MINISFORUM Mini Pc Intel Core I5-8259U Triple Output Easy-upgrade Win10 Pro System Is Pre-installed

Minisforum U820/U850 are minis especially designed for home entertainment, daily tasks, and even light duty work such as content creation. Adopting the latest 8th gen Intel Core ™ i5 8279U processor,he U850 is an aggressively generalist mini-PC, and it can tackle most roles—its dual network interfaces make it a good candidate for a high-performance router, and its combination of tons of USB ports, HDMI and DisplayPort video out, and surprisingly fast storage make it an excellent little desktop PC.The only role the U850 might play that we'd advise some caution with is home theater PC (HTPC)—although it's powerful enough to do the job, its fan noise when under load is loud enough that it might annoy the sorts of people who tend to want a small, unobtrusive HTPC in the first place.

The review unit we received was a U850 with the Comet Lake i5-10210U CPU. It matches the specs above except for storage, which is a 256GB Kingston Design-In NVMe SSD. The smaller SSD isn't "cheating" on Minisforum's part, by the way—it's a configurable option on the order page, which knocks $40 off the otherwise $699 (US) purchase price.

The easiest way to describe the U850 is "midgrade laptop in a cube form factor," so—along with the similarly designed but much less powerful Seeed Odyssey—that's just what we compared it to in our benchmark tests.

With the i5-10210U's wimpy UHD 630 graphics, you shouldn't expect to do any gaming on the U850—but it holds its own on video playback and general CPU related tasks. In terms of performance, it also wipes the floor all the way around with the Seeed Odyssey mini-PC.