[Hardware] Minisforum Venus UM690 Mini PC With AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX “Rembrandt” APU Review

[The GodFather]

 

 

Minisforum has been around since 2012 and has offered some really innovative designs, mostly in the Mini PC segment. The company has a wide variety of options featuring Intel and AMD CPUs but their Venus lineup is definitely one of the most interesting ones, packing AMD's latest Ryzen APUs and powerful integrated graphics which will be more than enough for a casual gaming session or a performance-focused compute workload.

Minisforum recently introduced the UM690 in its Venus lineup, packing AMD's flagship Rembrandt Ryzen 6000 APU, the Ryzen 9 6900HX. The Venus UM690 is a powerhouse with lots going for it and comes in two variants, a standalone bare-bone kit to configure yourself for as low as $499 US while the fully decked kit can be purchased for $929 US & gives you a 1 TB SSD plus 64 GB memory. The variant we got was configured with 16 GB memory and 512 GB storage and retails for $649 US.

Minisforum Venus UM690 Mini PC - Specifications At A Glance
Minisforum has already launched several AMD Ryzen 5000 APU-powered Mini PCs including the EliteMini X500, the Elitemini HX90, the UM590, and the DeskMini HM90. So now the company has decided to shift gears and focus on the Ryzen 6000 series. There's also the Ryzen 7000 products that will be heading out later this year as supply gets better. Once again, the UM690 aims to offer the best-in-class Mini PC performance utilizing AMD's latest hardware.

Coming to the specifications, the Minisforum Venus UM690 rocks the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU which features 8 cores, 16 threads, 20 MB of cache (L3+L2 combined), and a boost clock of up to 4.9 GHz. The CPU has a TDP of 45W which can be configured down to 15W and up to 65W.

The CPU cores utilize the brand new Zen 3+ architecture that offers insane amounts of efficiency for the 6nm node they are based upon.

Another primary component of the Minisforum Venus UM690 Mini PC is its RDNA 2 graphics core. Unlike the older Vega iGPU featured on past APUs, starting with Ryzen 6000, AMD has adopted its brand new RDNA graphics core which provides a bigger boost to graphics performance & also to overall capabilities that the APU can perform. The iGPU is known as the Radeon 680M and houses 12 Compute Units for a total of 768 shaders running at a top clock of 2400 MHz & is compliant with all AMD premium technologies including FSR, Freesync, etc.

Talking about the settings you can configure, the BIOS provides some room for user customization such as setting power limits, thermal limits, shared memory pool for iGPU, and even adjusting ram speeds. We got our DIMMs to run at 5600 Mbps which is a pretty decent boost over the reference DDR5-4800 speeds. We also set the APU to its 54W profile which should also provide a boost in the CPU performance.

Other specs for the Minisforum UM690 include 16 GB DDR5-4800 memory. This isn't soldered and instead features a SO-DIMM design so users can completely upgrade it as they wish. Storage comes in the form of a single M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD ad a single 2.5-inch SATA HDD. There's no HDD on the pre-configured units but users can easily upgrade that by disassembling the case which is a simple process. Following are the main configurations of the UM690 available through MInisforum:

For I/O, you will be getting 2 HDMI 2.1 ports, four USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a 2.5GbE RJ45 LAN port, a DC19V input on the back, and a Clear CMOS button, a USB4 port, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, a 3.5mm Combo Jack, a DMIC port and a Power button on the front. There's also full support for WiFi6 and Bluetooth 5.2 functionality. The Minisforum Venus UM690 Mini PC also comes with dual 4K Display support and rocks a Thunderbolt 4 port for up to 8K 60 Hz display functionality from the front IO panel.

 

ATX 3.0 power supplies have started to become common ground as more companies unveil their products for modern-day GPUs. One valid reason to invest in an ATX 3.0 PSU is the power spikes affecting modern-day GPUs.

Power Spikes & Excursions Are Just A Few Reasons To Why You Should Get An ATX 3.0 Power Supply
The ATX 3.0 standard was designed for several reasons, power excursions and power spikes are just a few of those but they are very much an occurrence on modern-day GPUs, even if sometimes rare. Now we have to say that modern-day GPUs are also some of the most efficient cards to date despite their higher power consumption thanks to architectural changes and relying on advanced techniques.

We were provided some tests of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti by MSI which was running on their brand-new MPG A850G PCIe power supply. This PSU is ATX 3.0 compliant & we have tested out its bigger 1000W brother which is an absolutely fantastic unit if you are building a high-end PC there are also variants that come with the Gen5 connector. MSI has a lot of options for users which you can check out here.

So back to the RTX 4070 Ti, in our own tests, we saw the particular graphics card to be extremely efficient and offer gaming performance that is slightly faster than the RTX 3090 Ti at less than 1/2 the power draw. But even an efficient card such as the RTX 4070 Ti can sometimes face those rare power spikes and excursions that we just mentioned above. Following is the raw data provided by MSI which gives us a look at the peak power that the card can hit when running Cyberpunk 2077 in both stock and overclocked conditions:

You can see above that the max power spikes can hit almost 1000W, that's 3.5x higher than the reference TGP of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card. In 3DMark, you can even exceed the 1000W rating which a regular ATX 2.0 PSU rated at 750/850W wouldn't have handled as well since their OPP or Over-Power-Protection is rated at around 120-130% above the normal usage & in these examples, we can see the power draw exceeding that limit.

One should remember that power spikes are an occurrence on all modern-day GPUs. While the RTX 4070 Ti was used as an example, all NVIDIA RTX 30/40 & AMD Radeon RX 6000/7000 can yield such spikes. Some users also experience these spikes during gaming such as this Reddit user who encountered an 800W spike on an RTX 4090 while playing Days Gone.

 

 

https://wccftech.com/review/minisforum-venus-um690-mini-pc-with-amd-ryzen-9-6900hx-rembrandt-apu-review/