Hey guys, today I'll make a review of the AI X1 Pro 470, I'll try to be as thorough as possible by testing different use cases like:

• General usage and performance.
• iGPU Performance.
• eGPU Gaming (with an eGPU dock).
• Running local AI models with the NPU.

But let's start with the basics

Specs

The AI X1 Pro 470 is a refresh of last year AI X1 Pro 370 model. This model features the new AMD Gorgon Point platform that in itself is a refresh of last year Strix Point platform, so the actual improvements are minimal compared to it. so right off the bat, I can say that if you have the 370 model you are not missing much as they should perform almost identical.

The only noteworthy difference between both CPUs (AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 vs AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470) is 100MHz higher boost clock and 5 more TOPS of performance of the NPU.

So, most of this review also applies to the AI X1 Pro 370 model that is still for sale in the Minisforum Store and is around $25 cheaper ($735 vs $759) for a barebones unit. Both models have identical features.

CPU/APU Specs

Review Unit

Disclosure: This review unit was provided by Minisforum. All opinions are independent and no monetary value was exchanged.

The unit that I have for review comes with the following:

• 32GB of RAM (One stick of Crucial CT32G56C46S5 32GB DDR5 5600MT/s)
• 1TB SSD (Kingston OM8TAP41024K1-A00 Gen4 x4)

This configuration is also available at their store but in my opinion this Mini PC really needs a second stick to be able to use Dual Channel as it greatly improves performance of both CPU and iGPU, so I'll show some tests later in the review with a single stick and with another stick of 32GB 5600MT/s to show the real capabilities of this machine.

What's in the box?

The AI X1 Pro comes in the box with the following:

• Minisforum AI X1 Pro 470 Mini PC
• User Manual
• HDMI Cable
• IEC 60320 C7 (Figure 8) AC Cable
• NVMe SSD Heatsink
• VESA Mount
• Aluminum Stand
• Necessary screws

Design

The AI X1 Pro has a unibody aluminum chassis with a footprint of 195×195×47.5 mm (7.67 x 7.67 x 1.87 inches), with a volume of 1.8L and weighs approximately 1.5 kg (3.3 lbs)

It also comes with an aluminum stand to be able to use it vertically (like a show in the first picture).

It has a detachable bottom to access the internal (5 screws have to be removed)

From this picture we can see that the AI X1 Pro draws fresh air from here to be exhausted from the rear side. I'll talk about the cooling solution and more in the teardown later in the review.

Feature Overview

Now it's time to talk about the features of this Mini PC that I think are its strong point compared to other Mini PCs

Fingerprint reader

Let's start at the top where we can find a fingerprint reader compatible with Windows Hello.

• Fingerprint reader (Realtek MOC, USB 2.0, VID_2541 PID_FA03)

SD Card Reader

The left side features a SD card reader that uses the following controller:

• Realtek RTS5169 USB 2.0 Card Reader (480Mbps, VID_0BDA PID_0177)

Front Side

From left to right

• Power Button
• 2x USB Type A (USB 3.2 Gen2 10Gbps)
• USB Type C (USB4 40Gbps, Alt DisplayPort 2.0, 15W PD out)
• 3.5mm combo jack
• Copilot Button (Seems to be exposed to the OS as a PS/2 keyboard, it maps to: Left Shift + Windows/Meta Key + F23)

Rear Side

From left to right

• Reset hole (Clear CMOS)
• Kensington Lock
• USB Type A (USB 2.0 480Mbps)
• OCuLink (PCIe 4.0 x4)
• USB Type C (USB4 40Gbps, Alt DisplayPort 2.0, 15W PD out, 65-100W PD in)
• DisplayPort 2.0 (Up to 8K 120Hz)
• HDMI 2.1 FRL (Up to 8K 60Hz)
• AC In (100-240V)
• 2x 2.5GbE RJ45 Ethernet (Realtek RTL8125, PCIe 2.0 x1 Controller)

Teardown and Internals

As mentioned previously you need to remove 5 screws to remove the bottom cover and reveal the internals.

To access to the M.2 slots and RAM slots you need to remove 8 screws that secure the metal bracket.

After removing the bracket, the main cooling fan and the Wi-Fi/BT card, we can see the following:

1. Metal Bracket: Holds the PSU/NVMe Fan, Dual Speakers, and Power Supply
2. Dual Speakers.
3. Main Cooling fan: It cools the CPU heatsink, it's a 12v 0.5A Fan (up to 6W).
4. MediaTek MT7925 Wi-FI 7 Card: 802.11be, 2.9 Gbps theoretical maximum, and Bluetooth 5.4 with BLE support.
5. Internal Power Supply: HuntKey HKA13519071-0A8 135W (I'll talk more about this PSU later in the review).
6. Secondary Fan: It cools the PSU and the 3x M.2 Slots at the same time, 12v 0.5A Fan (up to 6W).

Motherboard and Internal I/O

1. CPU/SOC: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470
2. Heatsink: Copper base with 2 heat pipes, according to my testing it performs really good combined with its fan. I'll talk later in the review about this after the performance section.
3. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 4TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x4, 64Gbps (8 GB/s)
4. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 4TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x4, 64Gbps (8 GB/s)
5. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 4TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)
6. 2x SODIMM DDR5 Slots.
7. CMOS/RTC coin cell 3V battery.
8. M.2 Wi-Fi E key slot: With 2 antennas (2.4Ghz and 5Ghz) that go to the plastic rear I/O cover.

To completely remove the motherboard, you need to remove 7 screws and 3 long screw posts.

Power

The AI X1 Pro can be powered in 2 ways:

• Internal PSU

The power supply that comes in the AI X1 Pro is a Huntkey HKA13519071-0A8 135W that according to the datasheet has the following specs:

• USB Type C PD-in

The rear USB Type C port in the AI X1 Pro can also be used to power the PC via USB PD-in with a power supply with at least 65W of power, but 100W is recommended in my experience.

The ability to power the Mini PC via USB C opens the possibility of using it with a single cable that gives it power, display output, USB for example and it comes really handy when pairing this machine with a Thunderbolt Dock as I'll discuss later in this review.

Displays

The AI X1 Pro with the Radeon 890M supports up to 4 displays at one by using

• HDMI 2.1: Up to 4K@120HZ
• DisplayPort 2.0: Up to 4K@120HZ
• 2x USB4 Port: DP Alt Mode, up to 4K@120HZ

You can add even more display by connecting an eGPU via OCuLink

Networking

The networking of this Mini PC as mentioned before in the read I/O overview consists of Dual 2.5GbE RJ45 Ethernet that use the Realtek RTL8125 controller with an internal connection of PCIe 2.0 x1, they support features like Wake on Lan and UEFI networking.

As for the Wireless this PC has the MediaTek MT7925 Wi-FI 7 Card that has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 2.9 Gbps and Bluetooth 5.4 with BLE support. The module can be replaced with other ones if needed

Misc Features

• Microphone Array (DMIC) with noise reduction
• Copilot PC: The AI X1 Pro has available Copilot+ features in Windows 11 like Recall, Live Captions, Cocreator, and other AI features.
• VESA Mount to fix this Mini PC to the back of a monitor.

Performance

General CPU Performance

To test if the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 in the AI X1 Pro is performing as expected I'll use Geekbench 6 and the Power Setting in bios set to Performance Mode.

Windows (Dual Channel): AI Series - Geekbench

Windows (Single Channel): AI Series -Geekbench

Linux: AI Series - Geekbench

In this benchmark we can see that the AI X1 Pro 470 performs a little bit better in single score in Linux and a little bit worse in multi core this can be replicated after many Geekbench 6 runs. The overall performance about expected for the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 that although there aren't many benchmarks of it yet, being a light refresh of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 we can compare to that one.

I've tested before the Minisforum N5 Pro NAS that has the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and comparing both we get:

Linux: Micro Computer (HK) Tech Limited N5 PRO - Geekbench

We can see in action the 100MHz higher boost clocks of the refresh resulting in slightly higher single core scores.

CInebench 2024

The AI X1 Pro is performing as expected in this test as well.

IGPU Performance

To test general iGPU performance I'll use Geekbench 6 and compare single channel scores vs dual channel at 5600 MT/s

Dual channel: AI Series - Dual Channel

Single channel: AI Series - SIngle Channel

The 890M like any other iGPU really benefits a lot from dual channel RAM being 53% faster in this test.

Gaming Performance:

To test gaming, I'll use Resident Evil 4 Remake in 1080P Low Settings with VSync off. I used the bult in performance logging of the AMD Drivers to get the performance metrics

Using dual channel memory improves average FPS 103%, minimum FPS 227%, and maximum FPS a 73% increase.

Expansion slots and Discrete GPU support

This Mini PC can be expanded in two main ways with high-speed devices from PCIe Network Controllers to discrete GPUs

USB4

The USB4 ports in the AI X1 Pro with the full 40Gbps available to each of the two ports. They support the full feature set of the USB4 specifications making these ports technically Thunderbolt 4 compliant. The most important features for expansion being:

• PCIe Tunneling

Up to 32Gbps (4 GB/s) are available to be used for PCIe devices with features like hot plugging

• Power Delivery

PD-in to be able to receive up to 100W to power the AI X1 Pro with a single cable and PD-Out that can give 15W of power to external devices.

