Prebuilt Minisforum Ryzen mini PC has a PCIe slot for eGPU support

[AlexTSG]

Just bought a Ryzen 5 5600G to go with the barebones. It's at it's lowest price yet on Amazon at the moment at $178.98.



That's puts the Elitemini B550 Barebones and the CPU at just under $500 which is $100 less than the Ryzen 5700G that Minisforum is offering as an option. Although I already have the RAM and SSD I plan to use, you could pick up a 1TB M.2 SSD, a 16GB DDR4 SO-DIMM Kit and a gram or two of good thermal paste for under $200 putting the whole system price at $700.

From the reviews I've read, the Vega 7 integrated graphics in the 5600G are less than 10% slower than the Vega 8 that's in the 5700G, so the main reason to spend the extra money would be to go from 6 to 8 cores. This also doesn't make too much of a difference in gaming even if you use a discrete CPU, but it might be worth it if you plan to use the Elitemini for more CPU intensive tasks like rendering or encoding.

AMD Ryzen 5 5600G Review | TechPowerUp
The AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, Ryzen 5 5600G, and Ryzen 3 5300G Review (anandtech.com)

I'm also hoping that the included heatsink and fan has a bit of headroom to enable PBO, but I guess I'll have to wait and see.

 

[AlexTSG]

Just had a look at the Minisforum website again, and it looks like they've updated some of the photos.

There's now a platform for the power supply that's connected to the rear of the dock.

Hopefully they're still on track to ship in the next couple of weeks.

 

[AlexTSG]

Another image update from the product page.

You can see they've added the extra parts for the PSU support. There's a short power cable extension with a 90 degree connector included too, so the power cable will be connected to the front.

I think having the power connector redirected to the rear, where all the other connections are made would have been better.

 

[msystems]

It's pretty innovative but I just don't know how practical it will end up being now that the GPU shortage is over. When you add in the standard PSU to this thing, it's starting to be kind of a mess. New GaN bricks are pretty nice and if there were just good ones with low ripple it would be a good fit with this setup.

 

[AlexTSG]

It's pretty innovative but I just don't know how practical it will end up being now that the GPU shortage is over. When you add in the standard PSU to this thing, it's starting to be kind of a mess. New GaN bricks are pretty nice and if there were just good ones with low ripple it would be a good fit with this setup.

I agree. While this meets my somewhat niche requirements, I don't think it's a good fit for most people. I think it would have been more useful if it was fully enclosed, just with a simple steel mesh surround for the PSU and GPU, to give it a more complete SFF PC look.

Unless you need the portability of the unit when not using the dock, you could put together an NR200 case + mini-ITX board + APU for less money, and have less compromises.

Aside from needing a test bench for various GPUs that I'm refurbishing, I also plan to spend a few weeks doing a huge upgrade on an old Alienware X51 R2 that my girlfriend is using, and an upgrade to water-cooling on my own NCASE M1. This is ideal as a temporary PC while I'm busy with those projects.

It may move on after that, without it's dock, as a PC for my mother.

 

[AlexTSG]

Another day, another delay.

The shipping date was initially Mid-June, which was then changed to End-June.

I see it's now been changed to July 25th. I hope the date doesn't slip again.

 

[AlexTSG]

Another day, another delay.

The shipping date was initially Mid-June, which was then changed to End-June.

I see it's now been changed to July 25th. I hope the date doesn't slip again.

and just a day after posting this, I get a notification that a 3.4kg package has arrived at my Aramex Hong Kong forwarding address.

I must say that Minisforum Support has been excellent, responding to most of my emails in under an hour if they were sent during Hong Kong working hours.

They've sent me the commercial invoice for customs clearance, and so I should have my Elitemini B550 on it's way within the next few days.

 

[AlexTSG]

It's arrived!

Under 2 weeks from Hong Kong to Johannesburg, South Africa including customs clearance isn't bad.

Unfortunately I was working from home today, so I just received a photo of the package from one of my colleagues.

I'll be collecting it from the office tomorrow, but won't have a chance to actually check it out until Wednesday.

If there's anything in particular that you want to know about it then let me know.

 

[msystems]

If you have it set up now, what is your impression? Can you check your benchmark with gpu against similar user on ITX and see if it is similar performance?

 

[AlexTSG]

If you have it set up now, what is your impression? Can you check your benchmark with gpu against similar user on ITX and see if it is similar performance?

Sadly it's been sitting in it's box untouched for the last 2 weeks.

I wanted to film the unboxing, and post a video of the initial CPU, memory, and SSD installation as well as a few benchmarks.

Unfortunately, I'm a bit snowed under with the video editing work I do that actually pays the bills, but I should have that done by the end of the week.

If all goes to plan, you might see a link to a YouTube video here next week sometime.