The item came in perfect condition despite the fact that the box had visible impacts on corners. (Thanks to the shock absorber inside the box it did not harm the unit.) The unit is surprisingly “heavy”: Outside it is plastic, but inside it is metal – so that’s the reason, which is a very good thing. And we know: “weight is sign of reliability”. Right? So, the device itself is really good, except it is having a design flaw. But, in general it is great for slight gaming and gives outstanding performance on day-to-day tasks with so many programs running the same time. I expected that this little guy would be a lot less powerful on CPU and gaming. But, in reality, it outperforms the latest Ryzen 7 CPU by up to 5%. Woah! Compared to my older Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 Pro CPU-s it gives up 120 and 145% more power. And it fits in my hand.
The cooling: It is not too loud, not too quiet. Depends on the configuration in BIOS and overall utilization, it can be like a relatively loud laptop or like a passive cooled laptop. In normal use with Balanced mode power plan, the cooler is less noisy than a super-quiet Seagate external USB3 HDD in plastic enclosure. It is good isn’t? But, if I’m starting to play, it gives decent performance, but in cost of some noise. But, this noise is like a rain falling outside, instead of a noise we all know from bigger computers where coolers makes screaming and / or rumbling noise. So in my opinion it is amazing. The cooling solution for the CPU is absolutely great! It keeps the CPU cool under heavy loading but not makes me headache.
There are two problem I have faced with this little box:
The first is that I cloned my SSD to the NVMe SSD and I’m using the same stuffs I initially deployed around 2012… The Windows 10 updated (in-place upgrade) to Windows 11, but here I ran into the problem: If I SATA SSD along with the NVMe SSD, the system could not be rebooted, shutdown, sleep = The system will hang at the end of the procedure, no error will be generated. This is a driver incompatibility issue as I discovered, but not yet able to hunting it down. Yeah, mea-culpa! So, this is just a headsup if you wanted to buy this PC!
The another problem is more interesting. The applied passive cooling for the internal NVMe SSD is applied in a bad way. The heatsink picking up heat from CPU from other side of the board through the holders of the heatsink. This could make the SSD very hot. Some manual tuning of the heatsink or removing and attaching another heatsink would be a solution. (I already contacted with MinisForum and sharing technical details and recommendation to fix this…)
This is the reason for adding 4 stars only. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give 8.5. or even 9. (I would rate the competitors’ devices even lower…) So, the decision is yours. So far I’m very happy with the device and using it since nearly a week ago. Every single days, up to 16 hours.
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