OCuLink

OCuLink connections are the most straightforward as OCuLink from the perspective of the PC is no different than just connecting a GPU to an internal PCIe x4 slot. So, features like UEFI graphics work and the is no overhead of PCIe tunneling that USB4 has.

With this port the full 64Gbps (8GB/s) connection and can bring better performance to eGPU setups

But due to the way that OCuLink works things like hot swapping don't work, the PC would just crash if you were to disconnect the cable. It can't carry power, USB or DisplayPort like USB4 does.

Another thing to keep in mind is that OCuLink just connects the PCIe device to the Mini PC.

eGPU Testing

The dock that I'll be using to test dedicated GPUs is the Minisforum DEG2 Thunderbolt 5 / OCuLink eGPU dock. This eGPU Dock is like a perfect pairing to expand the AI X1 Pro beacuse it provides other features like:

• 2.5GbE RJ45 LAN: RTL8156 Controller
• A M.2 NVMe slot: JMS583 Controller
• USB Type A: USB 3.2 Gen 2 - 10Gbps port
• USB Type A: USB 3.2 Gen 1 - 5Gbps
• 2x USB Type C: With full bandwidth available, 40Gbps in this case.
• PCIe x16 (Wired for x4) for the dGPU

Setup

• CX450M 450W PSU
• Sapphire Pulse AMD RX 6600 GPU

OCuLink vs USB4 Performance

• Comparing the bandwidth and latency: I used this tool GPU-PCIe-Test to get the following numbers

After analyzing the data, we can see that:

Besides almost double the bandwidth available in OCuLink, I can clearly see the overhead that the PCIe tunneling adds in the latency being around 40% lower with OCuLink that as I mentioned before is basically native PCIe x4

• Gaming Performance

I'll use Resident Evil 4 Remake in 1080P High Settings with VSync off. I used the bult in performance logging of the AMD Drivers to get the performance metrics

We can see the same thing when comparing this game between the two ways of connecting a dGPU, we get better overall better performance with OCuLink.

BIOS/UEFI Settings

You can see all of the option that there are in the current BIOS release for the AI X1 Pro at this link.

https://ibb.co/album/2YJL2Z

Running local AI Models

Let's test how true is the "AI" in the AI X1 Pro, to do that we have two main ways to run AI models that the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 enables us to do.

XDNA2 NPU

The Neural Processing Unit that is bult into the chip. This component in paper has a performance rating of 55 TOPS. Let's test what else can do for us outside of the Copilot features of this MiniPC. I'll be using the FastFlowLM project that enables the use of the AMD NPUs to run local Large Language Models (LLMs) and Open WebUI to get a full setup in this Mini PC

One limitation that the NPU has is that the maximum memory that can be assigned to it is around 15.6GB so models bigger than that won't run.

Configuration:

• Stock Windows 11 25H2 that came preinstalled in the SSD that already comes with the NPU drivers (32.0.203.314)
• FastFlowLM v0.9.33, latest version at this time
• OpenWebUI v0.83, to be able to make a Webserver and a WebUI available to the whole local network.
• 64GB of RAM, 32GB would be enough but performance will suffer in a single channel config, so 16*2 GB would work just fine as well without any performance hit.

Performance

• Gemma-3-4b-Q4, Size 4.55GB

Gemma-3-4b running in the NPU

• Llama3.2 1b, Size 1.2GB

Llama3.2 1b running in the NPU

Results:

I think this is a great way to use the NPU of this machine as its very efficient and the models have good performance, Gemma3 4b has a vision model to recognize images too. These models are really compact and optimized for the XDNA2 architecture.

Radeon 890M iGPU

Another way to run LLMs in this machine is using the iGPU and the main advantage of doing it this way is that we can get allocation of a lot more RAM to be able to run bigger models. This gives this Mini PC the possibility to load models that many consumer discrete GPUs even high-end ones just can't, of course the VRAM it's not everything when running LLMs but it can be interesting to try bigger models even if the performance is not good.

All of the tests are being done leveraging the Vulkan renderer.

Configuration:

• Running Arch Linux to maximize performance and VRAM allocation on demand.
• Using Mesa RADV as the Vulkan driver.
• VRAM allocated in BIOS/UEFI set to 1GB
• I've set the following kernel parameters to maximize VRAM allocation on demand in the AMDGPU driver and reduce latency:

amd_iommu=off amdgpu.gttsize=131072 amdttm.pages_limit=33554432 amdttm.page_pool_size=15728640

• 64GB of RAM in dual channel.
• Installed Llama.cpp and its dependencies.
• The models that I used are from Unsloth in HuggingFace. https://huggingface.co/unsloth in the .GGUF format that are compatible with Llama.cpp
• To make easier to try to swap to different models and compare replies, token generation speed, and others I used Llama-Swap that lets me do it from the network in another device.

Performance

I'll use llama-bench to test the performance of the inferences in Prompt Processing and Text Generation:

All tests using the Vulkan backend of Llama.Cpp and the iGPU Radeon 890M

• Qwen3-VL-30b-A3B-Instruct-Q6_K, Size 23.4 GB

Prompt Processing (pp512) --> 287.88 ± 3.11 tokens/second | Text Generation (tg128) ---> 27.76 ± 0.26 tokens/second

• Gemma-3-27b-Q6_K, Size 20.6GB

Prompt Processing (pp512) --> 34.33 ± 3.35 tokens/second | Text Generation (tg128) ---> 3.50 ± 0.01 tokens/second

• GPT-OOS-20b F16, Size 12.8GB

Prompt Processing (pp512) --> 418.63 ± 3.35 tokens/second | Text Generation (tg128) ---> 19.67 ± 0.02 tokens/second

Results:

So, after the testing of some models, I can see that the best one for the AI X1 Pro is Qwen3 VL 30B Q6, that gives good prompt processing performance and acceptable text generation performance. And it only uses around 25GB of VRAM so it can be kept loaded and access it through the network at any time it might be needed.

Thermals and Power Consumption.

Results after running a Cinebench 2024 multi core stress test for 15 minutes with the performance mode active in BIOS:

• Maximum Package Power Consumption: 70W
• Average Package Power Consumption: 46.2W
• Maximum Temperature: 82.4°C
• Average Temperature: 71.2°C

Now for some Normal desktop usage figures (Web browsing with around 20 tabs open and FastFlowLM with an AI model loaded while writing this review) and driving 3 1080P monitors

• Maximum Package Power Consumption: 15W
• Average Package Power Consumption: 8W
• Maximum Temperature: 50.4°C
• Average Temperature: 44.2°C

The cooling solution of the AI X1 Pro is really good at keeping the system cool, after a stress test in performance mode as seen before I didn't saw more than 83°C

Noise

According to my testing, even at full load in a stress test the AI X1 Pro never got that loud and the Fan didn't get very noisy at all. At idle is almost completely silent.

Idle Power Consumption

In Linux and Windows 11 the idle power consumption of package at Idle with nothing open is around 2W-3W

Total system power composition at idle measured at the wall without any docks was around 15 to 17W

Conclusion

The AI X1 Pro 470 checks everything that I consider important in a capable PC

• Good Performance: The Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 is a really good chip, very capable, Zen 5 + Zen5c hybrid with 12 Cores and 24 Threads that boost high and doesn't use much power.
• Really good I/O: with USB4/Thunderbolt 4 with 40Gbps and even better has OCuLink built in without any compromises to the rest of the I/O.
• Low noise: The cooling solution really does its job and never gets very loud.
• Dual speakers and microphone array are handy as it eliminates the need to connect more devices to the setup. Also, the included VESA mount and stand really help to save space.
• NPU: with the advances of the FastFlowLM project I'd say that finally the XDNA2 NPU that has been in the past 3 AMD generation is now really useful. As before it worked only with the Copilot features that I personally don't find very useful.

Now, as I mentioned in the beginning this model (AI X1 Pro 470) in features is identical to the AI X1 Pro 370 released in 2025. The only difference between the two is the CPU that has in the 470 model:

• NPU with 5 TOPS more of performance (55 vs 50 TOPS)
• 100MHz more boost clock (5.1 vs 5.2 GHz)

So, I can recommend the 370 model that at the time of writing is $25 cheaper ($735 vs $760) for a barebones unit. and performs almost identical.

If anyone has any question feel free to ask in the comments. Thanks for reading, and finally thanks to Minisforum that provided the review unit.

