MINIS FORUM Mini PC UM690 AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX 8 Cores/16
MINIS FORUM Mini PC UM690 AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX 8 Cores/16 Threads AMD Radeon 680M 32 GB RAM 512 GB PCIe SSD, 2 x HDMI ports, 1x USB4 port, 1 x USB type-C, 4 x USB 3.2 type A, Wifi6, Bluetooth5.2
From the brand
| Weight: | 1.66 kg |
| Dimensions: | 19.8 x 19.8 x 11.4 cm; 1.66 Kilograms |
| Brand: | MINIS FORUM |
| Manufacture: | Micro Computer (HK) Tech Limited |
| Dimensions: | 19.8 x 19.8 x 11.4 cm; 1.66 Kilograms |
Get a 2TB+ SATA SSD for it though, you’ll need it!
Bought this expecting to come with generic, slow memory and ssd. Was really surprised to find it came with 2 Crucial memory sticks rated at the full 5600MHz!! The SSD was a Kingston and, although Gen 4, was rated at c. 3000mbit/s. The machine came with drivers, but not the AMD suite. So, a quick swap onto a Samsung 970 PRO stick and a cheaky rebuild later (taking care to extract the Windows key – as it was a full Windows 11 Pro key – another great surprise as I was expecting to have to upgrade that for Remote Desktop), and an expansion of the GPU RAM allocation from the default 2Gb to 4, and it’s now running brilliantly. It’s sitting under the TV in the living room playing directly to that at highly acceptable (to this casual gamer) frame rates at 1080p. To overcome the AMD GPU, I’ve stuck Sunshine on it and am running Moonlight on various TVs in various bedrooms around the house – and that’s working perfectly. Which is exactly what this was bought for.
Also, as it turns out that the Ryzen 9 8/16 core is slightly faster than an M2 – it is now going to be my Handbrake encoder as it’s so much faster than the M1 Macbook Air I’d been using for that. The GPU will max out in all games the but CPU barely shows any load.
In future, I’ll increase the chipset TDP up to the full 65W and, once I’ve exploited that full, all the CPU overhead suggests an eGPU in a couple of years may well be the next step.
Anyway, great purchase!
This small pc is very fast and easy to upgrade, you can add more RAM or one more ssd, I very happy with it, and if you believe or not I can play forza horizon 5 without any lag.
MinisForum promptly sent me a replacement PC that now functions as expected, and I’m genuinely pleased with the level of customer support I received. If anyone encounters similar problems with this product after the Amazon return window has closed, I recommend reaching out to MinisForum via their Facebook page. They are incredibly helpful and responsive.
I hooked this mini PC up to my TV primarily for gaming including emulation and as a general media PC. Amazing how far technology has come that a decent performing PC can be bought in such a small form factor. I tried some 1080p gaming with some modern titles and it handled them well. Not a system for 4k or ultra settings but a PC capable of good results from integrated graphics. Overall pleased can recommend.
I didn’t expect to be writing such a positive review about this machine.
It arrived and I was so excited to try it. The MINISFORUM EM680 has a Ryzen 7 8c/16t CPU with 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. For the price that I got it for around 479 was a steal. Other computers of this spec were more expensive.
However, this computer does come with some drawbacks. For example, the RAM appears to be soldered, therefore, no upgrades from the 32GB. For most that will never be a problem but for my use case maybe.
The CPU, it runs around 50 degrees celsius idle, which is absolutely astonishing considering the size of this machine.
GAMING… This computer albeit not sold as a gaming machine, is certainly able to game. And I am not just talking about small indie games. I was able to play GTA V at 1080p 30FPS. Now that is impressive. BUT… Cyberpunk 2077 brought this computer to its knees only getting 10FPS!
This computer has one other downside and that is the significant lack of an ethernet port but makes up for that with WiFi 6E. Again for most people, it won’t be a problem but for me it was.
I am not returning this item as I think it is awesome and cannot wait to see the next version!
I haven’t even tried adding an external graphics card with occulink yet. Honestly, I’m not even sure I’ll need to with the games I play. This machine is just a beast.
It amazes me how far pcs have come over the years. But this one is pushing the boundaries of what I even thought was possible.
I’d say we’ll done minisforum, but most of the credit here goes to amd. Minis forum packaged it all and did a good job. The the performance is coming from that amd cpu and graphics card.
I can’t fault it. If its still on sale and you need a new pc, nothing, and I mean nothing on the market right now compares.
