Beastly Mini PC Packing A Ryzen 9 7940HS And 70W TDP Breaks Cover At Retail
Given that it's the same silicon, what's to stop someone from shipping laptops sporting desktop silicon? Nothing—that's exactly what the company's "Dragon Range" Ryzen 7045HX CPUs are. Going the other way is less common, but it's starting to become a trend with Minisforum. We looked at the company's BD790i a couple of months ago; that's an ITX desktop motherboard sporting a 16-core Ryzen 9 7945HX mobile CPU.
Now, Minisforum has a new pair of micro-desktop machines based around mobile silicon, this time the Ryzen 7040HS "Phoenix" series. These chips have exactly the same CPU and GPU configuration as the Ryzen 8000G "Hawk Point" parts, just with lower NPU performance. That means you get eight Zen 4 CPU cores at up to 5.1GHz as well as six RDNA 3 WGPs (768 shaders across 12 dual compute units).
Normally this is arguably too much processor for the TDPs it is often deployed at. Even at the maximum 54W mobile power limit, you're likely to hit power throttling before thermal limits. The desktop processors get a 65W limit that allows the Phoenix APU to stretch its legs, but what if we went further? That's the novelty of these new systems. The Minisforum UM790XTX and UM780XTX ship with the option to enable a 70-watt performance mode.
Of course, the desktop 8000G chips can be overclocked beyond the 65W limit, but you're not going to find many Socket AM5 motherboards that will fit into the dimensions of one of these systems. These are mini-PCs that take power from a 19V DC barrel plug. Memory upgrades come in the form of DDR5 SODIMMs, while storage options include a pair of PCIe 4.0 M.2 sockets.
External connectivity is very robust, including 40Gbps USB4 ports on both front and rear, four USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, HDMI and DisplayPort connections, dual 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, and uniquely, an OCuLink port. Despite being near retirement, this server-oriented connector is finding new life in micro machines that can use the external PCIe link it offers for a direct connection to a discrete GPU. With a compatible GPU dock, that could turn one of these tiny Minisforum machines into a monster gaming rig.
There are several different models of this machine available, although only some of them come with the Ryzen 9 7940HS. Those are the Minisforum EliteMini UM790 XTX, which is unfortunately not yet available on the company's English-language store. If you want one, you'll have to be comfortable buying from the China-only JD.com store. However, the EliteMini UM780 XTX, which differs from the UM790 XTX in only 100MHz of CPU clock, IS available on the company's global store. The barebone version is only $439, but you can snag it with 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory and a 1TB SSD for just $607.