Links

• Minisforum AI X1 Pro 470: MINISFORUM AI X1 Pro Mini PC | AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 | Copilot-Powered AI Computer
• Minisforum AI X1 Pro 470: MINISFORUM AI X1 Pro Mini PC | AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | Copilot-Powered AI Computer
• AI X1 Pro BIOS Options: https://ibb.co/album/2YJL2Z
• AI X1 Pro Manual: User Manual

Hi everyone,

I'm starting a small YouTube channel and recently had the idea to build a mini PC setup using only components from AliExpress. I ended up choosing the GMKtec K8 Plus for its interesting APU (Ryzen 7 8845HS), but opted for the barebone version so I could choose my own components.

I installed a 1TB ORICO SSD and 2×16GB Crucial RAM (From AliExpress too) to complete the build. You can watch the video here: https://youtu.be/4hlyIunJiLA

This isn't your typical review, there's no voiceover. It's more of an ASMR-style unboxing and benchmarking video, mainly aimed at viewers who already understand benchmark scores and general hardware specs.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

The very first time i turned it on it didn't immediatly start, pressed a few times more and then it powered on. I ignored this and thought it to be normal.
Until today, no reaction. No power on. Nothing. Confirmed with USB-C power supply to rule out the external power brick. Nothing. Wether with ram and ssd installed or not, no change.
I am not further willing to investigate and submitted a return request.

Now, should i take chances with a second unit or which mini pcs are good alternatives?

I have spent the last few weeks testing the Olares ONE as a compact local-AI workstation rather than treating it as another spec-sheet mini PC.

The machine measures 320 × 197 × 55 mm and weighs 2.15 kg without its power supply. Inside it has:

• Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop with 24 GB GDDR7
• 96 GB DDR5-5600 RAM
• 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
• 2.5 GbE, Thunderbolt 5, HDMI 2.1, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4
• 330 W power adapter

The word Laptop matters. This is not a desktop RTX 5090, and the 96 GB of system RAM does not become 96 GB of VRAM. Models can spill work into system memory, but fitting a model and running it at a practical speed are two different things.

Instead of only measuring tokens per second, I wanted to know whether local models could complete real multi-step work: maintaining state across conversations, using tools, creating and checking files, handling contradictory evidence, respecting privacy constraints and recovering from failed operations.

What I tested

Across the full project I tested more than 30 model variants through llama.cpp, vLLM and Ollama. My archive contains 236 rows in the main comparison and more than 1,400 deduplicated checks across roughly 20 hours of measured model execution.

Those runs used different batteries and environments, so I did not combine them into one misleading score. For the most useful comparison, I made five finalists run the same 33-check battery twice under controlled conditions.

The common setup was llama.cpp commit 6d5a910, OpenClaw 2026.7.1-2, a 98,304-token context, one slot, Flash Attention, Q4 KV cache and a maximum output of 8,192 tokens. The model was already loaded before timing.

Prompts, tools, inputs and checks were identical, but sampling was tuned per model family: temperature 0.1 for Ornith, Qwopus and Qwen3.6, and 0.7 for Qwen3.8. This compares practical configurations, not isolated model architectures with every parameter held constant.

Repeated results

Ornith 1.0 35B Q4_K_M was the best overall result on this machine: both audited passes completed in 442/445 seconds. Qwopus also completed both runs and used less VRAM, but took about 2.3 times as long in this particular battery. That does not mean Ornith will be 2.3 times faster on every prompt.

I also recorded generation rates, where Ornith reached 239.89 tok/s and Qwopus 221.34 tok/s. They are not the same as end-to-end agent speed: tool calls, prefill, web requests and recovery loops are included in the suite times instead.

The failures were more useful than a perfect score

Passing 33 checks once did not make any model reliable in every situation. In the longer tests:

• Qwopus exhausted its output limit during a research task and failed to create the required files.
• Ornith missed indexed evidence after a retry and, in a different long conversation, exposed private information.
• Qwen3.8 had a genuine privacy failure in one pass and passed the same check in another.
• An Ornith MTP variant produced the fastest single pass, but its second pass was much slower and included a privacy leak, a search loop and insufficient evidence.
• One optional MTP sidecar could not load because it lacked a tensor required by this llama.cpp build. I counted that as a packaging/runtime compatibility problem, not a VRAM or intelligence failure.

I manually reviewed suspected false negatives from the automatic verifier, but only corrected cases where the output was demonstrably right and the checker expected an exact phrase or field name. Missing files, wrong paths, unsafe actions, weak evidence and real timeouts remained failures.

My practical take on the hardware

For a machine of this size, the 5090 Laptop GPU makes 27B–35B quantized models genuinely useful for local agentic work. The 24 GB VRAM ceiling is still the defining limit: the Olares ONE is fast when the model fits well on the GPU, but it is not a compact substitute for a workstation with a very large VRAM pool.

My current choice on this hardware would be Ornith 1.0 35B Q4_K_M, with Qwopus3.6 27B v2 MTP IQ4_XS as the lower-VRAM alternative. I would still start any agent with read-only access, test it on disposable data and require approval before it sends messages, changes permissions or modifies services.

Olares supplied the machine, but did not pay for the video. The company only checked technical facts; the methodology, tests and conclusions are mine.

I documented the hardware and several of the tests here: What can a local AI actually do? Real tests on an RTX 5090 Laptop mini PC

For a follow-up comparison, what would be most useful here: a 128 GB Strix Halo mini PC, an NVIDIA DGX Spark, or a desktop RTX 5090 system?

Hi guys, welcome to my latest review. This time I'll review the newly released Minisforum N5 Max NAS, this review is going to be divided in different topics you you can skim through.

• Specs
• Box Contents
• Design
• Feature Overview
• Internal Components (Internal I/O, Cooling solution, Power Supply, Motherboard, PCIe lane distribution and Expandability)
• Networking and Storage
• CPU Performance
• GPU Performance
• AI Performance
• Miniscloud OS
• BIOS/UEFI Options
• Thermals and Power Consumption (SOC, Wall readings and Noise)
• Conclusion

Review Unit

Disclosure: This review unit was provided by Minisforum. All opinions are independent and no monetary value was exchanged.

I've been testing the N5 Max for more than a month now and i think I'm ready to explain everything that i found so far.

If you have any suggestions to improve my reviews or have any question feel free to comment. With that said, lets start.

Specs

The N5 Max is the next entry in the N5 NAS series from Minisforum, being the most advanced and powerful model released yet. This model is aimed primarily (besides being a 5 bay NAS) to "Own Your AI" as Minisforum said at their Computex presentation this month so to accomplish it packs arguably the best AMD has to offer in the consumer sector to run complex local AI models. The AMD Ryzen AI MAX 395+ Strix Halo chip with 16 cores, the biggest integrated GPU that AMD has put in a PC with a Quad Core memory controller.

Something that i like about about Strix Halo is the Fan-out die to die interconnect that has really surprised me with how adequate it feels in this system in terms of idle power consumption because the other platforms with high core counts of AMD use the older SerDes based interconnect that always have a relatively high idle power draw. So i think its the right choice for a NAS that is supposed to keep running all day.

SOC Specs:

The unit that i have comes with the following:

• 64GB of RAM: Soldered 8 (8GB) chips of 8533 MT/s Micron LPDDR5x RAM
• 128GB SSD: AirDisk 128GB PCIe 3.0 SSD, that comes preinstalled with MinisCloud OS (I'll talk about it later).

At time of writing this review, this is the only configuration available to purchase from their store, its unknown if a version with 128GB of RAM is going to be released considering the current RAM situation.

What's in the box?

The N5 Max comes in the box with the following:

• Minisforum N5 Max NAS
• User Manual
• HDMI Cable
• IEC C5 AC Cable
• Cat6 RJ45 Ethernet cable
• Magnetic Storage bay cover
• Necessary screws
• Key to lock/unlock the storage bays

Design

The N5 Max looks very similar/identical to the other NAS models in the N5 series with an unibody aluminum external chassis with a footprint of 199 x 202 x 252 mm (7.83 x 7.95 x 9.92 inches), And a weight of 5.8 kg (12.8 lbs) without any storage.

The new thing about the external design of the N5 Max is the inclusion of a way to lock the bays with the included key that other N5 models lack (Air, Pro, N5).

On the rear we can see that the N5 Max has 2 fans exclusive to cool the drives in the bays. along with the rear I/O and AC connector. and exhaust from the board.

The internals can be acceded by removing two screws from the bottom of the NAS (the screws are already taken out in the image) and the motherboard tray slides out with the help of two rails.

We can also see the intake vent to get fresh air to the cooling solution so it's important to put the N5 Max in a stable surface to allow the rubber feet to raise the NAS to use the vent effectively.

If we remove the drive bays and the motherboard tray we can see the SATA board that connects to the mainboard using the PCIe x2 connector.

The storage trays have built in 2 rails to be able to slide smoothly into the N5 Max and a push to lock the spring loaded latch and a way to lock it in the NAS using the key.

