MINISFORUM Venus Series UM773 Lite Mini PC AMD Ryzen 7
MINISFORUM Venus Series UM773 Lite Mini PC AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS up to 4.75GHz 32GB DDR5 512GB PCIe4.0 SSD AMD Radeon 680M Mini Computer, 2 x HDMI,1x USB4,5x USB ports,Wifi 6,BT5. 2
| Weight: | 1.71 kg |
| Dimensions: | 12.8 x 12.66 x 4.65 cm; 1.71 Kilograms |
| Brand: | MINIS FORUM |
| Colour: | Black |
| Manufacture: | Micro Computer (HK) Tech Limited |
| Dimensions: | 12.8 x 12.66 x 4.65 cm; 1.71 Kilograms |
I have the um773 lite 32gb 500gb sdd.
Quick to boot up, great for working across monitors. Plenty of ports. Although a docking station is recommended regardless of what consumer you have.
For gamers: it ain’t great on first person shooters as frame rate drops with 680m GC But c&c remaster, starcraft 2 all work really well on high settings.
Using WiFi at over 200mbps with no issues and machine is actually on a different floor to the WiFi router. Using Logitech MX Bluetooth keyboard and mouse with no issues.
Machine is running with nice temps and seems very stable. Couldn’t be happier so far.
I connected the PC by network cable eventually (trailing across the floor so not ideal) but it was an absolute blast while it was working. My PC at home for the past year has been a Mac Mini M2 and this thing was easily as fast as that. I work with Adobe software (CC) and after I installed the suite on the Minisforum, and it did all its windows updates, it was just as fast as the Mac Mini, maybe a little faster. Apps seemed to launch quicker and run a little more smoothly and it had no issue running my BenQ 4K monitor. Colours were accurate and the display scaling worked a treat. My Mac makes a mess of running at 4K – the menus are tiny and there’s no way to change that other than dropping the resolution on the monitor – thanks a lot Apple. Who’s going to purchase a 4K monitor and be forced to drop it to 1440p to get it to work?
This PC was very quiet and has plenty of connection options compared to my Mac. It’s also under 50% of the size of the Mac Mini and this makes it very unobtrusive. There are no vibrations or strange noises coming from it and the SSD is very fast (as fast as the Mac) so no issues there. There’s plenty of RAM (32gb) so I never experienced any issues running PS, Illustrator, Bridge, Edge and Outlook at the same time and using large files – most of the artwork I work with is 100mb + and it never missed a beat.
I can honestly say that it exceeded my expectations and I will be purchasing another one to replace my Mac Mini in a couple of months when I can iron out any issues that may arise.
Finally, I have to say that I contacted Minisforum for support and they were polite and very helpful – again not what I expected at all!
I have had it for a week now and set up was easy and mine came with Windows pre-installed. Performance is exceptionally good. I pulled some video work off my old laptop (i7 16GB) for a test, and a video that took 50 minutes to render on the old machine was done in 10 on this one. Playback whilst editing in DaVinci Resolve is smooth.
It is tiny, smaller than my wifi router, and pretty much silent. It is running 2 x 27″ monitors through the front USB Type C.
I did put a couple of older games on here , though mostly older stuff as I have a console for modern games, but GTA IV, Manhunt and Bioshock remastered all perform brilliantly. I only scored 3 as GTA IVs frame rate wasn’t great, so I imagine newer AAA games would struggle.
All in all, I’m very happy and would highly recommend this.
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.
Update: the external GPU has been working again now for a few months (since resetting everything and reinstalling the drivers and switching back to original cable) but I have to go through a little ritual.. when powering on the pc, it will boot with the non external GPU and not the external GPU. I then power it off and power it on again and this second time it now boots with the external GPU. It’s annoying but I can live with it..
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.
Bought this to replace 10 year old tower pc was a bit sceptical it would be up to the job .had it now a couple of months.easy to set up and pleasantly surprised how fast it is great little machine found no faults
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.
Went for the UM773 barebone as I wanted to choose the storage/memory for it.
32 Gig DDR5 Ram (2×16 Gig)
2TB M2 Main Storage
1TB SSD Secondary Storage
It didn’t take long to put together and so far; it works very well and is silent.
