Minisforum U850—solid hardware and easy upgrades in a little box
The U850 comes with VESA hardware-mounting bracket, HDMI and DisplayPort cables, a USB-C charger, and a slim manual. [credit: Jim Salter ]
Earlier this month, we teased the announcement of a new model of mini-PC from specialty vendor Minisforum. Today, we're taking a look at the results of some hands-on testing of the Minisforum U850, configured with a Comet Lake i5 CPU, 16GiB RAM, and a 256GB Kingston NVMe SSD.
The 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.
| Specs at a glance: U820 / U850 | |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel i5-8249U (U820) Intel i5-10210U (U850) |
| OS | Windows 10 Pro (pre-installed) / Linux supported |
| RAM | 16GiB DDR4 (2x 8GiB SODIMM) |
| GPU | Intel Iris+ 655 (U820) Intel UHD 630 (U850) |
| Wi-Fi | M.2 Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6, dual-band + BlueTooth 5.1 |
| SSD | M.2 2280 512GB NVMe SSD |
| Connectivity |
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| Price as specified | $639 (U820) / $699 (U850) |
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.
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