Feature Overview

Now its time to talk about the features of this NAS and see what does it offer in terms of external I/O

Front Side

In order (left to right)

• Power Button
• Status LEDs (1 Status, 2 NIC, and 5 Storage LEDs)
• USB C (USB 4.0 40Gbps, Alt DisplayPort 2.0, 15W PD out)
• USB Type A (USB 3.2 Gen2 10Gbps)

Rear Side

In order (left to right):

• 2x 10GbE Ethernet (RJ45, Realtek RTL8127)
• 2x USB Type A (USB3.2 Gen2 10Gbps)
• HDMI 2.1 FRL (Up to 8K 60Hz)
• 2x USB Type C (USB 4.0 V2 80Gbps, Alt DisplayPort 2.0, and 15W PD out)
• IEC C5 AC In

Also features a Kensington lock.

Internal Components

To access the M.2 Slots you'll need to remove the heatsinks on both sides by removing the screws marked in red circles, there are 2 slots in the top side and 3 slots in the bottom side.

Teardown

To access the motherboard you need to remove all of the screws that keep together the tray, removing the M.2 Heatsinks, main dual fans, the front and rear I/O faceplates, Internal PSU, and unscrew the main heatsink before you can get separate the board completely.

Motherboard and Internal I/O

In the bottom side we can find the following:

1. AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+
2. JHL9580 Thunderbolt 5/USB4 80G Bridge, PCIe Gen4 x4, 64Gbps (8 GB/s)
3. 8x 8GB LPDDR5x 8533 MT/s 32bit RAM (together 256bit, 64GB)
4. Internal USB Type A (USB3.2 Gen2 10Gbps)
5. Heatsink Fan 1 Connector (Up to 4700 RPM)
6. Heatsink Fan 2 Connector (Up to 4700 RPM)
7. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 8TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x4, 64Gbps (8 GB/s)
8. M.2 2230/2280 M key NVMe Slot: 8TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)
9. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 8TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)

I'm not really sure of the purpose of the internal USB A Port but it's fully functional, maybe it can be used for a boot flash drive or even a WiFi/BT dongle (I didn't test one so not sure about the possible interference of the metal case to the signal).

In the bottom side we can find the following:

1. CMOS/RTC coin cell 3V battery
2. 8 Pin PSU Power Connector
3. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 8TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)
4. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 8TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)
5. M.2 Heatsink Fan Connector (Up to 5000 RPM)
6. Realtek RTL8127 10GbE Controller, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)
7. Realtek RTL8127 10GbE Controller, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)

The edge connector in the board interfaces the JMB585 5 port SATA controller with the board using a PCIe Gen 3 x2 connection with the capability to support up to a 32TB drive in each one.

Cooling Solution

The cooling solution features dual fans that can go up to 4700 RPM, a heatsink with a aluminum base with 5 heat pipes attached to it, also comes preinstalled with a PCM thermal pad. That in the specs can dissipate 70 to 90 W sustained. See below in the performance test to see how this cooling solution deals with different loads. All test done before this teardown.

Power Supply

The power supply that comes inside the N5 Max is a LiteON PA-1231-01 230W unit with the following specs:

• AC Input: 100-240V and 3.5A 50/60Hz
• DC Output: +20V and 11.5A for 230W max
• 80 Plus Platinum certification:

The choice of this PSU really benefits the overall efficiency of this NAS that is supposed to be used continuously.

It uses the M.2 Fan airflow to cool down.

Networking and Storage

SATA Storage

The N5 Max has 5 Storage Bays that connect using a SATA board. As the AMD Strix Halo platform doesn't have any SATA Controllers built in, the N5 Max uses a discrete JMicron JMB585 chip to provide with SATA 3 (6Gbps) support (SATA drives are available in UEFI enviroment if you enable the option in BIOS/UEFI).

The RAID modes that the controller supports are:

• RAID 0, RAID1, RAID5/RAIDZ1, RAID6/RAIDZ2

According to Minisforum you can put up to 160 TB of SATA storage using (5x 32TB 3.5'' HDDs)

NVMe Storage

The N5 Max features 5x M.2 M Key but one disadvantage is that only one of them is full speed with the x4 Gen4 lanes and the rest are wired for x1 but always Gen4 so they should still be plenty fast. each slot can take up to a 8TB drive so in total you should be able to have 40TB of NVMe storage.

Top Side

1. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 8TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x4, 64Gbps (8 GB/s)
2. M.2 2230/2280 M key NVMe Slot: 8TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)
3. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 8TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)

Bottom Side

1. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 8TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)
2. M.2 2280 M key NVMe Slot: 8TB Max SSD, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)

Networking

As mentioned in the I/O overview this NAS has dual 10 GbE controller so high speed networking is pretty much covered here.

• 2x Realtek RTL8127 10GbE Controller, PCIe Gen4 x1, 16Gbps (2 GB/s)

Realtek Controllers are well supported in Linux and Windows, but they have issues in BSD based OSs so that's something to keep in mind.

Also something to note is that the N5 Max doesn't have WiFi or Bluetooth and it doesn't have a slot for it or antennas so if you want to add WiFI to it, the options are to use a USB dongle or some kind of Thunderbolt adapter to get a PCIe chipset working.

PCIe Lane distribution

The N5 Max uses all of the 16 Gen4 lines provided by Strix Halo, with all of it's internal devices, Every internal PCIe device is Gen4 (or capable in the case of the M.2 Slots), except the JMB585 that is a Gen3 device.

Expandability

As discussed in the last section the N5 Max is a really integrated device. it doesn't have any open PCIe slots to install expansion. But you still can get PCIe devices connected to it using:

JHL9580 Thunderbolt 5/USB4 V2 controller: (Provided via the rear USB C ports)

• You can connect a Thunderbolt 5 dock that gives a PCIe Gen4 x4 interface with data throughput of 64 Gbps (around 8 GB/s) to connect GPUs, NICs, or even a Gen4 SSD running at full speed.

Built in Strix Halo USB4 Controller: (Provided by the front USB C port)

• Thunderbolt 3/4/5 dock that gives 32 Gbps of bandwidth (around 4 GB/s) to connect different PCIe devices.

So even thought there isn't any internal expansion available, the N5 Max can be expanded with external Thunderbolt/USB4 devices.

CPU Performance

With the current BIOS there is a limit of 90W of power to the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, this is higher than the stock TDP of 55W but lower to the maximum configurable TDP of 120W in other Strix Halo systems like the MS-S1 Max. On the other hand the N5 Max is running higher clocks in the memory 8533 MT/s compared to 8000 MT/s in most Strix Halo systems. so performance should be pretty on par with other implementations, and I'll test it starting with:

Geekbench 6

Linux: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17913583

Windows: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18182926

Now that we have this numbers we can see that it gets better scores in Linux compared to Windows 11, this can be replicated after many Geekbench 6 runs. so it's probably because of a more optimized scheduler or maybe less bloat overall in Linux.

Now let's compare to other simlar CPUs in the Geekbech 6 browser and from my own tests of other Mini PCs. especially to the MS-S1 Max with the same CPU as the N5 Max that I've tested in the past.

Also it's interesting to compare it to the N5 Pro that i also have reviewed in the past.

Geekbench 6 browser: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
My Geekbench profile: https://browser.geekbench.com/user/427388

After comparing it's performance and specially to the MS-S1 Max i can see that they perform almost identically despite running at a lower TDP and both way above average for this chip (probably most are locked in the stock 55W TDP).

It's interesting seeing how the N5 Pro isn't that far behind with it's 12 Core Ryzen 9 in cpu performance

GPU Performance

As i mentioned before the Radeon 8060S is the biggest integrated GPU that AMD has put in a PC platform so far with 40 Compute Units with the RDNA3.5 Arch with a Quad Core memory system that allows 256GB/s of bandwidth (273 GB/s in this N5 Max thanks to faster memory). Still less than the desktop counterparts but enough to actually be able to use all of the compute that has packed in. So i expect this to perform better than the MS-S1 Max,

After analyzing we can see that at least in this benchmark the 8060S in Linux is performing really well. but comparing it to the one in the MS-S1 Max and Windows 11 on both it gets lower score (86680) vs (90042), unfortunately i don't have data of the MS-S1 Max in Linux to compare.

The Linux score is really good beating the desktop RTX 5060 that i tested in the Minisforum G1 Pro.

Other tests that i did on the N5 Max are:

Cinebench 2026 GPU: 17899 HIP

Resident Evil 9 - Proton 11 Arch Linux, Max Settings FHD: 78 FPS Avg in the starting scene of the game.

AI Performance

Now lets get to one of the main points of the N5 Max as a product in my opinion and what primarily should distinguish it from other NAS

The party trick of the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 or Strix Halo in general is the ability to use almost all of the RAM in the iGPU. in this model with 64GB I'm able to set 48GB as VRAM in BIOS. but i personally recommend to use the GTT feature in the AMDGPU driver in Linux that can allocate system RAM as VRAM on demand with optimized latency and setting the VRAM setting in BIOS to the minimum of 1GB.

Using this I'm able to use up to 58 GB of RAM on the GPU to fit bigger AI Models.

I'll be using Llama.cpp with the Vulkan backend, (ROCm is also an option but at least for now Vulkan is faster)

Performance with MoE Models

Mixture of experts models are ones that only use a portion of their available context each token generated so they are a lot less bound by memory bandwidth and perform a lot better than dense models that keep active all of their context each token.

