4-month MiniPC review: Minisforum AI370, AMD HX 370 CPU
A fast and tiny machine, but mired by support and quality issues, and not suitable for AI
At the end of last year I started looking for a new daily workhouse computer. I didn’t want another laptop because it just seems a waste of technology if it’s going to be powered all the time, and I didn’t want another “normal” desktop (with a tower case) because of its bulkiness.
I was always aware there was a “MiniPC” category, but this time I spent the effort to actually study what’s being offered. And it’s surprisingly good. The offers range from ultra-small-and-cheap, through interesting special-purpose variations, to high-end devices. Form factors vary a lot. So do the prices - from $200 to $2000.
For most of the devices, it’s like Chinese PCB manufacturers used their expertise to adapt laptop motherboard designs into desired form factors and built standalone computers out of them. There are some risks, though:
Stability / reputation - no different than in other industries, there are manufactures that have a better reputation that others when it comes to product quality. Some manufacturers tend to cut corners more than others, resulting in devices that, e.g. can’t be upgraded with newer versions of drivers (happened in my case).
Customer support - tied to reputation, many of the most popular MiniPC brands unfortunately have next to no customer support. The r/MiniPCs subreddit sometimes contains more complaints than regular discussions.
Cooling / heat dissipation / FAN and power management - tied to overall quality, some manufacturers do the absolute minimum for cooling, which might lead to instability in the device long-term operation. Unfortunately, this is per-model, and a manufacturer which might have designed a great cooling system for one model, might completely miss the mark on another.
There’s a big list of MiniPCs and their manufacturers maintained by a Redditor which can be used to get information about possible issues.
Now, onto my device. I’ve picked the Minisforum EliteMini AI370 because the company was among the ones with a good reputation, and because it was one of the first devices with the HX 370 CPU. Go check those web pages for full specs.
The good
For its size, it’s a hugely overpowered machine! This is the single most powerful machine I’ve ever used as a personal computer. This is all due to the AMD HX 370 CPU, and the CPU is the reason I bought the device. It is supposed to be a laptop-class CPU, but it’s faster than most of the latest Intel i9 laptop CPUs. That CPU is a beast even compared to desktop CPUs that require twice as much power!
At the time I bought it, it only came with 32 GB RAM, which might be a bit underwhelming for this CPU, but it’s definitely usable.
Overall, I’m very happy with the performance and form factor of the device. It makes me smile when I look at just sitting there on my desk, doing some impressive workloads.
The integrated GPU was the fastest on the market when the CPU was released, sometimes up to 5x faster than the Intel Iris line. But this means it’s still relatively slow, close to NVIDIA GTX 1070. By default, 8 GB of RAM is reserved for the integrated GPU - meaning it’s inaccessible to Windows & apps. Luckily, this can be reduced in the AMD Adrenaline software, and benchmarkers have measured no serious performance reduction from reducing the amount of reserved RAM, because the GPU drivers will take as much of memory as needed dynamically anyway.
Cooling is adequate. I didn’t see any dangerous temperatures yet.
The bad
I bought the device in the early days of December, when it was at the end of its pre-sale cycle. I bought it from the German Minisforum site, and it was supposed to be shipped early January. It finally arrived at the end of January, after I contacted the customer support. That’s almost 2 months after I bought it.
After I got it, I’ve tried to access advanced BIOS settings, to see what I can do with memory timings, etc. - but the device uses a graphical BIOS, with all the advanced settings hidden. I’ve contacted Minisforum support again, asking if there’s a way to access advanced BIOS settings, but they didn’t respond.
The device is already out of stock. This means the manufacturer most probably did just one production run of the device, without the intent to produce it or support it for a long time. Even though I bought the device from a .de web shop, I doubt the manufacturer will honour the legally required 2-year EU warranty.
The mighty APU (which was the main reason I bought it) has an issue. The official name of the APU contains the letters “AI” but I’ve studiously refrained from mentioning it in this review. Its hardware includes a NPU - a “neural processing unit” and it was one of the reasons I wanted it. But, it turns out that the device is a bit of a dud as far as AI workloads are concerned because:
The NPU isn’t usable for general LLM inference, and at the time of this writing isn’t supported by AMD’s “ROCM” drivers (which are like CUDA for AMD). Only special software patched or maintained by AMD can make use of the NPU, but not for any major performance gains.
The “50 TOPS” advertised performance for the NPU is tiny compared to about 1300 TOPS for NVIDIA 4090.
Memory bandwidth effectively limits AI workloads to small models (<= 14 B q4 models). AIDA64 memory benchmark achieved less than 90 GB/s. As memory bandwidth is crucial for LLM inference (NVIDIA RT 4090 gets to around 1000 GB/s, Apple M4 Max up to about 500 GB/s), and the limit is in the CPU’s memory controller, HX 370 isn’t really suitable for AI work.
Overall, it looks like HX 370, “Strix Point”, was just AMD’s early attempt at AI hardware, a stepping stone to the “AI Max” series, “Strix Halo” which should be capable for at least double the memory bandwidth. Edit: Unfortunately, Strix Halo also isn’t good enough for AI — probably the memory bandwidth just isn’t good enough yet.
Since AI work isn’t really possible on this device, the lack of Oculink for an external GPU is a downside.
The ugly
The problem described in this section has actually been solved by the manufacturer - the BIOS update v2.01 resolves the issue of the AMD drivers bricking Windows. The system is 100% stable now.
After I got the machine, I’ve updated the BIOS, Windows and all the required drivers. This has lead to a system that hung about once a week - not with a blue screen, but just with a complete hang. There was video corruption that made me suspect the graphics driver.
The crashes disappointed me, but I thought they will eventually go away with more recent GPU drivers. Until, one day in March, I installed the most recent version of AMD Adrenaline drivers and they bricked my Windows.
I can get out of most Windows-crashing issues with the help of the pre-boot environment and Windows Safe Mode, but this one just persisted and after a couple of days I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch, wiping the storage drive, from a freshly made bootable USB drive. I was worried that the new installation wouldn’t have vendor-specific drivers but it turns out it’s not an issue - I’m still running this reinstall and it’s absolutely solid.
Learning from the previous mistake, I tried once more to install AMD’s latest GPU drivers, but only after I made a Windows restore point specifically for this experiment. This resulted in exactly the same bricked-Windows problem like before, but this time I was able to restore from the restore point, undoing the driver install.
While my Windows installation is currently very stable, now I’m basically afraid to install new AMD drivers - since I’m actively using the device as my daily Windows machine. I’ll probably attempt to install new drivers once more when (and if) AMD adds ROCM support for this CPU.
Forum discussions lead me to believe the driver problem might be the manufacturer's fault - maybe they just did the bare minimum design that happens to work with only 1 particular version of the driver by accident. I hope it's not so.
Verdict
I like the device. I’m using the device. But I’m a bit wary if it will still be operational in 2 years time; the lack of support is the only real reason I hesitate to recommend it.
I’m sold on the form factor however. Whatever happens, I think my next desktop-like machine will also be a MiniPC.
Edit: Actually, once the BIOS issue was resolved, Minisforum continued to produce and sell this model (on their international site), and after 6 months of everyday use, I’m pretty pleased with it.