Expected for a few months, the new compact desktop Minisforum B550 Mini has officially made its debut on the market, albeit in pre-order, with AMD processors and support for a full-sized external dedicated card through the supplied dock.
After inaugurating the year with the UM350 miniPC, the Chinese brand Minisforum has started pre-orders for a new compact computer, the Minisforum B550, which can also be attached behind a monitor, thanks to the VESA attachment contained in the purchase package (also including of an HDMI cable, a SATA cable, a hard case and a 19V power supply), which should be shipped by the end of May.
The Minisforum B550 Mini measures 20.859 x 24.088 x 12.813 cm, limiting the weight to 1.155 kg. Inside its “box” frame, with several air slots (in the context of a heat dissipation system that also involves the use of liquid metal) diagonalized on the roof, the manufacturer has provided the AMD motherboard B550 which will allow you to choose between a Ryzen 7 4700G processor, whose operating clock ranges from 3.6 GHz base to 4.4 Ghz of the Boost and, again in AMD share, a Ryzen 7 5700G, a more performing choice since in this case the operating frequency starts from 3.8 GHz to get in Boost to 4.6 GHz.
If desired, thanks to the presence of the AM4 socket for Ryzen 4000/5000 series APUs, the user can also mount a processor of his choice, taking into account that he will have to narrow the choice so that the TDP, the power consumption of the processor, is internal or at least 65W. The RAM, of the DDR4 type, can reach up to 64 GB maximum while, for the SSD storage, a couple of slots for SSD M.2 2280 are made available.
On the connectivity side, Minisforum used the RZ608 network card, developed by AMD together with Mediatek, which brings support for Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6: the ports, also including 1 Display Port and 2 HDMI (in order to connect the terminal to 3 screens), of 5 USB (of which 4 USB 3.2 of 2nd gen and one Type-C), of 1 jack for the microphone and headphones, of an RJ45 for the Gigabit Ethernet of 2.5 Gbps , are of particular importance.
The manufacturer, in fact, has also included a dock that, properly powered (through a charger to be purchased separately), can support a full-sized dedicated external graphics card (for example a Radeon RX 6700 XT GAMING OC 230W of TDP ). For prices, the version of the Minisforum B550 Mini with the Ryzen 7 4700G processor starts at 469 euros for the barebones iteration (without memory) to reach 699 euros with 32 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. Otherwise, the version with Ryzen 7 5700G processor ranges from 559 euros of the barebones variant to 749 euros of the set-up with always 32 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage already inserted.