Earlier this month, we teased the announcement of a new model of mini-PC from specialty vendor Minisforum. Today, we’re taking a look at the results of some hands-on testing of the Minisforum U850, configured with a Comet Lake i5 CPU, 16GiB RAM, and a 256GB Kingston NVMe SSD.

The U850 is an aggressively generalist mini-PC, and it can tackle most roles—its dual network interfaces make it a good candidate for a high-performance router, and its combination of tons of USB ports, HDMI and DisplayPort video out, and surprisingly fast storage make it an excellent little desktop PC.

The only role the U850 might play that we’d advise some caution with is home theater PC (HTPC)—although it’s powerful enough to do the job, its fan noise when under load is loud enough that it might annoy the sorts of people who tend to want a small, unobtrusive HTPC in the first place.

Specifications and overview

The review unit we received was a U850 with the Comet Lake i5-10210U CPU. It matches the specs above except for storage, which is a 256GB Kingston Design-In NVMe SSD. The smaller SSD isn’t “cheating” on Minisforum’s part, by the way—it’s a configurable option on the order page, which knocks $40 off the otherwise $699 (US) purchase price.

The easiest way to describe the U850 is “midgrade laptop in a cube form factor,” so—along with the similarly designed but much less powerful Seeed Odyssey—that’s just what we compared it to in our benchmark tests.

With the i5-10210U’s wimpy UHD 630 graphics, you shouldn’t expect to do any gaming on the U850—but it holds its own on video playback and general CPU related tasks. In terms of performance, it also wipes the floor all the way around with the Seeed Odyssey mini-PC.

The one area where the Seeed Odyssey takes the prize from the Minisforum U850 is noise. We wouldn’t call the U850 obnoxious, but it does make a significant amount of fan noise whenever the processor spins up. It’s a clean whoosh, but it’s a very noticeable one, even in an office packed with other PCs. This probably isn’t something that can be avoided with a Comet Lake CPU in a small form factor; laptops with this CPU are just as noisy.

Performance

Minisforum’s U850 performs just as you’d expect a laptop armed with a Comet Lake i5-10210U to perform—middling-well for a laptop, though considerably better than many competing VESA-mountable PCs, which tend toward lower-powered CPUs such as Celeron, Pentium Silver, and so forth.

The Passmark CPU benchmark doesn’t show a considerable difference between the U850’s Comet Lake and the Gateway’s Ice Lake CPU—which is a shame, given that the Gateway’s Ice Lake has an enormously better GPU. Cinebench R20 and Geekbench 5 both show a much more marked preference for the Comet Lake, though.

There’s always a lot less to look at in single-threaded performance than multithreaded. Passmark, Cinebench R20, and Geekbench 5 all largely agree—there’s a noticeably bigger difference between the Ryzen 4700u and the Intel i5 CPUs than there is between the Comet Lake and Ice Lake i5 CPUs themselves.

Cinebench and Geekbench both show a noticeably bigger advantage for the Ryzen than Passmark does. But the most important difference here is between the three at the top and the Celeron-powered Seeed Odyssey limping along in the background, with a bit less than half the score of its closest competitor in any single-threaded test here.

This shouldn’t really be taken as a knock against the Odyssey itself—after all, it also sells for a bit less than half the cost of anything else on these charts. It also comes closer to being silent—it does have a fan, but that fan doesn’t need to do as much work as the ones on the laptops, and the result is audible.

We should also point out that the Odyssey made, in our opinion, a perfectly usable budget desktop PC. This puts the performance of the U850—and the two laptops it’s competing more closely with—in perspective. At more than double the single- and multithreaded performance of the Odyssey, the U850 isn’t just a usable desktop PC—it’s a solid one.

AAA gaming on the U850 is a bad idea, and we don’t recommend it. The Acer Swift at the top of these charts is not very good at gaming. The Gateway i5 and Minisforum i5 machines are absolutely terrible at it. Casual games will probably work OK, as well as games 10 or more years old. But that’s about it.

In addition to Time Spy, we ran the much less demanding Night Raid benchmark. Night Raid is specifically targeted at PCs with integrated graphics, which didn’t keep the i5 Gateway and i5 Minisforum from tripping over their own feet running it as well. The numbers you see on those scores translate to a very painful 5-7 frames per second in Night Raid’s demo mode at 1080p. Yuck.

We don’t have any gaming benchmarks for the Celeron-powered Odyssey, and we didn’t want to generate any—so we subbed in a Ryzen 3200U-powered low-end Gateway laptop. The i5 machines did better than the low-end Gateway, but that’s a very low bar to clear.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1745802