Minisforum Unveils UM780 XTX Mini-PC: Most Powerful Design Yet With 70W Ryzen 7 7840HS & Tested With RTX 3080 Using OCULINK

wccftech.com:

Minisforum has unveiled its most powerful Mini PC to date, the UM780 XTX, which features up to a 70W AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS APU.

Regarding product hierarchy, the Minisforum UM780 XTX falls right below the higher-end UM790 XTX, which we have covered extensively. So what makes this mini-PC special than the others? Well Minisforum's "XTX" units feature support for an Oculink port, which essentially uses PCIe lanes of the CPU and extends it in the form of a standalone connector on the I/O. PCIe lanes deliver higher bandwidth and transfer speeds versus a Thunderbolt 4 port so it can lead to better performance when running a discrete graphics card.

Minisforum has tested the UM780 XTX with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card by connecting it through the Oculink port. Based on the official data released by the company, the mini-PC was able to squeeze out a graphics score of 17,494 points in 3DMark Time Spy which is comparable to the standard desktop variant running inside a PC (17,653 points).

While Minisforum didn't reveal any sort of gaming benchmarks, nevertheless it is quite interesting to see the results either way, given that the adoption of Oculink ports in the industry hasn't been that widespread besides a few handheld consoles and Mini PCs.

If we talk about the "feasibility" of connecting an external GPU through the port, it is another debate, but for a conclusive statement, it all depends on how the consumers want to work with their device. Other than that, the Minisforum XTX series will be available in AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS "UM790 XTX" and AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS "UM780 XTX" flavors. The Phoenix Mini PCs will also come in the standard UM790 Pro and UM780 Pro flavors.

All Minisforum Mini PCs with AMD Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" APUs come