MINI PC | £829 from Amazon www.snipca.com/47474
Power worker
The processor at the heart of this model from Minisforum is the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS. Most of the mini PCs we’ve reviewed have more affordable Ryzen 5 or 7 chips, so we were intrigued to see how much power could be packed into such a small case. The price – while at the top end of the mini PC range – is reasonable given its components. So how does this miniature powerhouse fare in our tests?
When it comes to raw processing power, the UM790 Pro has it in spades. In our processor benchmark tests it ran 73 per cent faster than our current favourite mini PC, the Beelink SER6 Pro 7753HS (reviewed in Issue 661, £699 from www.snipca.com/46416), when testing on a single core.
In multi-core tests, it slowed to 30 per cent faster, though that’s still a reasonable leap for a machine that’s just under 20 per cent more expensive. It was around 40 per cent quicker at encoding video, and 30 per cent up when running general Windows tasks. If you can afford to spend the extra money, and you spend a lot of time doing jobs that push the processor hard, the UM790 is worth considering.
What it lacks, which you’d expect to find in a desktop PC at this price, is a graphics card. Although the built-in graphics of the Ryzen 9 processor performed reasonably well in our gaming tests, it’s only a tad better than the SER6 Pro in this area. When compared with a desktop PC with its own graphics hardware, it falls behind – making it less of an all-rounder.
As you’d hope for the price, the RAM and storage are impressive, with 32GB of memory and a fast 1TB SSD. There isn’t a great deal of room inside to upgrade, but you could increase the memory up to 64GB if you ever needed to. There’s also a second SSD slot, so you could easily double the storage.
The case is a relatively subdued black box and measures 52x126x130mm (HxWxD). It offers a generous range