This little computer is great. It’s very fast and quiet. It has a stand for sideways storage but I keep mine flat so the liquid metal cooler is more effective. I have also installed another SSD and the computer comes with a lead so I didn’t have to buy one. Very happy!
… so far the best mini PC that I used, well designed, plenty of space for two 2.5in HDD, nice looking mini tower, quick, working very well with very demanding software … highly recommended produc
It is small but as its on/off button is on the front it needs to be visible or accesible. It is very quiet and fast. Very pleased. Can’t give a score on gaming as I don’t game but as it does not have a seperate graphics card it might not be suitable. It was easy to insert extra SSD. Lots of ports.
I have had the Minisforum now for a few weeks and can truthfully say that it’s still impressing me since day one and is a super powerful thing compared to my last mini pc which was so disappointing but this time I did some research and gave a lot of thought and picked the right package for me, 32gb DDR5 & 512gb SSD I also bought a Samsung 1TB NVMe M.2 from Amazon on their prime day and made it even better! 5 star mini PC
It does have one problem, the audio output is very noisy. This is present whether the HDMI or headphone socket is used or using an external D/A converter and appears to be related to radiated noise from the processor.
This is present on the UM690 and UM590 which I have set up for other users.
Fan noise however is non-existant especially when used flat on the desk rather than in the stand supplied.
Contrary to some comments, I find Windows 11 to be at least as stable as Windows 10 and the updates that have come through in recent months now make it the O/S of choice.
The gaming experience isn’t great unless you want to run older or less graphics intensive games. Flight Sim 2020 will run if you tweak the setting down sufficiently, and RTS games like AoE IV will run well. Raytracing on Minecraft was nope, nope nope.
Amazingly in such a small package there’s a great selection of USB ports and 2X HDMI ports. I have only tested the WIFI briefly and stuck with wired networking, but the Bluetooth is very stable, and my wireless keyboard and mouse have never failed to connect.
There were a few annoyances.
The factory fitted NVME storage is insanely fast, but half a gig soon fills up, and to add a second disk means it has to be SATA, which is an order of magnitude slower. Slower storage isn’t always hugely problematic, but it does mean having to carefully consider what should be stored where. The 3 year old ASROC minipc it replaced managed to get a second NVME slot into a small form factor.
The fan only runs under loud, but is fairly high pitched noise.
Audio out is on the front panel. To keep the front uncluttered by cables you’d need to lose a USB port to a USB to audio converter.
The ultrafast USB4 port is on the front, meaning that if you want to connect a 3rd monitor you will have an ugly USB cable sticking out the front.
I struggled to get all the drivers, especially the proper AMD graphics drivers to run until I updated the BIOS. After flashing the BIOS it all just seemed be fine.
25th June 2023
Running it for a couple of months now and its held up well, no crashes, BSOD or other weirdness, updated the AMD drivers without incident and gone through a couple of Windows 11 updates too! I leave it on 24×7 and if I am not running World of Warships the fans are not audible and it sips power!
By Comparison, for the same amount of money, the MF comes with 32GB DDR5 RAM and a 512GB SSD, both branded Kingston. It also includes Windows 11 Pro which was straightforward to set up out of the box, and a powerful AMD processor.
The MF fan spins up when the machine is first switched on, which I think it just a re-assuring check that the fan is working, before settling down to silent operation.
The only issue that I have had is that it failed to switch on after a couple of weeks and I diagnosed the issue to a faulty power supply, so thankfully nothing wrong with the unit itself. I contacted MF and they responded quickly notifying me that the company who supplies their power supplies had none in stock but they directed me to another compatible power supply on Amazon, which I then ordered and they reimbursed me within 48 hours. They have been very easy to deal with and professional.
Incidentally, I too was worried about the cooling prowess of this small machine, so I copied a UM690 video reviewer who ran Prime95 testing on this unit and I did the same thing, running Prime95 for 30mins and my temps were actually lower at around 72C – this is truly impressive. (The video reviewer was very impressed that his temps had ran at around 78C). Normal operation is silent and the temps are usually around 42C. This is genuinely impressive for such a small machine with a fairly powerful CPU. Incidentally, I purchased the pre-built specification, rather than the barebones. I think some users have been reporting mixed results with barebones.
I had no difficulty in attaching to the USB ports at the back and they all work as expected.
