This is a new series looking at the Minisforum UM890 Pro Mini PC running Linux. In this series, I examine every aspect of this Mini PC in detail from a Linux perspective. I’ll compare the machine with desktop PC counterparts along the way.
The Minisforum UM890 Pro is an impressive compact mini PC based on an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS with integrated Radeon 780M. The AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS has a CPU Mark of 29608 and the Radeon 780M a corresponding G3D Mark of 6910.
The Minisforum UM890 Pro is available for a 25% discount on Minisforum’s website. Many of their range also have sizeable discounts for Black Friday.
For this article in the series, I’ve run a series of benchmarks on the machine. Most of the tests use the Phoronix Test Suite. Together with the Minisforum UM890 Pro, I’ve run the same benchmarks on 5 other mini PCs. Specifically, the BOSGAME M4 Plus (with AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS), the Minisforum AI X1 Pro (with AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370), ASRock NUC Box-255H (with Intel Core Ultra 7 255H), Intel NUC 13 Pro (with Intel i7-1360P), and an Intel N100 machine, together with two desktop machines with 10th and 12th generation Intel processors.
Both Minisforum machines as well as the BOSGAME machine have an AMD processor, the rest are Intel based. It’ll be interesting to see how they fare. Bear in mind there’s quite a price disparity between all the machines. For example, the N100 machine is extremely inexpensive. It’s included simply to put in perspective the performance improvement offered by the higher specification machines.
Each machine is tested with the same software and configured to ensure consistency between results. All power management functionality is disabled when running the benchmarks. Where available, I enabled Performance Mode in the Power Limit mode section in the BIOS. Every performance enhancing technique is used e.g. the performance governor is used for all tests, each machine was running with as few processes running as possible (e.g. no X11/Wayland is running except for the graphic benchmarks).
Let’s begin the tests with a variety of processor benchmarks.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt
Smallpt is a C++ global illumination renderer written in less than 100 lines of code. Global illumination is done via unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing and there is multi-threading support via the OpenMP library. As this benchmark uses all cores, a CPU with many cores complete the test considerably quicker.
A decent start for the UM890 Pro. Its AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS processor matches the performance of the Ryzen 9 7940HS.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark compress-pbzip2
pbzip2 is a parallel implementation of the bzip2 block-sorting file compressor that uses pthreads and achieves near-linear speedup on SMP machines.
This test measures the time needed to compress a file (a .tar package of the Linux kernel source code) using BZIP2 compression. Like the smallpt benchmark, this test uses all the cores.
The UM890 Pro scores what I expected — the same as the Ryzen 9 7940HS.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark openssl
OpenSSL is an open-source toolkit that implements SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocols. This test profile makes use of the built-in “openssl speed” benchmarking capabilities.
There are many different algorithms available for this benchmark. I’ve tested with the RSA4096 algorithm, as it’s representative for the others. There are two charts for this benchmark, one for the sign/s and one for the verify/s.
Here the UM890 Pro ranks in second place in both tests — a very impressive result particularly taking into account the machine is hundreds of pounds cheaper than the Minisforum machine hosting the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark x265
This is a simple test of the x265 encoder run on the CPU with a sample 1080p video file, and repeated with a sample 4K video file.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark
Coremark is a benchmark that measures the performance of central processing units (CPU) used in embedded systems.
A great result for the UM890 Pro beating both the Ryzen 9 7940HS and the more expensive Core Ultra 7 255H machine by a significant margin.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark crafty
Crafty is a chess program directly derived from Cray Blitz, winner of the 1983 and 1986 World Computer Chess Championships.
This is a benchmark looking at the CPU’s performance through a chess benchmark. This benchmark only uses a single core.
This result surprised me so much I re-ran it multiple times (even though the benchmark itself runs it 3 times). While the 8945HS in the UM890 Pro comes top in this single core benchmark, don’t expect it to be top in other single benchmark tests. If I get time, I’ll do some further single core benchmarking and update this article.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Processor
Page 2 – Graphics
Page 3 – Memory
Page 4 – Disk
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Minisforum UM890 Pro Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Introduction to the series and interrogation of the machine |
| Benchmarks | Benchmarking the Minisforum UM890 Pro |