Minisforum EliteMini UM780 XTX (AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS)

[Zareek]

@phxrider, nice job, and thanks for all the pics of the process. This is exactly why I expected it would be like and the reason I'm probably no going to do it myself. I used to mod things all the time, but I gave up a lot of my tools and work space for doing that sort of stuff a few years back.

I'm kind of surprised there are not any turn key oculink enclosures by now. As mini PCs gain traction, I really expect this market to take off. To me, it's kind of ideal. I'd like to see Minisforum do something like this with oculink and at least two m.2 drives at the same time. The lack of a turnkey oculink enclosure or reasonably priced oculink GPU and the fact you have to give up an m.2 slot to use it are the two things holding me back from jumping on this. Aoostar has a mini that has oculink and like three m.2 slots at the same, but it took me a year to get comfortable trying out Minisforum. Interestingly enough, it appears Aoostar is also making an oculink enclosure.

 

[phxrider]

Yeah I get it 100%... It was a lot of research and time, although I am nowhere near super-equipped tool-wise for this, I really had to improvise with very basic tools and did it on my kitchen counters (as you can tell from the pics haha).

I hope someone starts making a Razer Core X style Oculink enclosure, that would be nice, but I don't think that's going to happen. Oculink isn't suitable for the masses - remember we're talking about people who put their iPhones in an armored Otter Box and STILL manage to break the screen twice a year. Oculink is a server connector, it's not meant to be plugged and unplugged 50000 times and be handled by people who give zero thought to these things. It will have to be T-Bolt 5 or something that really makes this take off. Corporations consider things like this, return rates, likelihood of having to warranty it, etc and IMO they'd be scared of that with Oculink. For now, IMO it's going to be a hobbyist/nerd thing.

For some reason, it appended this to my last post.... but I think this is it for updates - I received the 1 meter Oculink cable and it works just fine. FYI, Oculink is supposed to be good for 1.5m without any signal loss, at least that's what I read somewhere while doing the legwork for this. I think it's past the point where I can edit the original post to say it's tested, as there is no option to do that.

Quick benchmark - this is FC6 @ 1440p on ultra everything with all the DXR (ray tracing) options turned ON. This is actually pretty representative of real world FPS, I've seen highs in the 90s and lows about 60 in real world play.

 

[HeadRusch1]

I played Far Cry 6 and Starfield, both played at very high FPS on Ultra with all the DXR options on in FC6, 70-80 FPS most of the time. Starfield may have dipped a little lower but I don't think it was much lower, it played like a real gaming PC, subjectively, performance didn't seem far off from the same GPU in a full size PC with x16 slots.

Had the same experience over USB 4.0 as well, the dock I paid $100 for off Alixpress was delivering nearly the same throughput as I was getting with my card running native in an x16 slot.....granted it's not an RTX 40 series or anything so maybe that's where you hit a wall, but I think if you are shooting for 60fps you won't have a problem using either technology with an eGPU, although it probably varies game ot game...not all of them are starved in the same ways.

I personally no need for an eGPU enclosure though....I mean you have the Power Supply, the octopus cables off the Power Supply, the GPU itself and your chosen interface (let's assume mini-motherboard style).....subtlty is out the window at that point Maybe you could throw Irony a bone and just put the mini PC inside of a PC case and just install everyting in the mounting brackets in the case
Inception that rig!

 

[phxrider]

I personally no need for an eGPU enclosure though....I mean you have the Power Supply, the octopus cables off the Power Supply, the GPU itself and your chosen interface (let's assume mini-motherboard style).....subtlty is out the window at that point Maybe you could throw Irony a bone and just put the mini PC inside of a PC case and just install everyting in the mounting brackets in the case
Inception that rig!

Let me guess... you're single?

The enclosure makes it easier to bring out for gaming and put away when not gaming - or just tuck the enclosure away somewhere, like now I have it on the chair where the power supply was in the pic with everything set up pre-enclosure, but tucked under the table where it's not visible. The whole point of the mini is to be able to have a neat-ish station on half of the dining room table that can be stashed away in 5 minutes if we have company and need the table as an actual dining room table. Before that, we each had our laptops and it was really a kludge and took up a lot of surface space right where you need it.