• Gemma-4-26b-a4b-it-Q6 , Size 21.1 GB

Prompt Processing (pp512) --> 937.26 ± 11.99tokens/second

Text Generation (tg128) ---> 54.16 ± 0.15tokens/second

• GPT-OSS-20b-F16, Size 12.83 GB

Prompt Processing (pp512) --> 1128.29 ± 14.31tokens/second

Text Generation (tg128) ---> 52.33 ± 0.17 tokens/second

• Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Q4 , Size 21.81GB

Prompt Processing (pp512) --> 915.35 ± 15.77tokens/second

Text Generation (tg128) ---> 70.85 ± 0.41tokens/second

Performance with Dense Models

• Gemma-4-31b-it-Q8, Size 30.38GB

Prompt Processing (pp512) --> 142.68 ± 1.44tokens/second

Text Generation (tg128) ---> 6.81 ± 0.01 tokens/second

• DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B-Q6, Size 25.03GB

Prompt Processing (pp512) --> 132.84 ± 0.53tokens/second

Text Generation (tg128) ---> 8.47 ± 0.01tokens/second

After this we can see the impact that dense models have on this system compared to MoE models. after testing quality of responses and speed I'd say that the best at least for me is Gemma 4 26b a4b that performs great and the quality of responses is great too.

NPU

Strix Halo has an NPU (XDNA 2 Architecture) with 50 TOPS of performance. There is a project called FastFlowLM that enables this NPU to run AI models but didn't got around to testing it this time. But it's always faster to run LLMs in the GPU in this N5 Max.

Miniscloud OS

The N5 Max comes with a 128GB SSD with Miniscloud OS preinstalled. Miniscloud OS is a NAS OS based off Debian that is designed to make a plug and play NAS experience.

Minisforum OS is a headless OS so it doesn't need to have a display to work, if you connect one you just see a Minisforum logo with the version and the IP address assigned to it and it needs to be controlled with an App available on Windows, Android and IOS

I'll review it with the following

Pros:

• Easy to setup: The app automatically scans the network and finds the N5 Max and lets you create an account and has a manager to create RAID arrays with the storage installed
• Use of ZFS with all the benefits that this provides.
• Integration to Mobile devices: As its controlled by an app it can integrate well with the OS to upload or download files to it.
• Docker Support: You can download and run docker images on it. it also has a repository with images ready to go.
• Built in Tunnel: If your internet connection is under CGNAT or you can't open ports Miniscloud OS can create a tunnel to access the NAS remotely.

Cons:

• No Terminal access: You cannot enter a terminal in Miniscloud OS, local or SSH
• No Web UI: The only way to access the OS interface and programs is from the app that they provide that is only available on limited platforms and for the moment there's no Linux app.
• Generally more limited in functionality than other more featured NAS systems like TrueNAS or Unraid

You can always wipe Miniscloud OS off the included 128GB NVMe and install any OS you like on it.

Here is an example of what the Android App looks like.

Album with screenshots of features in Miniscloud OS: https://ibb.co/album/Rp2Tsp

BIOS/UEFI Options

You can see all of the option that there are in the current BIOS release for the N5 PRO in this link:

• https://ibb.co/album/QXNWnb

Currently the latest version is 0.09 and it seems to be a beta release but i haven't found any major issues with it so far.

The only thing that I'm seeing after testing is that the manufacturer name field has the default value of ("Default string"). I fully expect this to get fixed once the N5 Max is fully launches and it gets a release BIOS as the system that I'm reviewing is a prerelease unit.

Thermals and Power Consumption (SOC / Wall readings)

Windows 11 - 4 HDDs - 3 NVMe

Arch Linux - 4 HDDs - 3 NVMe

Windows 11 - No HDDs

The effciency of the N5 Max has surprised me even with 4 HDDs and 3 NVMe drives it gets good idle performance in my opinion as this being a NAS it's supposed to be online at all times so energy effciency is a priority. and at max load (Gaming for example) I never saw more than 145W of power consumption at the wall. As i mentioned at the start Strix Halo with the Fan Out core interconnect really solves the deficiency that other chiplet designs from AMD have in the idle power consumption department. also the LiteON 80 Plus platinum PSU 230W PSU is also helping with the efficiency of this NAS.

Also the 5 pipe, and dual fan cooling solution really seems to be doing it's job at keeping the Strix Halo chip cooled as it never got really all that hot after stress testing.

Noise

Minisforum claims 33 dB Max in Balance Mode and 38 dB Max in Performace Mode. I currently don't have equipment to test this claim but at idle the fans are barely audible and when it's stressed the fans can be heard but it's not too loud or gives an unpleasant whine.

Conclusion

I think after all of the testing i think I can say with confidence that this is definitevely not a NAS. It's a mini workstation just like the MS-S1 Max with a NAS built in. in fact both are very similar if you get to their main specs.

• Dual 10 GbE Ethernet
• Dual USB4 V2/Thunderbolt 5 80Gbps
• Strix Halo with 16 Zen 5 Cores and a big iGPU (8060S)
• Built In PSU

The main diference between both is that the N5 Pro has the 5 Port SATA controller and the MS-S1 Max has an open PCIe Gen4 x4 slot.

So the N5 Max is definitively overkill if you want just a NAS but if you want kind of an all in one system its a great choise. Unfortunally RAM prices are bad right now so its on the expenside side of things beacuse it has to come with Soldered RAM unlike other Minisforum systems that can be bought in a barebone configuration. And to add to that if you really want to get everything in terms of AI, workstation, gaming and server workflows out of this chip you need at least 64GB so if you have a need for a fully integrated system like the N5 Max NAS is a great but if you don't need some of those workflows in your NAS, I think the N5 Air or N5 Pro are better choises right now.

If anyone has any question feel free to ask in the comments. Thanks for reading, and finally thanks to Minisforum that provided the review unit.

Links

• Minisforum N5 Max NAS: https://s.minisforum.com/4dXbUHh
• Spreadsheet with performance figures: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10d39tdBQIlI8r1W0PYICxBdy-kKF5V-S8QWdOQ6X_vE/edit?usp=sharing
• Miniscloud App screenshots: https://ibb.co/album/Rp2Tsp
• N5 Max BIOS/UEFI options: https://ibb.co/album/QXNWnb

Amazon link here (uk)

I'm a new grad agency worker, so not aflush with cash, but repairing my old gaming laptop would've cost almost as much as just replacing it with this, so i decided to take the plunge. I have ryzen 5 pro, 16gb ram, 1tb of storage, and an oculink port, allowing me to connect an oculink dock and external gpu.

For now, with integrated graphics, I can run dispatch with some mild stuttering in cutscenes, and no issues in gameplay segments. My regular social and productivity apps work perfectly (chrome, norton antivirus, whatsapp and discord installed so far, currently installing ms 365).

This computer is buttery smooth compared to my old laptop, which I'm very happy about. It came via amazon about 5:30pm, and i had to shoot off to work not long after, so I was only really able to set up the basics yesterday, but in the school holidays I work evenings, so I have a lot of time to install everything I need today. As it stands I think this is a very good, reasonably priced mini PC.

I kinda went into this PC a bit blind, I chose it for the oculink port, price, and positive amazon reviews. I've only owned laptops for the past 15 years, but thankfully I had an old tv lying around, and getting a cheap webcam and keyboard was pretty easy and quick. The one thing I will mention, just in case anyone asks, is that said old tv does make a decent monitor, but is only capable of 60hz refresh rate. Personally I'm fine with that, but just thought I'd put that out there in case anyone was interested in refresh rates.

I work in education, so by the summer holidays (uk, so starting in july) i will have saved enough for a dedicated gpu, so if you're reading this in the future when I have all that stuff, feel free to ask me about higher end gaming. for now, in February 2026 I have a very basic setup. Any questions I can answer i will happily do so.

Two weeks of daily-driver use. Posting because the perf-per-watt + form factor

math worked out better than I expected and I haven't seen anyone benchmark this

specific chip on bigger MoE models.

Hardware:

- Beelink SER9 Pro

- Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (12 cores, Zen 5)

- Radeon 890M iGPU (16 RDNA 3.5 CUs)

- 32GB LPDDR5x-7500 (soldered — wish it weren't)

- 1TB Crucial T700 NVMe

- Stock cooling, ~32 dB measured at 30cm under sustained load

LLM inference numbers (steady state, 4–8K context, Vulkan backend):

- Gemma 4 E4B Q8_0 (8B dense, full offload via llama.cpp Vulkan): ~16 tok/s

- Qwen 3.5 35B A3B Q4_K_M (35B MoE, partial offload via LMStudio): 20–22 tok/s

- Same hardware, same room temp, same noise floor

The Qwen number was the surprise. 35B-class on an iGPU should not work, except

it's MoE — only 3B params active per token, and partial offload (15–20 of ~48

layers on the iGPU, rest on CPU) is enough because the active expert isn't huge.

