Been meaning to post this for a week or so. I've picked up a Minisforum UM790 Pro for use as a media PC, and got to say, I'm very impressed. Absolutely tiny, very quiet and with a decent bit of GPU power in there. It's the 7940HS, so 8 cores, 16 threads and 12 RDNA3 GPU cores - I can't wait to see what the desktop APUs can do. Minisforum UM790 Pro by BeauchN posted 2 Oct 2023 at 15:40
That looks good @BeauchN, any idea how the GPU compares to something like the Ryzen 3400G or 5600G? I saw one YT review with the 7840 vs 5700G and the top FPS were a lot higher but with some not so good looking 1% lows in some places
I’ll put your mind to rest, I’ve deshrouded my pny 4070 dual. One of the thermal pads was missing on purchase and I noticed it was getting very high hotspot temps. I stripped it down and replaced the pads with thermal putty. I now have it venting directly out the bottom of my case (a Lian Li tu150 so it’s sort of itx) Because the cooler is so slim I use 2 20mm shrouds (some Phobya ones I had) with 25mm fans on top so they make contact with the cooler. Although the GPU temp never really goes outside 60-70 degrees and the hotspot is around 70, I find the memory T junction can rocket if I don’t limit the frame rate (I try to keep it at 70-80). Unsurprisingly, the cooler seems pretty inadequate for a deshroud. I mean, it works especially with an undervolt and my 2 Noctuas never go above 1400 rpm meaning it’s quiet, it just needs something a bit more meaty than 3 heat pipes. https://imgur.com/a/EY7CNzM For what it’s worth, if I change case in the not too distant future I’ll probably put the shroud back on and leave it stock (keeping the undervolt). Do like how efficient the card is though.
Thank you very much for this detail! It has indeed put my mind to rest. I’ve set my intake fans to a constant low rpm and sorted out my CPU fan curve to be less jumpy and the noise situation is pretty golden now. Good job the card isn’t thirsty
Right, so I've run a few benchmarks on the Minisforum UM790 Pro, and also had a quick look as some of the 5700G reviews online - the RDNA3 iGPU seems to be a fair bit more powerful. Usual caveats on different testing methodologies, testing conditions, etc. apply, but of the relatively direct comparisons I've been able to do (using standard setting presets and in-game benchmarks): - 1080 medium in Far Cry 5 increases from 29 low / 32 avg. to 45 low / 51 avg. (1080 high ran at 42 min / 47 avg.) - 1080 medium in Shadow of the Tomb Raider increases from 19 low / 24 avg. to 38 low / 45 avg. (1080 high ran at 31 low / 44 avg.) - 1080 very high in Rainbow 6 Siege increases from 47 low / 58 avg. to 85 low / 116 avg. - 1080 Fire Strike synthetic benchmark scores increased across the board with overall 3,913 to 7,648, graphics 4,294 to 8,253, physics 26,805 to 28,897 and combined score 1,329 to 2,883 On the CPU-side I did run Cinebench R20 quickly, and vs the 5700G the multithreaded score increased from 5,524 to 6,945 and single threaded from 589 to 703.
Thanks for doing all that @BeauchN, it looks to be quite the beast! The 780M seems to be in between the GTX 1050Ti and GTX 1650 performance wise, which is pretty impressive for integrated graphics.
No worries, if anyone is interested in specific benchmarks let me know and I'll see if I can do them. I was pretty impressed with the results to be honest. For info its got 32GB 5600MT/s DDR5 and a 1TB Sabrent Rocket 4 M.2 drive in it.
To be fair a tenner’s SFF tax is pretty reasonable. Shame about the underlying price, but it’s where we are I guess.
It’s nice that GN have done a proper review of the Billet Labs monoblock. I’d love to do a build based around it, but it is sooo expensive, and finding an FE 4090 is like finding rocking horse s**t.
Fitted it to the wrong GPU, trashed its performance and pricing, and then auctioned it off to live event attendees. Caveat: I have not yet watched the GN video. Personally I think it’s overpriced as a cooler. I can understand why it would cost so much, but it’s still damn expensive. However. The average PC nerd won’t be buying a limited-run solid copper combined GPU & CPU block. This is for the modders building their own enclosure, or the deep-pocketed SFF enthusiasts who aren’t afraid of heavy customisation & modding. This seems like the kind of thing you go to when design is more important than cooling performance or value for money. In the right hands it would probably make for some very pretty builds.
Even if you ignored all the bullshittery that LTT pulled off, even if they'd done a review with the right hardware and then sent it back, it still would've been a shitty review. Linus is so far up his own arse he decided to take it upon himself to be the flag-bearer of computer enthusiasts and say no one buy this. Who's he to decide for the masses?
You can just… not watch it…? Channels like LTT, GN, JayzTwoCents, or HardwareUnboxed are influential because of the size of their audience, but their opinion only has as much weight as you give them. LTT does a lot of dumb stuff, and even post-meltdown their content can still be really rushed. For me they’re basically a “for entertainment purposes only” thing, and when they do dumb stuff - like the absolute cockup when they had the first Billet Labs prototype - it’s pretty easy to spot it and ignore it. Almost all of them annoy me in one regard though: they’re not in the UK, so any talk of “value for money” is often completely meaningless for me. It’s all well and good having GN tell me that some GPU is good value because it can be found for $500, or having LTT go on about a dirt-cheap second-hand market, but you try finding those prices over here. At least Hardware Unboxed acknowledges regional pricing, but it’s equally useless to me whether they’re talking about Australian DollaryDoos or US YankeeBucks.
Works for me. I've never, in my life, watched a hardware review video on YouTube. I've never watched Linus Tech Tips, and for years I thought it was something to do with Linus Torvalds. I've never watched GamersNexus, JayzTwoCents, HardwareUnboxed, or any of the rest of 'em, and I'm very happy that way. And this is why, at least in part. Though a bigger part is that from what I have seen and heard of them all, which is as little as possible, they all seem incredibly irritating. This is where we differ, I think: I don't find watching an underinformed, at best and being extremely generous, talking head tell me falsehoods entertaining in the least. There's so much actual entertainment out there, why would I watch LTT? There are so many factual reviews out there, why would I watch LTT? And if we take the cynical approach that 90 per cent of everything is crap, it's a lot easier to skim 10 written reviews for the gold than it is to watch 10 'tubers gurn into the camera for an hour each.
I fell into the YouTube trap a long time ago. The format just… works for me. Post ADHD diagnosis it’s very easy to see why it works for me: relatively short 15-25 minute videos, often meaningless or inconsequential, often I don’t need to pay close attention, and there are plenty of rabbit-holes available when I hyperfocus on some really obscure topic. Why LTT? It’s vapid, it’s relatively entertaining, it’s related to my interests, and sometimes they get their hands on some pretty cool stuff that I’d never have known about otherwise. I don’t give any weight to their reviews, and even if I am interested in a review of, say, a GPU, I’ll typically look at multiple sources. I’d rather have actual data to sift through, but even finding good quality and reliable written reviews is quite difficult these days, let alone getting my hands on actual data. It’s frustrating because I know how easy it would be (for me) to build data systems to store, retrieve, and expose this kind of information. If this is coming off as me being a fanboy and leaping to the defence of a company with hundreds of millions in annual revenue, then I can assure you that is not my intent! I do prefer written content, but finding multiple sources of good quality and reliable information on PC hardware is hard these days. A lot of the “good stuff” is only in video. There’s so much crap out there, and I’m finding more and more “AI generated” trash websites in the last couple of years. Like I said I’d rather have the actual data, but there’s little chance of that happening!
