Thanks for Minisforum for sending me this review unit! If you’re looking for PC with superb performance and AI productivity this is a truly exciting device. You can pick one up for yourself here.

And stick around to the end because this thing is absolutely slaying my desktop PC in one surprising workflow…

Design

The Minisforum AI X1 Pro is a beautiful device with an aluminum chassis in the shape of a squircle. On the front, it has a power button, two USB 3.2 gen 2 ports, a USB 4 port, a headphone jack, and a Copilot button. On either side of the front panel IO there’s a microphone array.

On the right side of the device there’s an SD card slot. When testing, it seemed to only be capable of Class 10 speeds so this really isn’t going to be suited for copying large files quickly.

The rear IO features a CMOS reset button, a Kensington lock, a USB 2.0 port, an OCulink port, a USB4 port, DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1, two 2.5 GB LAN and an AC power connector.

Finally, the top of the device has a Windows Hello compatible fingerprint reader.

I have to admin, I love the design of this thing. Especially because it has a built-in power supply so there’s no power brick that I have to worry about. At 195x195x42.5/47.5mm it’s able to fit neatly under the monitors on my desk. This is an impressive feat since there’s very little clearance under here!

I also especially love how clearly each port is labeled. I just wish that the DisplayPort and HDMI had which versions they were printed here.

Performance

The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is the latest from AMD and it’s an impressive chip! At a max clock speed of 5.1 GHz and a default TDP of 28W, it’s pretty efficient, too.

I’m quite pleased with its performance here. It’s got a built-in Radeon 890M running at 2900MHz and that’s paired with 64 Gigabytes of RAM running at 5600 Megatransfers/second. It can be kitted out with up to 96 GB of RAM, though!

Opening it up, we’ve got 3 M.2 slots at the full 2280 formfactor, it supports Wifi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and… the Bluetooth seems solid here which I can’t say some other Mini PCs or even game consoles.

The AI X1 has a built-in speaker which actually sounds pretty good. I’m impressed by how dynamic the sound is… with the caveat that this is still a built-in speaker and it sounds like a built-in speaker. As far as the built-in microphone array? Well, it sounds like this. Which I shouldn’t have to tell you… is pretty bad.

Benchmarks

Typically, when I review a device like this, I like to run it through some of my favorite games that demand high performance. The two biggest are Doom: Eternal and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I was kind of astonished to find just how well this device held its own in terms of performance.

Though I will note that Doom Eternal specifically had these strange moments of a black screens when cutting between shots in the introductory cutscene. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was mostly over 60 FPS during its benchmark. And for an integrated GPU, this is superb performance! I am quite pleased with these results!

I also performed another benchmark here, which was rendering video. I was kinda shocked at the poor performance here, too. I tried to render my most recent video both in H.264 and H.265 codecs and both operations took over 20 minutes. For an 18 minute video, that’s less than realtime rendering.

Compare that to the render times of my desktop at 4:17 seconds for H.264 and 6:07 for H.265 and that’s a clear loss for the Minisforum AI X1. I would’ve expected the Ryzen AI 9 HX would have better encoding hardware, but I guess not.

Now, the real interesting thing here is going to be testing how AI performs on this thing. After all, the CPU has AI right in the title.

I installed Alpaca and tried Deepseek R1 7B and it ran significantly faster than it did on the Steam Deck. The 14 billion parameter Deepseek model also ran incredibly quickly—easily beating the pants off my desktop PC using an RTX 3080. That’s impressive. Especially considering the power draw of this device is an order of magnitude lower than my desktop. Just for good measure, I tried the 32 billion parameter Deepseek model and… god damn.

So, yeah… I mean, this thing is impressive. But before I end this video I know everyone is wondering… what about that Copilot button on Linux? What does it do? Can it be remapped?

Well, it reports as meta + touchpad off in KDE… and yes. It can be remapped. I’ve got it set up to open Alpaca!

– Chapters – 00:00 Intro 00:36 Design 02:18 Performance 03:41 Built in speaker test 04:08 Built in microphone test 04:23 Benchmarks 04:29 Doom: Eternal Intro Scene Quirks 04:58 Shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark 06:03 Video Rendering Benchmark 06:50 LLM Benchmark