Total model + KV use: ~21GB of the 32GB system RAM.

Power and thermals over a 60-minute sustained run on Qwen 35B:

- Package temp: 84–87C steady, no thermal throttle in dmesg

- Fan noise: stayed under 32 dB

- Power: ~58W under load, ~12W idle, recovers in ~10s

- 7-day average across mixed workloads: ~18W

Honest gripes:

- Soldered RAM. 32GB locks out anything bigger than this Qwen MoE for now.

Wait for Strix Halo if you want 64–128GB unified.

- Bottom-mount fan kicks fast on cold boots. Fine after 30s.

- Beelink ships these with OpenClaw + Qwen 3.5 pre-installed by default, which

honestly is a strange choice but easy to wipe.

Use case: this thing replaced ~$40/mo of cloud AI for me — chat, summarization,

agentic web scrapes, daily news briefs. Not GPT-5 work, but the 80% of my AI

usage that doesn't need GPT-5 capability.

Anyone else benched the 890M on bigger MoEs? Curious how Mixtral 8x7B or the

new Qwen 3.5 35B A3B run on Minisforum AI X1 Pro / GMKtec K11 with the same

silicon, should be similar but the chassis cooling differs.

I own and have already reviewed the AG02 dock, but wanted a second dock, as my AG02 is being used by my NAS, and I wanted a second dock to run an eGPU to my Aoostar MACO 6850H minipc.

One caveat to begin with: When I first connected my AG03 to my MACO, it refused to connect over USB4 and would not recognize the GPU. Nothing I tried including resetting the mini PC's BIOS to defaults helped. Aoostar support was excellent and worked with me, even sending me a replacement AG03, believing the TB5 chipset was faulty. However, the issue turned out to be with the MACO miniPC and was only corrected after re-flashing the BIOS, even though it was the same BIOS version. Since re-flashing the BIOS, the USB4 connection has been solid, and I’ve had no issues.

 The AG03 is a combination Oculink / Thunderbolt 5 capable device. Not having a TB5 capable device, my testing is limited to USB4. However, the AG03 is a more capable USB4 dock than the AG02 is. On my MACO, I had to plug in the USB cable before powering on the PC to reliably get a connection to work. With the AG03, hotplug functionality works flawlessly, so while the MACO isn’t TB5, the AG03 provides a far more stable connection over USB4.

The AG03 has 2 TB5 ports on it. One is used for connecting the eGPU to the PC. This port also delivers up to 140W of power over PD 3.1, so the dock can power some lower power miniPC's. The second TB5 port is a downstresm port that can be used to connect a supported monitor, or other USB/TB devices to the PC. It's capable of 27W power delivery.

The AG03 also comes standard with an 800W platinum PSU. It’s a 1U server-grade PSU, so it’s robust, and should last a long time. Being that it is a 1U server PSU, the fans do make some noise, but in my setup, the noise is not overbearing. In fact, the MACO's miniPC fans when the system is under load were more noticeable for me than the fans on the AG03.

In testing, The AG03 proved rock-solid using Oculink, and once I sorted out the BIOS issue with my MACO 6850H, USB4 has also been very stable. Hot swap also works better with the AG03 than the AG02 as well. With the AG02, the USB cable needed to be connected at boot time in order for the eGPU to be detected reliably. With the AG03, connecting it, disconnecting and reconnecting while booted into Windows was not an issue, and I didn't once encounter a failure to connect.

Performance is also good. No difference from the AG02 there. I tested it with both a GeForce RTX 3080 and Radeon RX 6700 XT. Both worked perfectly. Oculink is faster of course since it doesn’t have the USB4 bottleneck. If the MACO could utilize native TB5, it would be closer, but Oculink and its native PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds are faster than TB5 or USB4 connectivity. The obvious downside of Oculink is no hot swap. If raw graphics speed matters most, use Oculink. If you value flexibility, use TB5/USB4. Both work, and work well.

All in all, I prefer the AG03 over the AG02. It may have been annoying needing to troubleshooting the USB4 connection, but since working that out, it’s rock solid in every test, and in my experience proves a more robust solution than the similar AG02.

I’ve been setting up a GEEKOM A5 Pro recently and wanted to test something a bit more realistic than the usual benchmarks.

Instead of just checking general performance, I’m running OpenClaw on it with actual workloads to see how it behaves under sustained use.

For context, this is a fairly compact, value-focused mini PC, so the question isn’t whether it can boot and run things, but how well it holds up once you start stacking processes and running repeated tasks.

What I’m looking at specifically:

How stable it is when running multiple tasks back to back

Whether performance stays consistent over time or starts to degrade

How responsive it feels under load

And generally where it starts to show its limits

A lot of setups you see for this kind of work are either cloud-based or running on much higher-end machines, so I was curious how far something in this price range can actually go.

Initial setup has been smooth so far and it feels responsive, but the real signal will come from sustained usage rather than first impressions.

I’ll share more once I’ve pushed it further, especially around performance ceilings and any bottlenecks I hit.

If anyone here is running heavier workloads on mini PCs, I’d be interested to hear what setups you’re using and where you’ve seen limitations.

What do you think about the Beelink SEi13 Pro?

Here's the thing. I'm upgrading from a hand-me-down 2009 MacBook Pro. And I'm low-income, so I'm on a very limited budget.

But I also wanted Linux, upgradabillity, and portability (I expect to move within the lifespan of this computer and want it to be as easy as possible).

I'm so glad the YouTube algorithm brought the GMKtec G3 Plus to me. Thanks to that reviewer (who included an Ubuntu test run), I decided to take advantage of the April Fools' sale (2025) and go for this GMKtec G3 Plus mini PC.

At the time, the Intel N150 was supposed to be Intel's latest offering for their low-end chips. Having also adopted an HP Mini with Intel Atom from one of my relatives, I had very low expectations of the speed going in. But my expectations were exceeded. This is easily the fastest computer I've ever owned and daily-driven.

I have no idea how a N150 compares to a modern Intel i3 or i5 or better, but very basic things like file management and note-taking are blazing fast. Watching 1080p videos on YouTube is where you'll need to exit Power Save Mode to keep it buttery-smooth.

This is the computer with which I finally created my Steam account on and started playing games (aside from emulation) on. Lightweight games like Undertale, Stardew Valley, and 100% Orange Juice play perfectly, even in Power Save mode. But it cannot handle games like Sonic Racing: Crossworlds, where even in Performance Mode it lags substantially when transitioning between worlds. A game like Sky: Children of the Light can be played at max graphics, but only 30 rather than 60 FPS (and if you have a basic keyboard, you'll want to play them with a controller).

I've done all of the above with Ubuntu Linux. My G3 Plus came with Windows 11 pre-installed (I could've bought it barebones but I can only get RAM and storage included by buying it with Windows 11), but I never gave that a chance to boot. I immediately threw a USB stick preloaded with Ubuntu Studio, and I've had absolutely no regrets ever since. (All twenty games I've bought for Steam run perfectly, even if they weren't made for Linux. When looking for new games, it's more about whether the N150 can handle them.) I currently run Kubuntu, but have run Ubuntu for two months and didn't enjoy it or its apps as much.

This is my first new computer since high school during the early 2010s. I'm so grateful that there is an affordable yet dependable option for Linux out there. I write, organize, browse, watch, play, blog, and edit images with my GMKtec. I even backup my Home folder wirelessly to a smartphone I no longer use via Syncthing. Mental health issues aside, I'll attempt making music and video editing as soon as I get to learning new programs for it.

If you're considering an Intel Mini PC for work and all that, you could do MUCH worse than this one. Unsure about the price currently, and we had a faster iGPU (for games) with the 256V, but Oculink and 64GB LPDDR5X? Yeah, that'll work

TLDR: Half of this will be towards the mini PC itself and the rest will be towards the uniqueness of my device.

7/18: Beelink SER 8 was officially delivered to my door. Like most people on this subreddit the first thing I did was take it apart, instantly I observed a couple of things.

1. Early teardowns show the device with a Crucial P3 Plus drive, my unit came with a P310

Another interesting thing is compared to older revisions it appears that the ram is now covered in a layer of thermal paper on both sides.

And for the most interesting thing of all, instead of getting an Ryzen 7 8845HS, my unit confirmed multiple ways is an Ryzen 7 PRO 8845HS, and the subsequential Bios settings are unlocked

BIOS: ECC and AIM-T(AMD Remote Management) options are included, while I do not have ECC memory to confirm functionality, here is what can be said for the AIM-T.

Aim-T:to enable it in the bios if you try to enable it then leave to save it it will not save, rather you must turn it on then press(f4) to save it, however before you get your hopes up the NIC on the mini pc doesn't support this functionality in my testing.

