Minisforum UM790 Pro Power Consumption and Noise
On the power side, we get a 120W adapter with a standard DC power plug. The Beelink design may be more elegant, but this is one that should be easy to replace in the future.
At idle, power was in the 5-7W range, and at maximum we were pulling 80-85W. That means we were generally 5-10W lower than the Beelink GTR7 with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS.
The noise side was very interesting. The idle noise was between 1-1.5dba over our 34dba studio noise floor with this unit at idle. At maximum, it ramped up to only 2-2.5 dba over the studio noise floor. That was a fairly shocking result but this unit stayed relatively quiet.
Key Lessons Learned
There were certainly some key lessons learned. Chief among them is that the fan on the bottom of the system helps a lot. It seems as though Minisforum took feedback from our UM690 review, and perhaps others, where the memory was overheating and addressed that in this version.
Minisforum even went beyond Beelink and has not just a fan, but also a little heatsink for the bottom SODIMM. While Minisforum does not have a NVMe SSD heatsink, the bottom fan blowing over the SSDs seems to be adequate.
Performance and power consumption, as stock, were below the Beelink GTR7 Pro and GTR7. We test these units as they arrive because that is how most people will use them. On the other hand, there are BIOS tuning options one can use to hit similar performance levels to the Beelink that is optimized for long-term sustained full-throttle usage.
Finally, the key standout of this unit may actually be the barebones option. For those that do not want to use Kingston memory or a mediocre PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD, the barebones option allows one to save a lot of money on the initial purchase and then scale up to higher-end configurations at a much more reasonable cost.
Final Words
While the Minisforum UM790 Pro may seem like a small upgrade over the previous generation, it is actually quite a big one. Gone are the performance challenges due to overheating DDR5 that we saw even just playing eSports titles like League of Legends on the UM690. It was a great job by Minisforum to fix that in this generation.
There are still quite a few things that could be improved. The rubber feet with adhesive that need to be removed for each service is almost a silly design choice. Beelink also has more I/O like dual 2.5GbE NICs because of the larger form factor.
At the same time, there are a lot of Minisforum fans out there, and we can see why. This is a nice little unit and the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS is such a great Zen 4 and RDNA 3 upgrade that this machine has become highly potent in such a small form factor. For most users, they are going to find this system to be an upgrade to something like the Mac Mini M1/M2 and even the Mac Mini M2 Pro in terms of performance, albeit at the expense of higher maximum power consumption.
Still, while we had reservations about the UM690’s underside cooling, the UM790 Pro is one that has fixed those issues and is a nice unit.
Where to Buy
Since folks ask where to buy, there are a few options right now for this. Street pricing ranges from around $519 to $8400 depending on the configuration and seller. We have a few affiliate links that you can use:
- AliExpress is currently the cheapest at the time of publishing this article/ video
- Amazon currently costs more, but it is a well-known platform
- Minisforum’s official site is very rough but you can find it here
Hopefully, that helps. Also using these links helps support us in buying these units to do independent reviews.
I’m normally a reader but I like the new dbcam in the video. I don’t know when you’ve added that but it’s a nice touch.
Have you tested the wifi speed? I received my Minisforum UM790 Pro yesterday and unimpressed with the wifi connection speed as it is worse than what I get on all my laptops at home – including my Surface Book 3. It seems as if a firmware update is required.
“Street pricing ranges from around $519 to $8400”
That’s one hell of a price range! What comes with the $8400 system?
These things are still quite pricey for 8 core APU SoC on a miniscupe board.
$600 is not that far off the laptop price, which has plenty of other components ( battery, display, keyboard, trackpad etc).
This thing is essentially SoC on a miniscule board with small VRM and bunch of connectors, offering mostly the I/O that SoC has.
To Sinima:
They are pricey because of qauntity.
Cheap laptops are produced in millions. All these components are very cheap. You won’t find a Ryzen 9 7940HS in a $600 laptop. Laptops with 7940HS are much expensive.
This miniPC is produced in (tens) thousands. It’s a big difference. Try to order a thousand CPUs and try to order a hundred thousand CPUs. What price will you get for one CPU?
A great little system and I find it hard not to hit the buy button, but…
You can get a Serpent Canyon NUC12 with an A770m dGPU for €700 or €150 more, which is pretty near identical in terms of CPU performance, but quite a bit above for GPU.
