4 port supports Power Delivery, so you can plug this into a compatible monitor or hub if you want to reduce cable clutter (which is what I did for most of my testing with my LG monitors, and something I believe to be essential for anything that would go on my desk).

In use, the AuBox ranged between 15–30W under normal use, going up to 40–50W under load (Windows Update, gaming, etc.). With Wake-on-LAN turned on, it had no trouble responding to Steam clients when needed, so if like us you want to stream games from it to an Apple TV, it will work fine and save power when not in use.

The bottom fan is generally quiet and below hearing threshold, but of course it is noticeable during load. When running Windows Update or some games, it ramps up progressively over time to the point where it gets quite noticeable, but not bothersome (depending on ambient noise and what you are doing, most people won’t mind it).

For reference, I measured it somewhere between 34–46 dBA under load, but it is very dependent on ambient noise and distance.

The AuBox comes with a modern graphical AMI BIOS, with the usual options for boot order, virtualization, and power management as well as Wake-on-LAN and (an AMD special) HDMI-CEC support. This is much nicer than the usual white-on-blue AMI BIOS, and it supports both mouse and keyboard navigation:

However, I wasn’t able to find any BIOS options to manage the fan—you can see the current speed, but there are no fan curve settings.

I had no issues with the 2.5GbE Realtek ports or Wi-Fi 6 connectivity. I now have Wi-Fi 6 access points, and the AuBox was able to saturate the wireless connection when downloading Steam games (up to roughly 1.2Gbps, which is pretty nice).

I did have some spot input latency issues with Bluetooth gamepads under Linux, but they were (as everything with Bluetooth) hard to reproduce and might be anything from low battery to operating system issues.

Compared to the 7840HS machines I tested last year, the 8745HS compares favorably within a 5–10% tolerance margin. On paper it the CPU is actually slower, but in practice I’ve found no real difference–it does clock lower in turbo, but in general use the difference is indistinguishable, and RAM speed (single vs dual channel) has a much bigger impact on overall performance than anything else.

On the other hand, the AuBox runs cooler than the 7840HS machines I tested, which is probably due to the larger heatsink and bottom fan.

In practice, I found that it would happily be streessed at up to 78-90 °C without any indication of thermal throttling for short or sustained workloads. 7840HS machines would hit 85°C or more and start throttling, so you can probably expect better sustained performance over time from the AuBox.

My unit came with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed, which allowed me to directly create a local user account:

I had no trouble upgrading to 24H2—in fact, the AuBox is one of the few machines I tested recently where running Windows Update would be “fine” except for the fan noise, since I didn’t notice any slowdowns during the process.

I swapped out the 512GB NVMe for a pair of 1TB WD Blues I had lying around, and installed Proxmox VE 9.0 on it with ZFS RAID enabled—one of the nice things about having dual NVMe slots, and why I like the AuBox as a home server.

As you’d expect, the 8745HS had no issues running a few VMs and LXC containers, and I was able to pass through the second 2.5GbE port to a VM and use both for VLAN-segmented networks at full effective wire speed (about 2.3Gbps).

Video transcoding worked well, but I had some trouble trying to reproduce last year’s Ryzen AI testing. This was mostly because ollama’s updated ROCm support wouldn’t play nice with an also updated Proxmox, but the smaller RAM size (16GB vs the 32GB I had at the time) and single-channel configuration didn’t help.

ollama either crashed or ran quite slowly, so I could not get comparable results. I could run it on the CPU just fine, but that also isn’t worth comparing to anything when you will eventually be able to use the iGPU—let alone considering the fact that AI benchmarking is a moving target.

I expect ROCm on the 8745HS to be mostly sorted with an upcoming version of ollama, but the good news is that the 780M iGPU not only handled video transcoding well (after tweaking the right settings in Jellyfin) but also worked fine for GPU acceleration to Windows VMs via QEMU/KVM’s virtio-gpu driver.

Despite knowing in advance that graphics performance would be impacted by having only single-channel RAM, I later removed one of the SSDs and installed Bazzite, which worked perfectly and was able to run a few games at decent frame rates.

Hades, Hades II and all sorts of other indie games ran at 60+ fps—I plugged the AuBox into my LG TV, and they actually ran at 120fps, which was nice.

But with a single SODIMM very visually demanding games like Control struggled to get past 24fps and I had to bump them down to 720p to be playable.

For desktop use, the iGPU was still able to drive three monitors without any issues (dual 4K monitors via USB-C and DisplayPort plus my portable 1920x1200 panel via HDMI), and I found the overall experience to be quite nice–and smoother than in Windows.

Still, the 780M is a very capable iGPU, and I knew from my experience with the AM18 that with dual-channel RAM the AuBox would be able to do more.

As it is, it is perfectly fine for light gaming (maybe some eSports titles) and older games, including emulation. I set up RetroDeck on it and it ran a few of my archived PS/2 and GameCube/Wii titles without any problems.

Although I make it a point of reviewing what is in the box, since I was on vacation during part of the tests and wanted to play some games, I ordered a 16GB 5600MHz SODIMM from Amazon and upgraded the AuBox to a 2x16GB dual-channel configuration—and the 780M instantly became able to play Control and Stray at 50+ fps:

As this goes online I have been using it as a Steam machine for a couple of weeks, and have no complaints—with the added RAM, it is an excellent retro emulation machine (it can do PS/3 and Switch, if you’re into that), can play all the indie games we have perfectly and is good enough for casual AAA gaming.

It even runs Crysis at mid/high settings, although of course you have to be realistic about what to expect from a 780M.

The AuBox 8745HS is the best mini-PC I’ve tested this year, and a nice all-round piece of hardware with a simple but polished design.

I like its multi-display support (I am especially fond of it supporting single cable operation via USB-C), and it has the kind of connectivity and expandability I would look for in a compact home server—the dual NVMe and dual 2.5GbE ports are relatively uncommon features even today, and coupling those with a Ryzen CPU makes it a very nice addition to a homelab.

The only fault I can find in the configuration I got is it shipping with single-channel RAM—especially because that has a direct impact on the performance of the iGPU if you intend to do some gaming. Although theoretically you’d be better off if you plugged in an eGPU, the extra 16GB RAM is a cheap enough upgrade that it could probably be bundled in.

But for office (and light development) use that isn’t really a problem, and the fact that the case is (for a change) designed for easy access to upgradable components is notable (again, it’s very refreshing to not have to peel off rubber feet to upgrade a machine).

There should be more mini-PCs designed like this, and I hope Chuwi continues to refine the design and offer Ryzen AI MAX SKUs in the near future.