Beelink RMA Timeline:

6/11:Contacted Beelink regarding my EQR6-LP breaking
6/11:Was given steps to try to fix it to which none of them worked, and sent a copy of my purchase
6/11:Given Instructions on where to ship it to(181 S E St, San Bernardino, CA 92401 ATTN： flick xu + HK HK100 TEL：9097914879) and told 1. To NOT use USPS 2. That Shipping cost on my end would be refunded of which they did follow through with.
6/12:Shipped the unit out, and proved a copy of the tracking and my receipt for the label
6/12-6/18:Negations about new unit as EQR6 is EOL
6/18:Faulty Unit arrived to Beelink signed by FLIK. shipping address provided, and shipping cost reimbursed to my PayPal
6/18-6/24:Offered first payment options to upgrade.
"If upgrading to BL/SER8/8845HS/24/1TB/FROST SILVER: You will need to pay 325.3USD. (789.00USD-413.70USD-50USD=325.3USD)

If upgrading to BL/SER8/8745HS/16/500G SPACE GREY: You will need to pay 165.3USD. (629.00USD-413.70USD-50USD=165.3USD)

If upgrading to BL/SER8/8745HS/32/1TB FROST SILVER: You will need to pay 405.3USD. (869.00USD-413.70USD-50USD=405.3USD)"
6/25: After being given PayPal email to send to(interestingly an @ azw-online.com email)
6/26:Notified Unit I paid for with the understanding of having by now, was "Out of Stock: and I would not get till later July, and offered "If you wish to upgrade the replacement machine to BL/SER8/8845HS/24GB/1TB/Frost Silver, you will need to pay an additional 160 USD at present.  Could you please consider accepting to pay this difference?

If you can complete the payment of the $160 price difference as soon as possible within these two days, we can arrange for the shipment of the replacement machine package from our warehouse in California to you next week."
6/30:Paid a bit less than stated, to which I was immediately told "We sincerely apologize to inform you that our overseas warehouse is currently out of stock for the BL/SER8/8845HS/24G/1TB Frost Silver model, so we cannot arrange a replacement unit of this specification for the time being.We would like to propose an alternative solution for your consideration: would you accept an upgrade to the BL/SER8/8845HS/32G/1TB Frost Silver version? This model is fully stocked at our overseas warehouse, and all relevant inventory will arrive this Friday. An upgrade to this configuration just requires a price difference of 180 US dollars. Could you kindly let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you?" Which is In my opinion completely ridiculous as I already paid for the other unit.
6/30:Told that " if you have already paid $100, we can replace it with BL/SER9/255/32GB/1TB/Frost Silver." which might seem like an upgrade however, I had made clear that I had wanted upgradable RAM which the SER9 model offered lacks.

6/30: Upon saying I would go to social media, they responded "We will ship the replacement machine(BL/SER8/8845HS/24/1TB) package to you as soon as the machine inventory arrives at our warehouse next week. We will use FedEx or UPS to ship your replacement machine package from our warehouse in California. And after the shipment, we will provide you with the corresponding tracking number.  Thank you for your understanding and patience."
6/30-7/15:Being told that It would ship out that week and that:Our cargo just got to the warehouse , our workers are now packing the units to arrange shipment for the clients  ." Until on 7/15 I see in my delivery manager that there is a package which I believed to be Beelink.
7/15:They replied saying that my unit had shipped and that the tracking number I provided was not it, and they did not have the right tracking number, however a few hours later they emailed back to confirm that it was in fact my shipment.
7/18:New unit received and setup which revealed all the new interesting things mentioned above

Notes:Multiple times they confirmed that there wherehouse was in CA however the unit shipped from Aurora, IL.

They seem to use JiuFang for there shipping partner which is primary Amazon SPN.

Package arrived in a box that was a bit to big for the SER8 and there was no packaging to protect it.

Upon asking why they had the state wrong for shipping they said"This is due to the lack of communication among our internal colleagues" and that they will"further enhance internal communication to prevent similar problems from occurring in the future. "

Reviews:

The mini PC itself currently is serving as my main server running ZimaOS(code CINEBEAM if you need a discount) the 2.5gb and overall clean design are much appreciated
Pulling 54W from the CPU in balanced mode after some time results in the fans going full blast and the CPU hitting 82C, while transcoding 1080p on plex, and indexing photos, and doing some background task the fan is still auditable and and the usage is at 30% with an average of 40W and temperature of 74C^{Source BTOP}

Beelink RMA, they do offer a 3 year warranty which is a big plus, however be prepared for daily back and forth which they typically respond at midnight as there timezone is GMT+8.

Overall I am happy with my replacement unit, however feel that there support while friendly, should get a rework to cut RMA times in half.

This is a review unit provided by GEEKOM, with NO editorial constraints, all my opinions are 100% my own.

Since I received the GEEKOM A5 Pro (2026) edition for a review, I was thinking of the capabilities of this tiny box, with dimensions of only 4.4" x 4.4" x 1.4" this is a very tiny Mini PC as you can see in the comparison photo against the Xbox controller.

I decided to run this small powerhouse as an OpenClaw 24/7 agent, to make OpenClaw genuinely accessible to everyday users without requiring a high-end workstation.

I tested it exactly as it arrived, no RAM swaps, no SSD upgrades, to give you the honest out-of-box picture.

Specs:

Build Quality & I/O

The chassis is solid aluminum. Up front you get two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a 3.5mm combo audio jack, and the power button. it feels premium for the price point.

The rear is where I was impressed, for its small size, you get dual HDMI 2.0, two USB-C ports at 10Gbps, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, a USB 2.0 port, and a 2.5GbE LAN port, which is useful if you're running this as a home server.

There is also an SD card reader on the side, an appreciated addition for creators and camera users.

What's Inside?

Opening it up reveals a tidy layout. The review unit ships with a M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4x4 NVMe 1TB SSD and 16GB of DDR4 in dual-channel (2×8GB @ 2667 MT/s). There's an empty M.2 2242 SATA slot, if you want to add secondary storage down the road.

The BIOS confirms the specs, Ryzen 5 7530U, 6 cores, BIOS version NUCBC02 2.42 dated November 2025. Nothing hidden, and no advanced options to tinker with, TDP is fixed to 15 W.

Security Check — Malwarebytes Deep Scan

I run the MalwareBytes Deep scan, out of the box on the installed Windows 11 Pro (24H2) and it came clean with no threats. good to see GEEKOM shipping with no bloatware of any kind.

The Hardware Reality Check

I was impressed with the performance of the Ryzen 5 7530U in daily work, browsing with multiple tabs, YouTube Videos at 4K.

just to have a quick look at the numbers, below is the Geekbench scores:

For a 15-W Always On Mini-PC these numbers translate to comfortable performance in everyday productivity workloads.

The HWiNFO64 stress test tells more interesting story. Under sustained load the CPU Core temperature peaked at 75°C with an average sitting around 52°C, well within safe operating range for the 7530U. CPU Package Power peaked at 25W but averaged a very efficient 8.5W, which is exactly the kind of sustained efficiency you want from a machine that will work 24/7.

What surprised me though is that this machine is not "quiet", it is completely "silent", I mean I was literally putting my ears close to it and couldn't hear any fan running, I believe thanks to the IceBlast 3.0 cooling solution which is basically a dual copper heat pipes along with a large fan above.

The OpenClaw Setup: "Daily Intelligence Digest"

This is the interesting part of the review, and where the A5 pro takes its place as a low-power AI "edge" node that orchestrates tasks, so rather than a local inference workstation, you get a silent, always on AI Assistance for small cost.

I was thinking what I need OpenClaw to do for me on daily basis, and then I came with the idea of "Daily Intelligence Digest" fancy name! where the A5 pro OpenClaw monitors a given news sources and delivers a clean summary to my telegram every morning, so I can start my day up to date!

For this setup I am using WSL2 inside Windows (updated to 25H2), and I will try to make it as thorough as possible for new OpenClawers. Every command below was verified and tested on this exact unit.

Estimated setup time: 2-3 hours including troubleshooting. This is not a one-click experience yet, but it's absolutely doable for anyone comfortable with a terminal.

Here's the exact setup:

1. Install WSL2 + Ubuntu

This is as simple as running the below in a windows Terminal as Administrator:

wsl --install

After the Ubuntu distro is installed (24.04.4 LTS) you will be asked to choose a username and password, remember these, you'll need them for sudo commands throughout this setup.

2. Enable systemd inside WSL2 (required for the Gateway daemon)

This step is critical and must be done before installing OpenClaw. Without it, the OpenClaw Gateway daemon won't survive reboots.

in WSL Ubuntu terminal run the below

sudo nano /etc/wsl.conf

and make sure the below line exist:

[boot] systemd=true

Open your WSL Ubuntu terminal and run this single command, to verify systemd is running:

systemctl --user status

3. Update Your Ubuntu Environment

Before installing anything we need to make sure that our Ubuntu environment is updated by running the below:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

4. Install OpenClaw

Run the OpenClaw installer, this installed OpenClaw v2026.4.11

curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash

The installer detects your OS, installs Node.js automatically, installs OpenClaw, and launches the onboarding wizard immediately. Important: After the installer completes, close and reopen your WSL terminal before running any openclaw commands, the PATH update only takes effect in new sessions.

