Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Minisforum UM790 Pro: Low Power, High Speed, Tiny PC”.
Foreign, you want to talk about something hotly anticipated. It’S a mobile chipset that runs fast, but doesn’t use a lot of power. I don’t think that anybody would argue with the fact that Intel and AMD been struggling with that for a long time. I mean M1 Max super low power, ah, okay, okay, the um 790 Pro it’s a mobile processor and a Mini PC form factor, and I don’t know why.
But the volume of affiliate sales that we’ve been getting from people that want to buy or or are buying mini PCS is over the top and the 7000 series mobile CPUs from AMD, basically no compromises. They are basically desktop level performance, at least desktop level performance. As of about a generation ago, we don’t recommend see customers remove the CPU Cooler by themselves. There’S a liquid metal ceiling tightness morning service number provided by damage caused by improper, disassembly, don’t take these apart. You don’t need to.
We saw that far apart. You can replace the ssds and RAM on models that support it, but, oh my goodness, look at that all right for our front. I o we’ve got a reset button: a physical power button, usb4 USB 4 and a combination headphone microphone Jack. On the other side, we’ve got a 19 volt power input, dual HDMI 2.5 gigabit Lan and four 10 gigabit type A ports.
So this platform is not lacking for connectivity. In the box we have a 120 watt power, brick, our power cable, a standard length, HDMI cord spare rubber feet and a Visa mounting bracket inside it’s a big change. First, you don’t have to remove the screws it just snaps. Together, we’ve got our Wi-Fi antennas that are mounted in the bottom of this, and we’ve got not one but two m.2: two 256 gigabyte m.2 and Raid 0, these rpcie Gen4 and then we have 16 gigabytes of user upgradable. Ddr5 5600 now know what you’re thinking darn. It it doesn’t have any DisplayPort it does it’s a usb4 on the on the front. Those will work just fine in alt mode or even with the USBC plus power delivery level. Intex, KVM wow, that’s so quiet! I can’t even hear it dang. So how are we looking in terms of Mini PC performance? Well, switching to a metal case is really paid off for minis Forum. It runs cooler, quieter feels a lot more sturdy and the performance is there. I mean this is basically better out of the box performance than an 11 900k single thread and multi-thread ahead of tiny, tiny fraction of the power or idling at 11 Watts on the desktop, and that’s probably because I’m running 4K and OBS capture over 2500 single thread And geekbench 6 and over 11 000 multi-core, the breakdown is pretty much as you’d expect. Our dna3 here coming in a little stronger than expected for other devices that I’ve seen that are based on the rdna3.
It’S been a little bit of a mixed bag: Esports ready, uh, maybe not really Esports ready, seems to depend on the wattage and the configuration of the actual system. You could probably get away with some very light Esports on the the rdna3 that is built into the system, but I think it is far better suited for streaming gameplay from another, more capable system. That said, you know for minis Forum. They’Ve also got the HX 99g, which combined the the mobile version of the 6600 plus another system.
I really can’t wait for them to update a system like that with this with the latest 7000 series CPU, so that you get the best of both worlds. If I were looking for a compact gaming system, I would probably go with the HX 99g, because it’s got all of the accoutre mods. You have USB ports and yeah it’s a little physically larger, but it’s also got a dedicated GPU. This box is even smaller, though so there is that the USBC ports on the front I would have liked to maybe have had one of those on the back, but they are full usb4.
What can you do with usb4? I’M glad you asked Thunderbolt 4. If you want to add an e-gpu with this system, you can Thunderbolt 4 and 2023, however, is severely limiting. If you think you’re going to be adding a good external GPU, you are sadly mistaken.
I just want to add a four-lane 6500. Oh no! No you don’t! You don’t you don’t even want to go that to the low end of the spectrum. A 6600 or a 6700 can achieve about 80 percent of native performance, so you could get 1080p gaming out of your Thunderbolt 4 connection.
Here, it’s not a thunderbolt. We can’t call it Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is an Intel technology. This is pcie tunneling, it’s a different thing. That’S done by AMD, there’s, not a thunderbolt controller in there or anything like that. I know it’s confusing because there’s some am5 motherboards that include an Intel Thunderbolt controller, but this is not that this is actually amd’s own pcie tunneling, which has the foundational elements to make it Superior to other pcie tunneling Technologies in the market.
But we’re not quite there. Yet, on the software side of things, we’re getting pretty close, though, because, as you see, I didn’t have to do anything. Special Minnie’s Forum has got the BIOS settings out of the box. Dialed in they’ve learned they’ve watched my videos they’ve seen how everything comes together and I just plug it in and they’re like yeah.
We should probably do that before it leaves the factory and bada bing bada bang bada boom. The GTX 1070 is working just fine. This 1070 is chosen specifically because of pcie Clarks and some other stuff like that. So it’s I’m there’s some subtext here that you haven’t been picking up on, but now I can share and there’s also a huge Boon to home labbers, because those Thunderbolt pcie 4 connections to pcie tunneling part of it.
You can use for direct machine to machine networking that is built into the Linux kernel via Thunderbolt networking, and that code is getting some. Some dust kicked off of it because, because of software reasons, it’s really limited to about 10 to 15 gigabits per second, and so it’s not really a lot faster than a 10 gigabit Ethernet card like real world. If you try to use it, it’s got kind of a lot of CPU overhead, but it can be as fast as about 25 gigabit, with just a little bit of Polish and tuning. That’S something I’ve been working on for a few months.
