Minisforum Venus UM790 Pro Review

Over the past six years, Shenzhen-based Minisforum has become a prolific mini PC maker. A quick glance at the company’s online store reveals a steady stream of neat and well-appointed boxes aimed at home and business users, equipped with the best of AMD’s and Intel’s mobile APU arsenal.

There are a few gaming-focused units in the range with a more racy design, but the Venus UM790 Pro isn’t necessarily one of them. Housed in a immaculate, purple-hued aluminium chassis, it’s attractive in a minimalist way, but we’re interested in its gaming potential, as it’s an affordable way to access the dual-tasking of the Ryzen 9 7940HS and Radeon 780M CPU/iGPU. Like the Ryzen 7 7840HS, which is much more common in mini-PCs and gaming laptops, this APU SoC is built on the same 4nm Zen 4 architecture as AMD’s 7000-series desktop processors. It’s also the chip of choice for the recent Razer Blade 14s laptops, among other affordable crotch-cookers, and its placement in such machines tells us something about its capabilities.

It’s worth pausing to note the difference between the Ryzen 7 7840HS and the Ryzen 9 7940HS. For desktops, the jump from Ryzen 7 to Ryzen 9 gives you more CPU cores and higher clock speeds. For example, the Ryzen 7 7700X has eight cores running at 4.5GHz-5.4GHz, while the Ryzen 9 7900X has 12 cores running at 4.7GHz-5.6GHz.

However, the Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 9 7940HS APUs have the same eight multi-threaded cores, but the 7940HS has 200MHz more in base speed, 100MHz more in turbo mode, and 100MHz more in its Radeon 780M turbo speed. That’s it! No additional cores. On the spec sheets and in practice, they are virtually identical. Which begs the question, why are they named that?

Regardless of all this tinkering, and before I reach for my tinfoil hat, the fact remains that the 7940HS is a great little chip. It’s powered economically at 35-54W and still happily drives eight cores/16 threads at a base clock speed of 4GHz, boosting to 5.2GHz when the chips are off. AMD lists a TJMax of 100°C before throttling, which at this power draw actually leaves a lot of room for cooling solutions. Cooling is often reserved in mini PCs like this, and that’s another essential point to consider before you buy, which we’ll get to.

The Radeon 780M iGPU is a 12CU, miniature powerhouse running at 2.8GHz that can isolate up to 4GB of system memory as VRAM. Power is of course a relative term here — you won’t be tracing any ray tracing at 4K resolution on this little chip Nearby playable frame rates. But it’s the top of the line in the iGPU range, thoroughly training Intel’s Iris and newer Arc-branded iGPUs, and nipping at the heels of older budget graphics cards like the GTX 1650. It’ll be replaced by the Radeon 890M, but until then it’s still pretty keen for something that’s not a discrete GPU.

The supporting cast is similarly solid: four USB 3.2 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, an Intel Killer Wireless 6E with Bluetooth 5.3, a pair of SODIMM RAM slots that support up to 64GB of DDR5 5600MHz memory, and PCIe 4.0 support for two M.2 NVMe slots. We’re using the barebones version here, so we squeezed in our own PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive and 32GB of DDR5 5600 RAM.

Opening up the UM790 Pro to install RAM and storage could be a bit more elegant. You have to remove four glued-on rubber feet to access the screws that allow you to open the case. After that, it’s pretty effortless, and the M.2 and SODIMM slots are very effortless to access, but the weakened connection makes me think the feet will probably fall off at some point.

For the higher starting price, you can opt to pre-load the UM790 Pro with various RAM and storage configurations at the point of purchase. However, if you want to do this on a budget, we recommend buying the barebones version and getting your own inexpensive DDR5 and M.2 storage. Shop around, and you can find a 1TB M.2 drive plus 16GB DDR5 memory for a laptop for just over 100 Notes.

The only I/O bit missing is a DisplayPort. That might be a dealbreaker for some, but with two HDMI 2.1 ports and a pair of full-size USB4 ports with 40Gbps Thunderbolt support up front, you’ve got high-refresh monitors and even a Thunderbolt-powered eGPU if you prefer.

So how does the whole package fare in games? Based on our benchmarks, it’s quite capable at 1080p, as long as you don’t overdo it. For the sake of simplicity, we ran each game on its standard medium settings, using FSR where possible, and achieved 30-48fps depending on the title. The only title in our stack that we can’t recommend on this rig is Homeworld 3, which, despite averaging 40fps, suffers from staccato 1% drops.

Some experimentation with advanced in-game graphics settings can of course yield benefits in the form of higher frame rates—or higher fidelity at the best-value-for-money settings at the expense of more high-priced ones. But in brief, mission accomplished: If you can stomach living below a solid 60fps, nearly all of the games we tested were fully playable on the Radeon 780M.

Picture 1 With 4

It’s all good news for indies and older titles. Subnautica runs smoothly at 50-60 fps on medium settings, and the same goes for Stray, which hit 45-60 fps, while Soulstone Survivors ranged from 45 to 90 fps, Doom Eternal was 75-95 fps, and Bioshock Remastered ranged from around 140 to over 200 fps. It’s protected to say there are thousands of great games that the UM790 Pro will run like a champ.

Being the curious type, I connected a Razer Chroma X with an RTX 4070 Ti to one of the UM790 Pro’s Thunderbolt ports to see what was going on, and inevitably I saw frame rates skyrocket. Cyberpunk jumped from 48fps to 98fps at the same settings, Warhammer 3 went from 42fps to 190fps, and the 1440p 3DMark Time Spy score increased almost six-fold, from 3376 to 18226. It goes without saying that the 7940HS performs very well with a discrete GPU, if only it could get its hands on one in the hands of the little robot.

The UM790 Pro has two performance modes that are toggled via the BIOS. Balanced mode runs the processor to its full rated 54W power draw, and I have to say the cooling solution in this little device is pretty impressive. It’s Minisforum’s own “Cold Wave 2.0” design, featuring liquid metal heat exchange with additional busy cooling dedicated to the RAM and M.2 drives, and it really works.

With all cores maxed out in the Cinebench 2024 multi-core rendering test, the CPU never exceeded 80°C, and the CPU fan was barely audible. Switching to performance mode, we measured a slight escalate in consumption to 56W, a maximum core temperature of 82°C, a petite but noticeable escalate in fan noise, though still without coil whine, and a slight improvement in synthetic benchmark scores. 82°C is still a comfortable 18°C ​​below the point where the system hits its TJMax and starts to throttle. There was no noticeable escalate in game performance, though — well, okay, Forza did get an elusive 2fps boost — so our recommendation would be to leave it in balanced mode, bask in the silence, and enjoy your games.