Minisforum UM890 Pro Internal Hardware Overview
One of the neat parts of this system is that Minisforum changed the system orientation. Instead of accessing the user-serviceable parts on the bottom and the CPU being on the top as they were in the UM790 Pro, the UM890 Pro is flipped. The user-serviceable parts are on top and the first step is just to remove the magnetic top cover.
Underneath that is a plastic partition with a fan and the WiFi antenna endpoints.
Removing this partition is a bit of a pain since those three components all require wires. Our advice is to unplug the fan header.
Once the cover is off, you can see that the NVMe SSDs have a thermal pad and heatsink cooler.
Inside the system, the RZ616 WiFi solution as well as the Kingston 1TB NVMe SSD are installed here. Nothing is in the second slot. That second slot can be used for a M.2 2280 SSD, or it can be used for an OCulink board that exposes internal M.2 PCIe lanes to the rear via an OCulink connector. This board came with our system. If you want to see it being installed, we showed that in the video.
The bottom is interesting. Here, we have two Crucial DDR5-5600 SODIMMs that are 16GB each. There is also a small heatsink to help cool these and that heatsink sits under the fan so it gets decent airflow. This is much better than what we saw on the Minisforum UM690, where we saw significant RAM throttling under load.
Next, let us get to the performance.
Couple questions. Does the occulink “expansion” perform equal or better than TB4/USB4 for PCIEe expansion? Why use one or the other? More lanes? Faster clock?
Is the eGPU expansion really “any PCIe” expansion? I can’t see why that wouldn’t be the case, but for some of us, running 10 Gbit might be the killer-app?
TB3 to PCIe chassises seem to go for nearly $400 these days which seems like $100 of hardware and $300 of greed built in. Is occulink “better” in the price-per-PCIe transaction perspective?
I would like to see a slightly larger case with a standard fan(connector). They would get a better air flow, low noise and the miniPC would be able to run without RAM and SSD heatsink. What is most important, this would improve serviceability. You don’t just replace this custom fan when it breaks, and that will be the first thing that breaks there.
I own a um790Pro and this fan is the loudest thing in this mini PC.
@chris h
OCuLink uses raw PCIe lanes so it’s not affected by the myriad of bandwidth and latency limitations of TB/USB4.
However it’s not usually designed for hot-plugging, especially if using M.2 to OCuLink converters like in this case. See the STH review of DEG1 – the eGPU Dock with PSU+GPU has to be powered on before the host in order to function correctly, and can’t be disconnected/reconnected at runtime. This is partly a limitation of the motherboard used.
Device compatibility depends on what PCIe endpoint is implemented on the other side of the OCuLink.
What you’re paying for with TB/USB4 is compatibility and certification. You know that certified devices will work, they will behave correctly with hot-plugging, and so on. Certification isn’t cheap, especially TB, so devices are more expensive than a hodgepodge collection of random PCIe elements from Aliexpress ;)
How fast would this compile chromium? I would love to know, I’m looking for a portable machine for my work related travels that would allow me to have a decent build speed locally when working on chromium.