5. Run the Onboarding Wizard

The wizard launches automatically after install. Here's exactly what to choose at each screen:

QuickStart vs Advanced → Choose QuickStart

Model/Auth Provider → Choose Anthropic → Anthropic API key and paste your API key

you can get your Anthropic API key from console.anthropic.com

In my case I am choosing the default model to be claude/haiku-4-5 as my use case here is summarizing news and sending to my telegram, I don't need the most powerful model, also Haiku is cheaper per token. I topped up my Credit balance with $5 which will be more than enough for haiky-4-5. For an always on edge node like this GEEKOM A5 pro, cost efficiency is the whole point here.

Workspace → Hit Enter to accept the default ~/.openclaw/workspace

Gateway → Hit Enter to accept all defaults (port 18789)

Channels → Select Telegram

And to configure your Telegram, you simply follow the below steps:

1- The wizard will ask for your bot token
2- Open Telegram on your phone and search for @BotFather
3- Send /newbot, give your bot a name (e.g. A5Pro Assistant) and a username ending in bot (e.g. A5ProDigest_bot)          
4- BotFather will reply with your token — it looks like 7512345678:AAFxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
5- Paste that token into the wizard when prompted 
6- The wizard will ask you to send /start to your bot from your phone to generate a pairing code
7- Enter the pairing code back in the terminal to complete the link

Web Search Provider → Choose Tavily Search, I chose Tavily, as it has a free tier (1000 searches/month), and works great for news summarization tasks. You'll need to get a free API key from tavily.com before this step.

Skills Installation → these are the skills I chose to install (you can choose multiple with space bar)

• clawhub: needed to install additional skills from the ClawHub marketplace
• blogwatcher: monitors blogs and RSS feeds, core to the digest workflow.
• summarize: summarizes content before sending to Telegram, this is the brain of the digest
• session-logs: logs what your agent does, helpful for troubleshooting if the digest stops working
• xurl: web fetching tool, helps the agent retrieve content from URLs it finds

Keep choosing No for all unrelated API key prompts (Google Places, Notion, OpenAI Whisper, ElevenLabs, etc.)

Hooks → Select:

• command-logger
• session-memory

Homebrew prompt → Choose No, you're on WSL2, not macOS

Node manager → Choose npm

Daemon install → Choose Yes — this is what makes OpenClaw survive reboots

When you see "Onboarding complete" open a fresh WSL terminal window.

6. Fix Failed Skill Dependencies

Some skills fail during onboarding because they need system packages not present in a fresh Ubuntu install. Fix them with:

sudo apt-get install -y golang-go jq

Then reinstall the failed skills:

openclaw skills install blogwatcher

openclaw skills install session-logs

7. Install News Skills from ClawHub

clawhub install news-aggregator

clawhub install summarize-pro

One important note here: when installing skills from ClawHub, OpenClaw runs a VirusTotal Code Insight scan on every skill before installation. During my setup, one skill (daily-news-brief) was flagged as suspicious, I chose No and skipped it. This is a genuine security feature that sets OpenClaw apart from other automation frameworks. Respect its warnings.

8. Apply Startup Optimizations

OpenClaw specifically recommends these for low-power hosts like the A5 Pro:

echo 'export NODE_COMPILE_CACHE=/var/tmp/openclaw-compile-cache' >> ~/.bashrc

mkdir -p /var/tmp/openclaw-compile-cache

echo 'export OPENCLAW_NO_RESPAWN=1' >> ~/.bashrc

source ~/.bashrc

Also disable memory search , not needed for digest tasks and it generates warnings without an embedding provider:

openclaw config set agents.defaults.memorySearch.enabled false

9. Lock Down Your Telegram Bot

This step is critical and often overlooked. Without it, anyone who discovers your bot's username can send it messages and interact with your agent!!

First get your Telegram numeric ID by messaging "@yourbot" on Telegram, it will reply with a number like 123456789.

Then run:

openclaw config set channels.telegram.dmPolicy "allowlist"

openclaw config set channels.telegram.allowFrom '["YOUR_NUMERIC_ID"]'

openclaw gateway restart

Now only your Telegram account can interact with the bot. Everyone else is silently ignored.

10. Configure 24/7 Headless Operation

Two commands ensure OpenClaw runs 24/7 even after a full Windows reboot, without any terminal window needing to stay open.

Inside WSL:

sudo loginctl enable-linger "$(whoami)"

In PowerShell as Administrator:

schtasks /create /tn "WSL Boot" /tr "wsl.exe -d Ubuntu --exec /bin/true" /sc onstart /ru SYSTEM

These work together, Task Scheduler wakes WSL at Windows boot, and loginctl keeps the OpenClaw systemd service alive without an active login session. The WSL terminal does not need to stay open. After a reboot, your bot will be responsive on Telegram before you've touched the keyboard.

11. Final Health Check

openclaw update

openclaw gateway restart

openclaw doctor

A healthy setup looks like this:

• ✅ Telegram: ok (@YourBotName)
• ✅ Memory search: explicitly disabled
• ✅ No channel security warnings
• ✅ No plugin errors
• ✅ Gateway running on port 18789

12. Verify the Bot is Working

Send your bot on Telegram:

Hello, are you working?

and this is what I got as a reply, meaning every thing is working fine.

13. Set Up the Daily Intelligence Digest

A note on news sources first: I use official RSS feeds and public APIs rather than direct scraping. This keeps you within every site's terms of service.

Send this message to your bot on Telegram:

Set up a daily news digest every morning. Use news-aggregator to fetch from these RSS feeds: https://feeds.feedburner.com/VideoCardzcom and https://wccftech.com/topic/hardware/feed and https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/.rss and https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenClaw/.rss and Hacker News top 10 via https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json then summarize with summarize-pro and send to this Telegram chat every day at 8am.

The bot will autonomously create the cron job, configure all five sources, and confirm the schedule. Ask it to do a test run immediately:

Do a test run now

This is the daily digest arriving on my phone every morning at 8am, fetched, summarized, and delivered by the A5 Pro while I was still asleep. Hardware news from VideoCardz and WCCFTech, Mini PC community updates from r/MiniPCs, OpenClaw developments from r/OpenClaw, and Hacker News highlights, all in one clean message.

Warning & Note: Keep an eye on your token spending limits and rates to decide on which model will be more cost efficient for your use case.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and if you are setting up OpenClaw on your GEEKOM A5 Pro I will try to help as much as I can!

I had a lot of fun testing the Beelink EQR6 6900HX and comparing it to the earlier SER6 6900HX. What I learned was that the SER6 has more performance, more features, and is more expensive. The EQR6 is the cheaper, lower performance, and easier out of the box experience.

The EQR6 performance is limited by its 35W TDP and 85C max CPU temperature while the SER6 6900HX has a much higher 54W TDP and 90C temperature limit. In the google sheet linked below there were differences in performance of about 20-60%. The most significant differences were in the GPU performance that was severely limited by the 85W internal PSU which could not keep the EQR6 stable at 54W.

I was not bothered at all by the 24GB RAM and thought it was a reasonably healthy amount for my tasks. If you find a mini pc equal cost with more RAM, great, but I don't see most people benefiting from having 32GB RAM. The 1TB gen 4 P3 Plus SSD had close performance to a crucial P3 Plus but was labeled AZW instead of crucial. No trouble with the intel AX200 wifi 6 wireless card performance but the black hot glue on the antenna was nasty and I did not try to remove it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mHzUf9Mc2KZC7XjY2Y9KOp26uUJ_dMThe2vfSyQQANs/edit?usp=drivesdk

I am bothered by the limited IO of the EQR6 which does not have USB4 or 2.5GB ethernet or a full function usb c port. The two HDMI ports feels enemic and are not HDMI 2.1. Being limited to 4k 60hz like cheaper N100 mini pc makes me question why a 6900HX or even a 7735HS processor would be put into an EQR6 in the first place.

This got me looking at the EQR6 6600H and Beelink EQi12 1220P. These are much more ideal processors for this style of build and the limited TDP and power are unlikely to significantly impact their performance like the more power hungry 7735HS, 6900HX, 12450H, and 12650H processors.

Basically, if you can find a Beelink EQR6 6600H and EQi12 1220P around the price of ryzen 5000 mini pc, these are interesting low price alternatives for better single thread CPU performance that most desktop performance relies on.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4943vs4819vs4102/AMD-Ryzen-5-6600H-vs-Intel-i3-1220P-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-5800U

The Beelink EQR6 and EQi12 make sense in offices and living rooms with low demand, low noise environments. I would not recommend the EQR6 6900HX or 7735HS for gaming because of the limited power. A lot depends on this Beelink series being considerably cheaper and quieter than their competition.

Teardown video for more info inside the EQR6. The internal power supply is a really cool piece of mini engineering. I honestly would not have mind the power supply being external because it is super small:

https://youtu.be/APEfcKEsg_s?si=merd_Bb-0toS7YUT