MINISFORUM Mercury EM680 Mini PC AMD Ryzen 7 6800U 32GB

Edit – I’ve had this little marvel for three weeks now, used daily for web browsing, TV streaming and Office apps, and it’s excellent. It’s so fast, and runs absolutely cool, with hardly any sound. And looks really neat on my desk.
This is the second UM790 pro I’ve bought, as I had to return one with a jammed screw on the SSD mount. But this one, which arrived today, has a new plastic case top, and the WiFi and Bluetooth antennae have been moved. This should be a marked improvement to the WiFi signal, which has been frequently remarked on as being poor. I have not yet built in the RAM and SSDs, but it has a good reputation and hopefully will be great for what I need.

I use the UM690 primarily for work as a software developer not for games. It’s performance for general productivity has been fantastic..

However, it does have a thunderbolt 4 port for use with an external GPU.. I decided to buy a razor core x external gpu enclosure and equip it with my nvidia 1070ti from my desktop. After plugging it all in it was initially working – for three or 4 days. Then a few days ago, it just stopped detecting the graphics card over the thunderbolt port.. I have found similar problem reports on the minisforum forums. So if use of an external GPU is important to you, I would probably recommend not purchasing a UM690 unfortunately. It should work on paper, but your mileage may vary.

I’m a software developer who plays the odd game. Out of the box, this machine is competing with my old ryzen desktop setup with my Radeon graphics card. How on earth that’s possible in a machine 10% of the size that cost only 500 is beyond me.

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.

Had an AMD 3700x Vega 56 tower that broke, initially replaced it with a AMD Huawei 16 laptop last year as I didn’t have time to build a new rig. However, that was lacking in the graphics department as the Vega 8 on the 5800H wasn’t great for world of warships without toning down all the eye candy, did fine with everything else I did so this is basically the Huawei laptop with an extra 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD and a discrete graphics card for 25% less! Saw a few reviews on youtube of the HX90G and more recently the HX99G, but I had a coupon with a sizable discount for the 80G so took a chance and picked one up. The HX99G looked better on paper but the price was a deterrent and I don’t think the extra features matters much for what I intend to use it for! Despite its diminutive size it’s basically got the same performance as my old tower but takes up almost no space on my workbench and is really quiet. I’ll see how it holds up over time but very happy so far!

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!

I’ve had a Zotac M1571 mini PC for around 7 years so I have some experience of living with a mini PC. For background, the Zotac has been super reliable, completely quiet to the point where I have often wondered it it’a actually on. I paid around the same amount of money for a barebones Zotac and 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD and just installed Linux on it rather than pay for an operating system.
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.