Minisforum U850—solid hardware and easy upgrades in a little box

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  The U850 comes with VESA hardware-mounting bracket, HDMI and DisplayPort cables, a USB-C charger, and a slim manual. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Earlier this month, we teased the announcement of a new model of mini-PC from specialty vendor Minisforum. Today, we're taking a look at the results of some hands-on testing of the Minisforum U850, configured with a Comet Lake i5 CPU, 16GiB RAM, and a 256GB Kingston NVMe SSD.

The U850 is an aggressively generalist mini-PC, and it can tackle most roles—its dual network interfaces make it a good candidate for a high-performance router, and its combination of tons of USB ports, HDMI and DisplayPort video out, and surprisingly fast storage make it an excellent little desktop PC.

Specs at a glance: U820 / U850
CPU	Intel i5-8249U (U820) Intel i5-10210U (U850)
OS	Windows 10 Pro (pre-installed) / Linux supported
RAM	16GiB DDR4 (2x 8GiB SODIMM)
GPU	Intel Iris+ 655 (U820) Intel UHD 630 (U850)
Wi-Fi	M.2 Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6, dual-band + BlueTooth 5.1
SSD	M.2 2280 512GB NVMe SSD
Connectivity	two SATA ports one full-size HDMI 2.0 one full-size DisplayPort one USB-C (full featured) one USB-C (charge only) four USB3.1 Type-A one 1Gbps Ethernet (Realtek 8111H) one 2.5Gbps Ethernet (Intel) one 3.5 mm audio one Digital Mic
Price as specified	$639 (U820) / $699 (U850)

The only role the U850 might play that we'd advise some caution with is home theater PC (HTPC)—although it's powerful enough to do the job, its fan noise when under load is loud enough that it might annoy the sorts of people who tend to want a small, unobtrusive HTPC in the first place.

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