While there are quite a few videos and articles about BD795m potential, I found very little information about how the board performs in actual use. So I acquired one for 429€ from Minisforum shop, mostly as a toy, but for now I'm using it in my main system.
If anyone is unfamiliar with this model, it is a mATX mainboard with soldered Ryzen 9 7945HX CPU.
So, in no particular order, here are my experiences so far:
If anyone is unfamiliar with this model, it is a mATX mainboard with soldered Ryzen 9 7945HX CPU.
So, in no particular order, here are my experiences so far:
- Board has no speaker connector or any kind of diagnostic LEDs, so it gives zero feedback on its operation. In my case it booted first try without problem, but if anything goes wrong, you will be left guessing.
- Displayport seems to be missing 3,3V power, as I couldn't get video signal when using DP-DVI adapter. Port worked fine when connected directly with DP cable.
- BIOS has novel ways of data input. Memory timings are written as hex values, fan PWM settings are 8-bit decimals, frequencies and voltages are mostly decimal.
- The option to disable iGPU when using external graphics does not work in my case. No matter the setting, iGPU is always present in the OS, and uses some of the memory - on auto setting is is about 800MB
- SoC OC mode can be enabled, which will lock FCLK to 2000MHz, MCLK to max supported and VDDCR_SOC to 1V. This will rise idle CPU PPT by about 6W, and improve memory latency somewhat.
- There is option to adjust memory Vdd and Vddq, but no matter the setting, voltage will not budge from 1,1V (can't be raised nor lowered).
- If you configure Fan Stop temperature above 0, this will also trigger fan failure warning during cold boot. It's a deal breaker if you were to power on the system unattended, by Wake-on-LAN for example, as it will just hang on POST waiting for F1 keypress. There is no option to disable this warning. (There is no warning at all on 1.0 BIOS board shipped with)
- Idle power at the wall by just mainboard and two sticks of RAM is about 18W.
- M.2 E-key slot for WiFi works fine with 5GbE Realtek 8126 AE-key card.
- While there are two M.2 M-key slots, the one below PCIEx16 slot will be absolutely cooked by any serious graphics card. I'm considering M.2 to MCIO or OCulink adapter to simply move this drive elsewhere.
- If you don't care about warranty, I strongly recommend replacing thermal paste beneath heat spreader. I went with TG Kryosheet and this resulted in 15K difference in worst case scenario (single CCD with maxed PPT).
