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Early Minisforum V3 & Hawk Point Thoughts (Die Shrink Telegrams) (Patreon)

Published:
2024-04-18 02:12:13
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

So Tom has had the Minisforum V3 for a few days now, and while he wanted to try to get a review out this week - he thinks it would be better to make this a much more comprehensive long-term usage review instead. In fact, half of the reason has to do with the fact that some pretty impressive overclocking tricks were discovered that the team feels deserve investigating further...

Anyways - have any questions now? Is there anything you want Tom to look into? What are your thoughts on Hawk Point, Meteor Lake, and Strix so far? Write in below! You have ~12 hours (till afternoon on 4/18/24 US Central Time) to submit below!

https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-v3

Comments

Lucas

The product page seems to indicate a replaceable m.2 ssd yet the ram appears to be soldered to the board. Since Surface products are almost as hostile to user serviceability as Apple I was hoping we might see some CAMM modules. Are those not compatible or too difficult/expensive to source? I can understand a major player like Dell needing more than can be produced atm and hoped that Minisforum, being a smaller outfit, might be able to lead here. Is there a chance of seeing CAMM in future revisions or is the standard DOA and we should all welcome the soldered future?

xpk20040228

I wonder how low it idles when on battery saving mode and browsing through Google.

Onikaze

it's a nice to have feature that it can be used as a portable monitor. they missed a trick to enable touch and the pen for artists looking for an on the go tablet that can be used as a mini-cintiq when connected to a desktop. I guess the question is, did they think of that and were unable to do it or could it possibly be enabled with a firmware update?

Woody Chang

Hi Tom, I know from reviews of the V3 that it can set a TDP in the bios beyond the 3 options that can be set in the Minisforum software. I'm curious what the performance and battery life would be if you ran the chip at 10W or lower as it could be great for office work or emulation on the go. Seriously glad that Minisforum is getting what looks like a good competitor to the Microsoft Surface Pro line. Would have been nice to have an inbuilt kickstand though. Was interesting to see how many reviewers didn't flip the top down to make the back cover a stand. Seems like it could have been fixed by putting the air intakes at the bottom of the screen, rather than the top. Or by putting holes on the top part of the back cover.

Cache Miss

How is Linux on the V3?

KingKoro

Hi Tom, one thing I'm wondering is, with all these new APUs being as powerful as they've become - especially in the CPU department - is, where are the thin 14" Laptops with pcie 4.0 x8/16 connectors? As far as I understand all APUs should have atleast 8 lanes left for an eGPU, so why don't Laptop OEMs just have a compact Oculink-style port? This way you have a compact machine on the go and when docked you can get desktop-class GPU performance without that bottleneck of 4-lanes Oculink or USB4/Thunderbolt. I know these connectors and cables exist.

Woody Chang

How useful will the NPU in something like the 8840U be in the long run? Microsoft Copilot's requirement for offline use is an NPU with 40 TOPS where as the 8840U only gets close to that requirement if you combine the CPU, GPU, and NPU. I know we are very early in the AI game, but it seems like the 16 TOPS of the NPU really isn't enough to do anything useful right now.

Richard P

Hi Tom, I'm fortunate because of my job I can test a lot of machines, Meteor Lake has actually surprised me in the fact it's stable and is nice and quick but the NPU using Studio Effects in Teams seems next to useless. In fact 3 separate people said it looked worse than standard background blur. Rebrandt refresh is so good on battery and I'm looking forward to getting hold of a Hawk Point system, but Strix looks more exciting. At this point all three Intel systems have very poor battery life, MTL is more efficient than RPL but we're talking 20-30 mins on an average 57Whr battery. My overall question is, how do you feel about all these refresh processors these days? In my eyes RPL and MTL have mainly been a refresh and Hawk Point is mainly a refresh of Phoenix. Would you prefer an 18-24month cycle on CPUs to give time for more genuine improvements rather than such slim improvements and basically repackaging cleverly marketed products?

Woody Chang

What is the mood at Intel given that the major products using Meteor Lake have been anywhere from mixed to completely trashed in reviews?

Paul Hope

Basic interactions and evaluations with Ai apps such as Adobe Firefly would be appreciated 🙏

Dark Side of the Force

Please try to UV it. Last time, from what I know the 7840hs was locked from uv but the 7940hs was not, so I'll like to see it tested. I would also love to see how's the NPU being use in some application locally.

Nicolas Terroir

I have heard that RDNA3 will be use on multiple generation of CPU, like Vega. Is it going to be enough in the future?

Adre

Haven't been keeping up with too fine of the details but: What memory configurations do we expect to see for a full 40 CU strix halo? If not a 256bit bus would the newly announced (if it's able to support them) micron 9.6k Mhz and Samsung 10k Mhz ram on 128 bit bus + infinity cache be enough to feed it?

Adre

The 128 bit question especially if it's able to be socketable.

Nicolas Terroir

Could the NPU part have a negative impact on those Apu? That part takesplace and power on the die.

Nicolas Terroir

Could AMD crush all competition in the APU market? Nvidia lacks the cpu. Qualcomm snapdragon elite x seems OK, but not revolutionary. And Intel graphics is still having problem. The only thing missing in amd lineup is a super low power apu.

bigboss69

Do you think Nvidia could do well with APUs in devices like handhelds? I still think the tegra chip in my shield pro is excellent and am looking forward to its update in the future

Chris Rijk

How viable does the V3 feel as a true all-in-one travel PC? I tend to take both my laptop and a tablet on trips but I think the V3 or something like it could replace both. An option for 64GB of RAM would be nice though.

Chris Rijk

As far as I can tell, the V3 is genuinely the world's first AMD powered tablet. How much does this surprise you? Is this way overdue or are there genuine reasons why Intel has dominated PC tablets?

Chris Rijk

How badly are tablets (and laptops) hampered by the lack of reasonably priced and effective eGPUs? It feels like a market waiting to explode if only there were competitively priced options. I bought my current laptop 6 years ago and spent a lot of time researching eGPUs back then and it doesn't feel like the situation has improved much since.

Bran Muffin

How much power do you think RTX 5090 will use? And do you think it will need PCIe 5.0 to get full performance or will 4.0 be enough?

ProfNexGen

Does Windows yet show you if the NPU is in use, maybe in Task Manager. If not, any apps included to monitor NPU usage?