Minisforum HM80; A Wee AMD Powered System

Much Smaller Than A Breadbox And Under $1000

If you are looking for a system that takes up only slightly more space than four slices of bread, and prefer an AMD powered system to an Intel NUC or similar then check out the MINISFORUM HM80.  It is, in more official measurements, 150 x 150 x 56mm (5.9 x 5.9 x 2.2″) and 500g (1lb) in size but is still capable of outputting 4K video at 60Hz.

Inside you will find AMD’s Ryzen 7 4800U running at up to 4.2GHz, with it’s 8 GPU cores able to hit the full 1750MHz even in such a tiny space.  Currently, thanks to a $100 early bird discount for $760 you will also get 16GB of DDR4-3200 and a 256GB NVMe SSD, or for $830 you can double your RAM to 16GB.  The connectivity options include AX WIFI, Bluetooth, 8 USB3 ports including two USB-C, HDMI, DisplayPort, audio and not one, but two 2.5 Gigabit/s ethernet ports.  There is even room for a pair of 2.5″ drives to be installed on the bottom if the storage option feel a little cramped.

The Guru of 3D were a little disappointed in the DIMMs used in the MINISFORUM HM80, while DDR4-3200 is very common in AMD systems these particular modules are CL 22 which is much slower than you usually see on DIMMs of this frequency.  Then again, the TimeSpy results don’t suffer too much from if you aren’t already considering swapping in some faster RAM. 

Overall this wee system competes with laptops that have similar setups, making this review well worth the time it takes to read.