Easy, Tiger!
MINI PC | £729 from Minisforum www.snipca.com/48917
This mini PC packs a powerful punch thanks to its AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS processor, 64GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. It’s so fast in fact that it replaces the Beelink SER6 Pro 7753HS (£629 from www.snipca. com/46416, reviewed in Issue 661) as our favourite mini PC, despite costing £100 more. It also has twice the memory, twice the storage and a superior processor.
The better components showed their mettle in our benchmark tests. When testing the processor alone, the UM780XTX’s individual cores ran more than 50-per-cent faster than the SER6 Pro’s, and in multi-core tests it’s nearly 30-per-cent faster. For a mini PC it’s also impressive at handling graphics, running 16-per-cent faster.
The graphics muscle comes from the processor’s built-in Radeon 870M hardware, and is about the best gaming performance you can get without having a separate graphics card. It should run most games at a reasonable frame rate as long as you can live with less graphical detail and lower resolutions.
There’s a fan that helps keep the powerful processor cool. This produces a low hum, but it’s kept to a minimum with some clever additional cooling. The metal casing helps, because it disperses heat away from its surface.
The inclusion of cooling components means it’s slightly larger than most mini PCs we’ve come across, measuring 62x130x125mm (HxWxD).
However, it’s still small enough to be attached to the back of a monitor or otherwise hidden away on your desk.
It’s available in three colours – black, champagne (beige) and blue (aka ‘vivid cerulean’), but at the time of writing the black version (pictured) is only available as a barebones model (for £489) without RAM, storage or Windows. Choose the version you want under the ‘Type’ heading.
The attractive tiger head design (pictured above) is actually a magnetic stencil you can place over the case’s lit-up panel. You can remove this so it shows just a square of light instead – or switch off entirely if you prefer.
There’s no shortage of ports. One USB-C and two USB 3.0 ports sit on the front, alongside the audio out and reset button. The same combination of ports sit on the rear panel, alongside video outs for HDMI and DisplayPort. There are also two 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports.
SPECIFICATIONS
8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS processor • 64GB RAM • AMD Radeon 780M graphics • 1TB SSD • Wi-Fi 6E • Bluetoo