 

[Zareek]

So I had a moment of weakness, they had the 64GB/1TB model on sale, I grabbed one. I'm impressed with the performance per watt on these. I'm seeing 10 Watts at the wall while web browsing or writing this post. 15 Watts, watching a YouTube video. 20 Watts playing web based solitaire in another window while watching a YouTube video.

My end goal with this is to find a Linux distro that I can daily drive and leave the massive gaming PC for just gaming.

 

[phxrider]

So I had a moment of weakness, they had the 64GB/1TB model on sale, I grabbed one. I'm impressed with the performance per watt on these. I'm seeing 10 Watts at the wall while web browsing or writing this post. 15 Watts, watching a YouTube video. 20 Watts playing web based solitaire in another window while watching a YouTube video.

My end goal with this is to find a Linux distro that I can daily drive and leave the massive gaming PC for just gaming.

Nice, I need to take the wall power meter off of my PC and try it out on mine.

With the eGPU, I could legit get by with one of these as my main gaming PC, and my "real" gaming PC is a 7800x3d/7900xtx, so that's saying something. Any game I'm interested in is going to be almost entirely GPU limited anyway, I don't play eSports type low res / low graphics settings / super high FPS stuff that needs a lot of CPU. I keep the eGPU turned off and the monitor plugged directly into the mini when I'm not gaming - even on my primary PC, it wouldn't be much of a hardship to shut it down, flip the power switch and swap the monitor cable to the box when I want to game. Honestly, I can see this being the wave of future gaming PCs in an increasingly power-conscious world, when fast eGPUs become commercially available.... with the right marketing to the right demographics. If the big computer vendors don't do it, some smaller, relatively unknown Chinese company will (maybe even Minisforum).

On another note, this mini boots (well technically, POSTs) WAY faster than my AM5 desktop computer. It's about as fast as AM4 at POST - in other words, you flip in on and in a few seconds you see the manufacturer logo and Windows donut. It's this way regardless of whether it's on internal or external graphics.

Have you seen any of the supposed leaks for the Strix Point APUs? If those are to be believed, they're talking about a 4070 level iGPU, that would sure make an epic mini PC (although I don't know if the mobile ones that would go in a mini will be that powerful, IIRC that one was a desktop chip - still, AMD's APUs tend to make it to mobile form at a lower TDP and clock speed). I still like the idea of being able to shut down the high-powered GPU entirely, though.

 

[phxrider]

Benchmarking for the UM780XTX... Results columns are with eGPU on the left and without on the right.

Noteables:
* This is a barebones model with Crucial memory (same type as stock) and Silicon Power US75 SSD (much faster than stock).
* I looked at their database and this PC getting into the 31,000s range for CPU Mark is significantly faster than the typical/average 7840HS.
* This PC as-is (without an eGPU), scores above 80% of all scores in their database.
* Adding the 6800xt pushed the Passmark score up over 4000 points, or 50%.
* With the 6800xt, it scored above 90% of all scores in their database.

Not bad for a mini-PC!

Due to the fairly low number of submissions using this CPU, the average was in the 28K range, and my submissions pushed it over 29K.

I submitted 2 additional ones that I deleted from my submissions, due to not having known beforehand that you have to manually tell Passmark to use the C: drive in preferences when running from a USB (which you can legitimately do per your license), or else it will benchmark the USB drive instead of the SSD, leading to an abysmal Diskmark score, which drags the overall Passmark score down to like 1500 (which is like 10th or 15th percentile). I am not sure if deleting them from my submissions removes them from the average of all subs, if they are still in there, there will be a few more >31K CPU Marks considered in the average for 7840HS. Ironically, the Samsung USB thumb drive still benched better than 15% of all drives, but a score in the 900s vs over 51K for the US75 SSD killed the overall performance score.

Baseline # ending in 55 is with eGPU with 6800xt, ending in 70 is the standard internal Radeon 780M.

 

[phxrider]

Experimenting with making an RGB template using a laser printer and standard paper..... The bleed-through in the black area actually gives it a cartoonish look, and it shows stronger in photos than to the eye. (We have a bit of a poop emoji fetish in our house. )