Minisforum HM80

The MiniPC HM80 from Minisforum joins the rather closed club of minimachines running Ryzen 7 4800U. A club where we find the PN50 from Asus, the ASRock Mars 4000U, the ASRock 4×4 Box-4000 and the Gigabyte Brix S. Brands that have chosen the mobile chip in an ultra-compact sedentary case for its excellent performance / dissipation ratio.

With 15 watts of TDP, the Ryzen 7 4800U still offers 8 cores and 16 threads associated with 12 MB of cache and a Vega 8 circuit at 1750 MHz. A processor with very solid skills on all stations and that works very impressively within this type of small machine. For the rest, the Minisforum HM80 is a rework of the HM50 of the brand which employed a Ryzen 5 4500U.

It must be said that the chips have the same thermal “footprint”, the change of chip is not necessarily the most complicated for the brand that can take all its hardware to adapt to this evolution of the processor. We find the same chassis of 14.9 cm on a side and 5.55 cm thick, which houses two SoDIMM DDR4 slots that can grow to 64 GB of RAM. Storage is entrusted to a PCIe M.2 2280 NVMe SSD and a dual 2.5″ SATA slot will allow for up to 2 additional storage solutions.

These additions are done in a fairly classic way by unhooking the bottom of the device. The upper part being occupied by the dissipation and ventilation system of the device. The original system used by the brand in its more entry-level models was not retained, probably for safety reasons.

The connectivity does not move either with separate 3.5 mm jacks on the front panel, two USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A ports and a USB 3.1 Type-C port with video signal support.

The rear side houses four USB 3.0 ports, two RJ45 Ethernet ports, one Gigabit and one 2.5 Gigabit. DisplayPort and HDMI video outputs will allow to drive up to 3 ultraHD displays simultaneously. Still no card reader or Thunderbolt port, the platform does not allow the use of the second easily while the space is missing for the first. The sides of the device are indeed dedicated to air circulation. The motherboard of the Minisforum HM80 is identical to that of the HM50, so we find the same serial pinout present on the PCB but not used by default.

Available in July, the device will come with its power supply, HDMI and USB Type-C cables and a VESA adapter to easily position it on the back of a display. The current price is $759 for the 16/256GB version and increases to $829 for a 32/256GB version.