Minisforum Mercury EM680
The Minisforum Mercury EM680 is a very small mini PC that is still quite grand in many areas. The Ryzen 6000 processor with eight cores performs very well and the EM680 has many and potent connections for the form factor. Although you can’t escape soldered memory, Minisforum has made the SSD replaceable and the additional cost for a ram upgrade to 32GB can be called reasonable. Bottom line, the Mercury EM680 is an impressive piece of engineering, which is nevertheless not too expensive.
While Intel has just announced that it will discontinue its NUCs, the mini PC as a product category is very much alive. Minisforum is one of the companies that regularly come up with innovative PCs. The Mercury EM680 that I review here is particularly notable for its extremely small size. The box measures only 8x8cm, considerably smaller than a traditional NUC (11.5×11.5cm).
The impact of this on the volume of the PC, 0.28 versus 0.48 liters, is greater than the length and width suggest. In such a small case you might expect a super efficient and slow processor, a bit Atom-like, but nothing could be further from the truth; the Chinese manufacturer has included a full-fledged Ryzen 7 CPU with eight cores.
If it has to be as small as possible, upgradeability is often the child of the bill. That’s why it’s all the more impressive that this mini PC still has a replaceable M.2 SSD. Although that is a relatively short 30mm copy, the same form factor as in the Steam Deck and ROG Ally, great upgrade options will undoubtedly become available for that format in the future.
The manufacturer, on the other hand, has not found a place for SO-DIMM slots. However, there is already 16GB of ram in the Mercury EM680 as standard and for a relatively friendly additional price of 40 euros you can turn it into 32GB. That is something different from 460 euros, shall we say. The version we tested, with 16GB of ram and a 512GB SSD, will cost you 469 euros at the time of writing.
Minisforum Mercury EM680
Processor AMD Ryzen 7 6800U (8C/16T, boost 4.7GHz) GPU AMD Radeon 680M @ 2.2GHz (integrated) Memory available 16GB Lpddr5-6400 (onboard) Storage available Kingston OM3PGP4512Q-A0 PCIe 4.0 512GB Storage slots 1x M.2 2230 (PCIe 4.0) OS Windows 11 Pro Dimensions 8x8x4.3cm Front connections USB4, 3.5mm jack Side connections USB-A 10Gbit/s, microSD card reader, Kensington lock Rear connections HDMI 2.1, 2x USB-A 10Gbit/s, USB4 Wifi Wi-Fi 6E (Killer AX1675w) + Bluetooth 5.3 Price 16GB ram + 512GB ssd: € 469,-
32GB ram + 512GB ssd: € 509,-
32GB ram + 1TB ssd: € 549,-
2023-07-24 04:00:00
#Bizarre #mini #Minisforum #Mercury #EM680