I don’t know if I’m going to be the first one to get the video out on that, but I’m pretty close, so you can build a little mini cluster of these, especially with two connections. You could have three of these that are all directly connected to another node in the system. So imagine that one Thunderbolt connection goes to one node and the other Thunderbolt connection goes to the other node and then using the two empty Thunderbolt connections on each of the other nodes. They connect to themselves as well, and so every node has a single connection to every other node this.
This a cluster makes that you will always have a quorum of if one of them goes down. So that’s very nice for a home lab setup. These with eight CPUs and 64 gigabytes of ddr5, you could run a redundant home lab on this to really set the world on fire. The two and a half gigabit Ethernet for any kind of uh. You know public facing user-facing stuff will work fine. If you’re going to use uh, you know a network attached storage for iSCSI or NFS, you do have a dual m.2. So if you want to do 3D print and adapter and run say an m.2 10 gigabit adapter for even faster sand connections, you totally could there’s a lot of Home lab options for this platform. If you get really creative and that’ll, probably be something a lot of people do as the cost of these platforms come down now, because this is a brand new platform brand new chipset.
This is what shipping and laptops. Currently, it is a little bit of Premium pricing, especially if you look at the other minis Forum options that I’ve looked at in the past and been excited for, but you get what you pay for I mean if I were gon na run a home lab today. I probably wouldn’t Splash out this kind of cash on something like this, but it does have all the features. I’D probably get something like the minis Forum, the 5600h, that we reviewed previously it’s six cores, I mean the the horsepower is.
This is a night and day difference like if you use this as your daily driver and use the other machine as a daily driver. This will feel like you’re in the future, because it’s so much faster, but for a home laptop setup, you know who carries a home assistant responds 0.2 seconds a little slower. I mean it’s not going to matter for those kind of of use cases, but if you’re watching this video in the Future Past 2023 and you’ve got a deal on these or this platform yeah it’s there.
It’S got the goods. I really can’t wait for 80 gigabit and PCA tunneling to come more in Vogue, and the standards are basically all there for that or even pcie5 signaling. We may skip four and go straight to pcie5, which would be four lanes be about 160 gigabit or 16 gigabytes per second. That would make a pretty reasonable interface for something like a 6700 XT radio on. That would be great.
We need that yesterday or even Optical interconnects. I could go for optical interconnects. I could ramble about this all day. That’S not what we’re here for we’re here to take a look at the minis Forum machine see how it runs.
Well, eight cores metal case. Silent fan, upgradable memory, dual m.2, what’s not to love because of the Dual m.2 you do give up the option for SATA connectivity, it’s nice to add. You know four terabytes of inexpensive SATA, SSD storage, as we have done in the past with many form machines, but you’re not going to have that option on this platform.
I don’t think it really matters, though, because you’ve got 10 gigabit USB and I’ve been experimenting with 10 gig USB enclosures, and you can get really good performance from 10 gigabit USB these days. You’Ve also got the usb4 connections on the front, so you don’t have to use an enclosure like this. You can use one like the one from Cooler Master, which includes a built-in SATA Bay.
So you add your four terabyte SATA SSD there, your GPU and your games go together as a logical unit, and so you don’t have to have it on this. It makes a little more sense for a laptop versus. You know this small form factor desktop machine, but if you needed a powerful desktop with portability, that’s you know. This is a laptop CPU, but this is a laptop CPU running as fast as the laptop CPU can be made.
It’S still an ultra portable system and with the VISA bracket. You can basically build your own iMac mounted to the back of a monitor. You’Re, basically done. That’S it. That’S pretty much it for a quick look at the um 790 Pro from the Venus series. Oh one quick note about storage, even though it comes with two 256 gig ssds they’re, not in any form of raid.
This is largely because AMD hasn’t done anything special for their software Hardware. Raid assist thing, so you can do AMD chipset raid. There are bios options to enable that and you can go through the Windows installation to enable that. But I think it’s probably wise of Minnie’s Forum not to have done that on this platform, because the options for the bootable AMD raid are still kind of Half Baked, and this is a a software limitation.
Intel’S v-rock and vmd solution is technologically superior, but hobbled by the licensing requirements Intel wants to charge you a little bit extra if you want to do anything other than RAID 0 with their v-rock, but it is fortunate you can at least get RAID 0 for free On Intel platforms that support vmd and raid 0. you’re not really missing out on much overall on that, though, because most of the perceived speed like perceived speed of the system is down to latency, and you really want to put as little as possible in the chain That will increase the latency you. You really want your operating system to be as close to your storage metal as possible, because the latency more than the throughput is what makes the machine feel Snappy or not, and the higher the uh the the the performance feeling the lower the storage latency. That’S also why I’m really big on optane I’m riddle this level.
One has been a quick look at the um 790 Pro Venus series, thanks Mini’s form for sending this over it’s a great little system. It really is I’m actually impressed by. I we need laptops. We need more laptops in the market based on this recently took a look at the a Razer laptop based around basically the same platform. This is the the the the even higher end version of that CPU eight cores. It comes to us with a lot of performance.
A shocking level of performance in just two or three generations for mobile. I can’t believe mobile processors are already at 11th gen desktop performance at again, a tiny fraction of the wattage. As we look at the idle power here, eight Watts the system’s not doing anything even Under full load. It’S still peaking at 70, 75 Watts give or take that’s pretty impressive.
I bought this level one I’m signing out. You can find me in the level one forums foreign .