Minisforum X500

Chinese manufacturer Minisforum continues to build up its offer of compact computers, mini-PCs that stand out for their ability to be installed anywhere in the office, desk or living room for home theater, but offering a level of performance and connectivity suitable for most tasks.

The Minisforum EliteMini X500 uses the Ryzen 7 5700G processor as its hardware engine. It is one of AMD’s new generation APUs (codenamed ‘Cezanne’), which, while retaining the general advantages of the ZEN 3 architecture such as 7-nanometer manufacturing processes, offers increased operating frequencies, significantly improved IPC, more cache memory and greater graphics performance thanks to the integrated Vega series.

As you will see from its specifications, it is an ideal CPU for a mini-PC with good performance, integrated but competent GPU and moderate power consumption:

• 8-core, 16-thread CPU
• Operating frequencies of 3.8 GHz and maximum 4.6 GHz in turbo mode
• 8-core Vega iGPU
• Operating frequency at 2.0 GHz
• Maximum TDP of 65 watts

The Minisforum EliteMini X500 will not be much different in performance from the HX90 model introduced last month, with the Ryzen 9 5900HX notebook processor. The 5000G series is more optimized for desktops and will offer the level of the previous one, dual-channel DDR4-3200 MHz memory and several possibilities for storage, a PCIe M.2 2280 SSD and SATA bays for connecting SSDs or 2.5-inch hard disks.

Its connectivity will be up to the standards expected of a modern mini-computer. An additional Intel AX200 module will provide support for Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless connections, while for LAN we will have a Gigabit Ethernet. It will offer a variety of USB 3.0 Type A ports, USB-C, audio outputs and those corresponding to digital video, HDMI and Display Port that will feed content to up to four 4K monitors.

We assume it will ship with Windows 10 preinstalled, although Minisforum says that other platforms such as Linux and in particular Ubuntu may be employed. No pricing has been provided. To give you an idea, the recent HX90 with 16 GB RAM + 256 GB SSD is priced at $799. The Minisforum EliteMini X500 should offer more economical configurations with 8GB of RAM and also barebone formats for the user to install components such as memory, storage or operating system.