Minisforum Venus UM790 Pro review
In the last six years, Shenzen-based Minisforum has become a prolific producer of mini PCs. A glance at the company's webstore reveals a steady succession of tidy and well-specced boxes aimed at home and business users, sporting the best of AMD and Intel's mobile APU armoury.
The lineup features a few gaming-focused units with somewhat spicier designs, but the Venus UM790 Pro isn't necessarily one of these. Housed in a clean, purple-tinged aluminium chassis, it's attractive in a minimalist way, but we're interested in its gaming potential as it represents an affordable way to access the Ryzen 9 7940HS and Radeon 780M CPU/iGPU double-act. Like the Ryzen 7 7840HS, which is a much more common sight in mini-PCs and gaming laptops, this SoC APU is built on the same 4nm Zen 4 architecture as AMD's desktop 7000-series CPUs. It's also the chip of choice for recent Razer Blade 14s laptops, among other premium-price crotch-cookers, and its inclusion in such machines tells us something of its capabilities.
It's worth pausing a moment to note the difference between the Ryzen 7 7840HS and the Ryzen 9 7940HS. In desktop terms, jumping from a Ryzen 7 to a Ryzen 9 bags you more CPU cores and higher clock speeds. The Ryzen 7 7700X has eight cores running at 4.5 GHz — 5.4 GHz for instance, while the Ryzen 9 7900X has 12 cores at 4.7 GHz — 5.6 GHz.
The Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 9 7940HS APUs, however, have the same eight multithreading cores, but the 7940HS gets a 200 MHz bump in base speed, a 100 MHz bump in turbo, and a 100 MHz bump to its Radeon 780M turbo speed. That's it! No bonus cores. On the spec-sheets and in practice then, they're virtually identical. Which begs the question, why are they named as they are?
APU: AMD Ryzen 9 7840HS
iGPU: Radeon 780M
Memory: 0GB/32GB/64GB DDR5-5600MHz
Storage: 0TB/1TB M.2 SSD
Wireless: WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
I/O: 2x USB 4/Thunderbolt, 3.5mm audio, 4x USB 2.3, 2.5G LAN, 2x HDMI 2.1
Price: $429 | £379 (barebones)
Regardless of such noodling,
Read more on pcgamer.com