Yes, it’s also a lot more power hungry when you maxi it out but not that noisy and probably not that different on idle or background stuff. Intel’s box is bigger, uglier but plenty of ports, too.
I don’t like running any of these without 10Gbit NICs and they are on par with those via TB.
And to be honest, I do like my TB ports on the back, because they are more likely to be permanently used, while USB-A is mostly temporary stuff.
Now I guess I just want an MI300A in this form factor…
Hi to all!
Anyone knows how to enable virtualization in UM790 Pro BIOS?
Is there a more detailed user manual explaining how to access BIOS and boot menu during boot?
Sorry for my english, I’m italian ;-)
Double post, because for strange reasons after a while writing this page resets and erase all text…
Just bought a barebone one, installed 64GB of Crucial 5600 RAM, a 1 GB Samsung 980 PRO M.2 NVMe and a Crucial P3 Plus 4TB M.2 PCIe Gen4 NVMe.
Also bought barebone. Installed 64GB Kingston Fury 5600 RAM, 2x WD SN850X 2TB in RAID-0. This thing is fast, love it.
Thank you for the very in-depth review.
Head that it’s the wifi antenna being the main problem. Would be great to know more about it and also know of any fixes if possible
Great review. But still, the pricing range is amazing…
Can you tell me what type of fan connector that is on the motherboard.I’d like to extend the cable.
This thing is buggy as hell. Bought one for my wife’s desktop and it crashes whenever she tries to watch netflix in Chrome/Edge/Firefox.
Currently on 1.0.5 firmware, because anything newer causes massive crashes. Currently limiting the video RAM allocation to the bare minimum, because anything more causes crashes.
I’ve seen posts saying you have to set the RAM speeds to DDR5-3200 for stability as well.
Not sure what the magic incantation is that fixes this thing, but it seems a large number of customers are complaining on their forums. Not to mention they tend to pull the firmware from their website randomly.
Bought the UM790 Pro barebones, added Crucial RAM 96GB Kit (2x48GB) DDR5 5600MT/s, fanxiang S880 4TB NVMe SSD M.2 2280 for Data, and fanxiang S880 2TB NVMe SSD M.2 2280 for Windows 11 and two or three different Linux versions. also bought Maxonar USB C to DisplayPort VESA Certified, 8K 60Hz Type C to DP Cable 6.6FT/2M ($16.99 )
Everything just worked. Date of purchase Jan 13, 2024, total Amazon cost with cable was $1,201.88.
Just had my 78th birthday, so it took me a long time to go barebones, but I found that someone else used 96 GB ram and 6 TB SSD, so barebones is the only way to get that high performance. Kind of spooky, but the return policy of Amazon makes it all possible.
The unit is rock solid, and Costco just had a sale on a 4k monitor (LG 32UN500-W Monitor 32″ UltraFine (3840 x 2160) Display, AMD FreeSync, DCI-P3 90% Color Gamut, HDR10, Built-in Speakers = $250) so I bought that yesterday! Life is good.
This is a long way from programming the 6502cpu with 16k of ram and using a tape recorder for storage.
When it works, it’s great, but mine constantly reboits – 5 times a day, which sucks for work teams calls. Crucial 2x32GB DDR5 and a 2TB Micron NVMe so shouldn’t be shonky components. At least it restarts quick.
It’s not unusable, it’s just not particularly usable for long periods of time. Shipped with 1.05 BIOS, upgraded to 1.09 (via 1.07) which was worse. Can only downgrade to 1.07. Lots of online conjecture about ram speeds and single vs. dual monitors, but who really knows?
In theory it’s a great machine, and specs wise at about £900 it’s feeling like a half finished product. In retrospect I’d have gone for a more established/mainstream brand.
Pretty disappointed. Not recommended at the moment.
Mine was doing same till updated Windows 11 Pro insider edition and AMD’s drivers, chipset, etc. My screens would go dark usually when pushing Ran and video to max. Have you tried putting your bios power on performance, with 54w (58 or in 50s), with Ram setting mt/s at 5600? You need to change Auto to Manual in bios for other settings to appear. Just be conservative when messing with Thermal or have cooling option ( I use a fan next to AC , low humidity). I noticed big difference when using LM studio to run local LM. You can also add discrete eGPU using second m.2 connector (but that is different post).
Anyone tried this with Linux (Debian), any issues there?