In summary, the Zotac has been great and if this MF continues as strongly as it has started, I expect it to be a solid purchase, with great customer support and so I have no difficulty in recommending it.
Many Thanks.
Overall, this is a fantastic little machine, with good expansion – you can increase the RAM, and add two more 2.5″ disks, which you certainly can’t do with a Mac mini.
Performance is good and it has loads of ports too. The only reason I’m not giving this 5 stars is because of the fan noise. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t take much for the fan to kick in and it is louder than you would expect it to be. Ironically if you install Linux (Ubuntu or Fedora for example, I tried both) then the fan noise is much less.
I will actually be buying more of these to sit in a home lab, but they won’t be anywhere near my desk because of the noise.
Bought to replace an older Gigabyte Brix i7, this is faster and a lot quieter.
Using it to run Server 2022 hosting a number of VMs under Hyper-V, main issue was finding the right drivers for a consumer based PC running a server operating system, but got there in the end, all working fine.
Added a 2Tb SSD for extra storage, the supplied SATA cable is a bit of a pain to install, but does the job.
Seemed a bit picky about the network cable though, using the one that was quite happily running Gb ethernet on the Gigabyte, would only run at 100Mb, swapped the cable out for a cat7, all fine.
Can’t comment on game ability as I don’t play them, for the rest, 5 stars
love it dumped the tower and got this well pleased with i
What a brilliant purchase this has turned out to be. Windows 11 aside, I’ve had no issues at all and it runs quiet even when hammering the dedicated gpu. Best of all, this does output at 4k/120 unlike the description and the minisforum website that, says max 4k/60.
Ive not played the most demanding games yet, I’m working through some classics on my steam library. Max payne 3 flies on this machine, getting well over 100fps at 4k which looks great on my LG C2. Tried out some emulation 2 and everything I’ve tried with yuzu works great too, some at 2x resolution. I have this setup to boot straight to steams new big picture mode and within seconds of powering on, I’m straight into big picture giving a console like experience.
Biggest letdown is the WiFi card on board, I feel like speeds aren’t as good as what they could be but not helped by the location of where the pc is kept. I may upgrade to the Intel ax210 at some point since its just a standard M2 slot. Already ordered a 2tb ssd which I’m looking forward to upgrading and will give me plenty storage for my library.
Depending on your needs, I would definitely recommend this pc if it’s for a living space or you are short on room. Yes it’s not a 4k AAA powerhouse but will comfortably run modern games at 1080/1440p without Ray tracing. This should keep me going for years to come or until minusforum realise something a lot better than catches my eye!
I’ve been using this PC for a few weeks now and it works perfectly, more power than I need and its completly silent! Plays all games perfect GTAV, Red Dead Redemption, Cyberpunk with no problems. Would recommend to anyone who games, but for general PC use you would be better off getting one of the cheaper versions without a graphics card. One of the other advantages of this PC is you can upgrade RAM and HD very easily.
great machine had to send back unfortunately as the sound jack out put was lose and was only allowing sound through one speaker but despite this would recommend
I have the version with 2 HDMI, 2 Display Port sockets plus 2 internal SATA drive bays. I’ve added a 4TB SSD, a 2TB SSD and replaced the m.2 device with a 2TB stick to meet my photography needs. It sits just under my desk, but I’ve never heard the fans make a noise. I don’t play games so cannot make a comment on it’s abilities in that sphere.
What would make it better? If I could name only one – it would be support for more than one m.2 device.
Genuine review: I bought this as a replacement for a Dell all-in-one that had provided good service over many years. I was looking at the small form factor just for neatness rather than out of a desperate need to save space, but most couldn’t match this offering in terms of power and connectivity (the top spec here). It really seems well-specified and is quick, coping with everything we have used it for. It’s quiet and well-built, feeling solid and providing good value for money. It’ll happily sit on its included stand or you can even fix it to the back of most monitors. So far so good – definitely worth a look if you like this form factor.
I have no problem recommending this PC to others.
A great purchase for me.
The PC itself certainly does the job and does it quite well. For it’s size it is quick. Best of all, it will happily idle at 18 watts so I feel happy knowing I’m saving polar bears while I work.
The inclusion of windows 11 is a bit of a let down (because I can’t stand windows 11) it might have been better to include windows 10 as you have the option to upgrade for free if you really really want it.
I have had a few software crashes in things like development software and virtual box that don’t bode particularly well, but with PC’s you can never quite be sure where things are messing up. For all I know this is just a windows 11 thing. Unless I see a smoking gun I’m not going to point fingers at the hardware.