The only small downside was I needed a USB 3-powered Hub for the number of devices I need to connec
I have this in my home office for video conferencing, it’s great for Teams/Zoom presentations, I do have mine elevated on a shelf beside the conference monitor for better camera angles.
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.
Would recommend this to anyone who used to have a big tower but is aging. My old computer was huge and was around 10 years old, and started bugging and blue screening, but this one is amazing, I haven’t have to restart or anything, I think it has been turn on continuously since I bought it around a months ago, it’s really small and looks really neat. It is truly the best. I have included a picture of the new computer, and hope it gets the size of the machine in, it does get warm during hot weather (when it’s 30+ degree heat) but that’s understandable, and once the ‘heatwave’ went and was back to low 20’s the temperatures were nothing to worry about at all. It’s also very quiet and the fans don’t spin up at all really, very rarely when I have many programs open or it’s doing something taxing on the CPU. I also installed a 1tb SSD along side the original and to was very easy to open and closed up again, and give you the option for RAM upgrades in the future
Now the pc has so far not disappointed after setting the system up and doing all the updates I downloaded the AMD Ryzen software from the AMD website when I installed this it update the system to all the latest drivers and software this actually improved the system and sped up the overall performance.
The NVME SSD drive is great addition and the upgradable prospects to this are great add the option of the expansion of the second ssd is a big plus.
The ddr4 memory options are very much a plus I got it with 16gb 3200 however it is capable of taking 64gb witch is great for a little pc.
The 2 HDMI port’s on the back are more that capable of running 2 40inch monitor’s at 122 fps and with the addition of the AMD updated drivers and software it runs freesyncfor a smooth running system. You also have the USB c front display port that can also run a 27 Inch 4k display also the back HDMI are 4k supported.
The WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 along with the 2.5gh eth port alow for endless network and Communication support.
Overall at the moment of writing this review I can say I’m very surprised by the overall preference of this little pc
There is sufficient connectivity for USB devices and so far, the machine has proved rock-solid. Performance-wise, the CPU benchmarks at just over 50% of my full-tower PC with a Ryzen 5950x, which is to be expected but during business-related tasks the difference is not noticeable.
Although I am a gamer as well, I’ve not tried running any games on this machine but according to reviews, some reasonable gaming is possible at full-HD resolutions with moderate settings so I’ll still score it the full 5 stars based on the type of system it is.
Don’t expect to play AAA games on this – but as a tiny home office or bedroom PC (that is so small/light that if you wanted to you could easily attach to a vesa mount on a monitor) its great value for money and highly recommended. Has now been running continually since delivery a couple of weeks ago. Pictured here next to a QNAP NAS drive.
Ample memory, although could always use more storage space, but 1TB is enough and with 2 USB C ports it is easy to add an external SSD.
Performance is excellent considering this was less than 600 8 fast cores and 16 threads, handles photo and 4K video editing easily.
Light gaming at low to medium settings is possible, I’d recommend setting V-Ram to 4GB in bios, play at 720p and upscale using the super resolution feature in the drivers (games like fortnite, counterstrike GO and Borderlands 3 play without issue)
With the relatively low cost compared to a laptop with 32GB RAM and 1TB M.2 SSD it allows a low cost way to get a small but powerful system in place.
If I continue to be impressed, I will look at Minisforum PCs for upgrades in future, the big advantage for me is the ability to replace the PC whilst keeping a high quality screen, Keyboard, mouse etc, and the portability means it can be plugged in almost anywhere!
For productivity and web browsing it super fast.
Only really dropped a star is that I find the fan noise a small bit annoying. I expected the fan to spin up but along with the usual air sound there is a small high pitched whine. If you have ears like mine that seem to pickup high frequencies then this might annoy you.
Well made
Easy to upgrade ram and ssd
Very small
Reasonable amount of ports
Included stand
Very powerful for size
igpu is excellent
Cons
If you buy the bare bones the drivers for ethernet or WiFi are not included in windows image you need to download the WiFi drivers from minusforum.
Wouldn’t pick up second monitor, hdmi lead works fine on my main pc
The reason I returned it is under load the fan noise was too much for me. If your not taxing the system it’s silent but when it ramps up I found it very annoying
If your looking for a small powerful pc and can tolerate the fan this is excellent.
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.
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
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 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!