Minisforum Unveils UM780 XTX Mini-PC: Most Powerful Design Yet With 70W Ryzen 7 7840HS & Tested With RTX 3080 Using OCULINK

Minisforum has unveiled its most powerful Mini PC to date, the UM780 XTX, which features up to a 70W AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS APU.

Regarding product hierarchy, the Minisforum UM780 XTX falls right below the higher-end UM790 XTX, which we have covered extensively. So what makes this mini-PC special than the others? Well Minisforum's "XTX" units feature support for an Oculink port, which essentially uses PCIe lanes of the CPU and extends it in the form of a standalone connector on the I/O. PCIe lanes deliver higher bandwidth and transfer speeds versus a Thunderbolt 4 port so it can lead to better performance when running a discrete graphics card.

Minisforum has tested the UM780 XTX with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card by connecting it through the Oculink port. Based on the official data released by the company, the mini-PC was able to squeeze out a graphics score of 17,494 points in 3DMark Time Spy which is comparable to the standard desktop variant running inside a PC (17,653 points).

While Minisforum didn't reveal any sort of gaming benchmarks, nevertheless it is quite interesting to see the results either way, given that the adoption of Oculink ports in the industry hasn't been that widespread besides a few handheld consoles and Mini PCs.

If we talk about the "feasibility" of connecting an external GPU through the port, it is another debate, but for a conclusive statement, it all depends on how the consumers want to work with their device. Other than that, the Minisforum XTX series will be available in AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS "UM790 XTX" and AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS "UM780 XTX" flavors. The Phoenix Mini PCs will also come in the standard UM790 Pro and UM780 Pro flavors.

All Minisforum Mini PCs with AMD Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" APUs come with RDNA 3 iGPUs onboard which are very capable themselves. These discrete GPU solutions with OCULINK make sense if you want a portable solution near you or something that takes up less space than let's say a full-blown PC. External dGPU enclosures are very compact and the combination of those with the UM790 XTX or UM780 XTX Mini PC could make sense.

In terms of the overall looks, the Minisforum UM790 XTX & UM780 XTX Mini PCs adopt a design similar to Intel's NUC lineup, with metallic housing, which is magnetic at the top. The product has an optional backlight pattern, which users can enable based on their liking and even customize the accent plate on the front. Additionally, you get support for up to 96 GB DDR5-5600 memory, two PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSDs, two 2.5 GbE LANs, USB4 Type-C (40 Gbps) ports, and a high-end cooling solution within the chassis.

The UM780 XTX Mini PC is currently listed for 3199 RMB as part of the pre-sale or $440 US and can also be bought from the official Minisforum store for $479.00 US. You will also get an exclusive $20 US discount on the MKB Mechanical Keyboards if you purchase the UM780 XTX Mini PC  from 23rd November-1st December using this special code: MKBI83-Sale

News Source: ITHome