Windows devkit 2023

[Solaris17]

Decided to grab one to do some arm development. I wanted this specifically given the specs and ease of jumping in to the arm platform, sheerly because of the performance. I didnt want to remote build so I will be doing a lot of coding on it. I have a 1TB SSD I want to put it in, vs the 500 it comes with, just to have a real reason to break the warranty then any real need for more space.

Specs:

CPU: snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 8c 8t
RAM: 32gb lpddr4
SSD: 512gb kioxia nvme (gen 3)

Other bullshit like bt and wifi 6

Initial performance metrics are done with a vanilla boot. Fresh out of the box. Like a vanilla install is by default so nothing open or running in the background.

oops, looks like someone had an external hdd connected when they built the golden image. (I dont own this HDD)

ARC tool can manage files fine. Need to fiddle with my eGPU but I dont have much confidence given there are no arm for windows drivers.

Crystal with stock drive:

Unzipping cinebench was faster with 7zip for arm, then windows built zip. by a factor of minutes.

cinebench 24 itself has an arm for windows specific version. Which scores the following.


Single core:

Multicore:

neat.

CPU-Z

CPU-z opens but wont validate or fill all fields. It gets mad during execution. Looking at the logs it looks like the driver has issues.

[bInitDriver] m_szPath_2=C:\Windows\temp\cpuz158\, m_szFilename=cpuz158_arm64.sys

GPU-Z has the same fate but atleast tells you.

This is with and without memoriy integrity, firmware protection, driver protection disabled/enabled.



Time for 23H2 goodness.

 

[unwind-protect]

Nice. Keep us updated.

 

[R-T-B]

Cool stuff man, color me intrigued. Keep us posted with how the devtool experience is.

 

[Solaris17]

Nice. Keep us updated.

Cool stuff man, color me intrigued. Keep us posted with how the devtool experience is.

Will do! Waiting on cables at the moment. The kit from MS does not come with a cable. Initially I was using a TB cable which worked fine for setup. However that only worked once windows was loaded. The main display comes from a single mini displayport at the back. You need to use the mini DP to see the BIOS and post screens.

Getting a mini DP to TB/USB-c did not work. (I only use a portable monitor for my test machines). To rectify this I ordered some cables to help me convert to mini HDMI. Those were supposed to be delivered today, but were rescheduled for tomorrow. Assuming they work, the next segment will be the BIOS and format procedure, since like a surface it requires a recovery image as opposed to a straight install.

 

[R-T-B]

BIOS

btw, pretty basic bios I am picturing or is it somewhat decent?

EDIT: Oh, you haven't gotten there yet lol.

 

[Solaris17]

finally got into the BIOS. It is surface based. It even mentions it still in the corner. Not surprising considering this is basically a surface arm device in a desktop format.

You have all the usual fixings. This stage of the process took some time because finding a way to display the BIOS is the hardest part.

What wont work:
USB-C to USB-C
MiniDP to USB-C
miniDP to HDMI

What I found to work:
miniDP to active HDMI

Not only did USPS lose my first adapter I pretty much tried all the ways it WONT work first in typical fashion. The devkit does NOT come with a display adapter. However they do mention in the FAQ that USB-C cannot be used to display the UEFI bios. As the miniDP output is display 1. I found this out almost immediately when I hooked my usb-c portable monitor to it via the USB-C on the side of the chassis. It would show a display but only after windows was booted. This doesnt help when you are trying to format, or otherwise explore the BIOS so the adapter journey started there.

It should be noted the devkit FULLY supports the new win10 and win11 security schemas with the inclusion of a pluton chip.

The pictures are terrible since I did not use a capture card and instead hooked it to the spare TV I have.

Now that we have a display we will be tearing the device down and swapping in (unnecessarily I might add) the new SSD I bought for it. This was bought a week or so ago before I had to venture down the path of adapter hell. Curiously TPU actually posted a review of this SSD after I bought it, but that is more academic then important.

In the coming days I will tear this down to swap it, and then walk through the reimaging process. Like surface devices a windows image must be downloaded from here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surface-recovery-image and you must have the SN and a usb drive to build a recovery image onto. This is NOT the same as using something like the MCT to make a bootable windows installer. These are custom images meant specifically for the device you are imaging.

 

[Solaris17]

Well I got home a bit early so its time to take care of this format. first things first, its cold here and my hands are hot so the machine gets these kind of condensation rings where you touch much like cold alu or plastic, this device also picks up finger prints like a sponge, so its difficult to handle without it looking super gross.

The feet are 2.5mm Allen keys and the SSD screw is a triple 0 philips.

The SSD has the actual microsoft logo set into it so it transfers this to the cooling pad provided with it.

The machine as a whole pretty much uses a surface motherboard. We can even see the empty connections for digitizers, cameras, screens etc at the top.

With the new blank SSD in the machine I closed it back up and plugged in the recovery drive it made us make here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/dev-kit/

After powering on the machine seeing no OS it booted right off the drive no problem. From here we go through the recovery step by step by first picking a language.

We will be recovering from a drive (the USB in it)

At this stage im surprised it doesnt understand there are no files to remove so I just chose "Fully clean the drive".

We hit the recovery button and we are off to the races.

The process is slow. Not painfully, and not all the machines fault. It is a recovery image with a bit more bloat then a standard install. As well as running off my ancient USB drive. While I think it could be faster with a better drive and while I don't think its so slow it should be concerning, it probably should be noted.

After the recovery completes the system will reboot and if your curious like me and leave the USB drive in you will be happy to know it didnt matter and it began to boot the OS off the SSD.

This process doesn't seem to take any longer than normal. It isnt as fast as say my PC but that is to be expected and I have certainly had longer install sessions.

You all recognize this. So no need to really go further, the process is just like a normal windows 11 install.

I should probably do all this again at some point and sysprep the image. The device has a pxe option so it would be nice to be able to simply wipe it.

Anyway, I will run benchmarks on this later with the new drive after im done getting distracted by other things.

 

[Solaris17]

Alrighty so with the corsair in lets compare it with the original drive from the OP.

Faster. Pretty much maxed out the interface looks like the rest might just be overhead or even just raw horsepower. In either case still slow for the drive I'll be bottle necked by the interface a system and the gains are hardly noticeable over the stock drive for real world use.

Still was fun to tear it apart and now my microsoft branded SSD is a tiny memento.


Bonus feature. Have and AIDA64 memory and latency benchmark.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I like this machine. Reminds me a lot of the Mac Mini. Crazy crazy low memory latency, nice!