Decent discount on a cracking CPU. Normal price has hovered around the ~$700 mark.
Remember no fan included with these ones so you have to BYO. For under $60 the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 (normal or mini if you have space contraints) is a super good value.
CamelCamelCamel.
Is this an all-in-one MOBO and CPU combo? That would make a fantasist, albeit overpowered NAS/media server.
It is indeed
Wayyyy overkill for a media server. It has a full size PCI x16 slot - this is more for a minimal compromise gaming PC. You lose overclocking capabilities, but with a full PCI slot and a very beefy CPU it's very capable.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008404205748.html this is more for media servers / NAS. CPU isn't great, but the hardware transcoding is fast enough to keep up usually so CPU usage is minimal. There's plenty of different models available btw, some with a 10Gbit NIC instead but I can't find it currently.
Thanks. The N100 MOBOs are very cool. It's so cheap now to build a NAS box that is reasonably functional. I'm currently using an i7 6700 which is overkill but its old hardware that I had on hand.
I actually… don't really know how to compare these CPUs in a real life scenario given they are quite different products. I think it probably depends on your specific needs. Though what you've linked is a great bit of kit, especially for the price.
They actually benchmark quite closely surprisingly (within 10%), but you wouldn't be able to overclock it where this one would overclock quite heavily so that would likely drag it out to ~20%+ difference with a good cooler.
AMD hasn't done that well since the later 7000 series tbh - the improvements are very minor. They're better, but not by much. They seem more focused on laptops and "AI" now.
They actually benchmark quite closely surprisingly (within 10%),
That would depend on use case, games for example could see a much bigger gap since it looks like that can't use fast RAM.
Don't worry about the benchmarks. 7945hx is a beast in this minisforum motherboard. I recently built one with 32gb ram. I could not justify the over priced CPUs that amd/retailers are selling. I sold my old 5900x system for $1000 and pretty much built the new one for about $1200
this uses laptop ram tho so unless you decide to stick with this for long time and not ever going back to desktop MB it limits reusing the ram for future upgrades
Yeah also true, I’m looking to stick to ITX though for a while and a lot of them use SODIMM
Have been eyeing this, but seeing people say they basically don't provide any support is a bit worrying. Would be a lot more tempting if you could easily swap out the cooler.
Amazon provides great support - I had on DoA and Amazon immediately refunded before I even returned it so I could order a replacement straight away for faster delivery.
Driver wise they just provide a zip with everything you need, no issues there. Couldn't find a manual online and none is included, but it's pretty straight forward. Only difficult part is getting the fan mount screws in without a magnetic screwdriver - the screws are tiny (fan mount mounts to heat sink, then a 120mm to the mount). Couldn't find my magnetic one so took me a good 15 minutes of dropping screws into the heatsink constantly.
I wouldn't expect over 1-2 years warranty though without a consumer law claim - Amazon only typically provides around a year.
It's advertised as 3 year warranty, so consumer law should cover it for at least that time frame.
Sorry, I meant support in the way of BIOS updates.
Drivers I would normally go straight to the source, so doesn't really matter what Minisforum do, but you're stuck with them for microcode updates for the actual CPU.
Amazon should be good for the advertised warranty period, as you say, our laws trump whatever policies they have in place. And they've always been good to me, and vastly superior to after sales support from any of the PC shops I've dealt with.
How are you finding the system with regards to noise? Heatsink looks a bit small for desktop standards but it is a mobile chip. Do you find the fan ramps up and down a lot?
@TheContact: Oh - no yeah the BIOS is trash, nothing to even update lol
Literally no features in it beyond version information and what-not.
Don't buy direct from Minisforum.
I have a 2+ month rma saga ongoing
Yeah I went via Amazon, no way I would go via them directly.
Go to your card company, lol, especially if it's already returned. American companies just do not honor consumer law these days.
Can't overclock, but it's PBO can be dialed in to the point that it sits right up against the imposed limits- Short loads of 5 seconds and under will even push past the 100w cap.
Only gripe I've had with mine, is GPU overclocking- Any attempt in overclocking (even OC tune) results in networking completely dying.
Not just the on board ethernet either, USB ethernet and WIFI adapters will get detected by Windows and Linux, but fail to initiate.
This is a good CPU, nearly as fast as a base spec Mac Mini M4 Pro but that costs $2000 with edu pricing. Specced up similar to the Mac Mini M4 Pro with a cheap MB, 24GB Ram and a $400 Intel video card, sub $100 power supply and case and you could build a Mac Mini M4 Pro killer for sub $1300.
https://www.amazon.com.au/MINISFORUM-Motherboard-Onboard-PCI…
~10% slower single threaded speeds but includes an MB, can't overclock it though.