I did try to get support from minis forum regarding memory upgrades. I was VERY disappointed. They respond quickly enough, just don’t expect knowledgeable responses. That said I get very irate with Dell support so this might not mean anything
I have had this machine now for nearly 3 months and so far its worked flawlessly. Its fast, really quiet and takes up so little space. I had read reviews online where it mentioned it could be noisy at high load levels, yet in my experience this is far quieter then most desktop PC’s I have used. The only issue I had was with Windows 11 when I first switched it on. While it worked there was some odd behaviour so I reformatted the drive and reinstalled a fresh copy of the OS from scratch along with the drivers from the minisforum website and its been perfect since. I had also added an SSD as a secondary storage device which was simple enough using a video on Youtube as a guide which minisforum produced. This is a great PC, really happy with it.
Very impressed with performance and ease of use.
set up was easy, only issue I had was the display went blank around a minute or two after switching it on. I tried several different set-ups but the issue persisted, until it just stopped happening and works perfectly now. I have no idea what caused it or why it stopped.
I will attempt to install further hard drive in a couple of weeks. stay tuned for how that goes.
Comes ready to go with windows 11. Does not make much noise and very powerful what’s not to like.
I was anxious about the small box but it packs a super fast punch! with the Ryzen 9 it is booting in couple of seconds and handles huge mailboxes with ease. Very very happy with this one
Only been using this mini pc for about a week. Everything works fine. It’s very fast and quiet compared with other PCs I’ve used. I haven’t pushed it to the limits though, just general web browsing, email, MS office work. Very happy with it so far. Long may it last!
The Ryzen APU is more responsive than my i7 10750h gaming laptop. No bloatware in the installed windows11 pro OS. However I haven’t used the supplied GPU dock as yet. Do check out the reviews on YouTube. In my opinion a good value and very quite you can’t even tell it’s on except for it blue light.
Yeah decent machine, love the DP and HDMI connectivity. Fast enough for general use PCing and mid-level gaming which is all I use it for.
Even playing football manager 2022 is making the fan buzz like a cheap laptop so I don’t know what would happen with a FPS game like call of duty or battlefield!
I do some graphics using GIMP 2 and really smooth and quick.
Using for data analysis on large multiple linked spreadsheets and data base and this pc is an absolute beast in performance and whisper quiet, not totally silent but almost. Well worth to deal price.
The vertically mounted computer is almost silent, except when the fan racks up for cpu-intensive processing, when it throws out a surprising amount of hot air. This indicates that the relatively “state of the art” liquid metal cooling does facilitate excellent heat transfer. Video processing is as fast as one would expect of an 8 core Ryzen 9 chip. The integral graphic processor in the chip works fine with my single 4K monitor and external usb3 blue ray disc drive / recorder. This is a fast machine. What is not fast is the tedious business of reloading software onto windows, a problem of Microsoft not the machine.
Value for money, particularly if you get a good voucher deal, is excellent. I have no experience using the machine for gaming nor have I needed to contact the seller, so I have not rated those items.
Perhaps the best recommendation is that I was sufficiently impressed with the machine that a few weeks later I bought one for my wife. I would have preferred to buy her a more “goof-proof” MiniMac with M1 chip, not that much more expensive. However she is addicted to a particular legacy piece of Microsoft software which, to my surprise, still runs fine on Windows 11.
I rarely write Amazon reviews and it is early days yet, but two happy users of the Minisforum Ryzen 5900HX MiniPC here!
Certainly powerful and fast – if there is a fault it could do with a larger C Drive SSD (I cloned it and replaced it with a 1TB). Space for two internal SSD/2.5 hard drives. Quiet, small footprint, enough USB A and C ports.
So far, so good – time will tell but v happy with my purchase, although pricey its the best I could find for my use and it is Windows 11 Pro.
I use it for everything. A speedy little PC. I put an extra 1.0 Tb and 500 Gb drives in mine.
Waiting for a replacement power pack so haven’t used the machine yet, will update when we have.
Unfortunately mine is faulty with a sound problem. so can’t say much more. Did contact manufacturer support got one email from them and then nothing else even though I emailed them again,
I can only give it 4 stars due to sound problem. Will ask for replacement. Have to reorder as no provision replacement on Amazon. Amazon picking up faulty unit and manufacturer appologised for inconvenience caused. Second pc absolutely fine