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’m looking at the power consumption of the Minisforum UM890 Pro (“UM890 Pro”) I’ll compare it to 5 mini PCs and a couple of desktop machines. Specifically, the Minisforum AI X1 Pro (“Ryzen AI 9 HX 370”), BOSGAME M4 Plus (“Ryzen 9 7940HS”), ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H with an Intel (“Core Ultra 7 255H”), the Intel NUC i7-1360P (“i7-1360P”), DreamQuest Intel N100 (“N100”), and desktop machines with “i5-10400” and “i5-12400F” processors.
Let’s start with the power consumption when each machine is idling.
As the charts how, the UM890 Pro is frugal at idle but not quite as efficient as the BOSGAME M4 Plus, Minisforum AI X1 Pro, or the N100 machine. But it’s more power efficient than the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H.
- The chart measures the power consumption of each system (not just the CPU).
- The i5-12400F machine hosts a dedicated graphics card, whereas the other machines all have onboard graphics. Power consumption even at idle is much higher with a dedicated graphics card, in this case an NVIDIA Asus RTX 3060 Ti. That graphics card, itself, consumes 11W with the machine at idle with two screens off, 21W idle with two screens on, as reported by nvidia-smi.
- The BOSGAME M4 Plus, Minisforum AI X1 Pro, i5-12400F and i5-10400 machines offer BIOS power management options. This power management is enabled. The other machines don’t offer power management functionality.
- For the i5-10400 machine, the BIOS offers options to enable Asus Performance Enhancement as well as a Performance Mode. With both these options enabled, the PC idles at 22.2W and 24.9W with both screens off and on respectively. Having the power functionality disabled therefore makes a significant difference.
- The Power Saver CPU governor is used.
- The machines are running Ubuntu 25.10 with the exception of the Minisforum machines which are running Manjaro (an Arch-based distribution).
Next page: Page 2 – Power Consumption With Light usage
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Power Consumption With System Idle
Page 2 – Power Consumption With Light Usage
Page 3 – Power Consumption With CPU Stressed
Page 4 – Electricity Costs
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 |
| Power | Testing and comparing the power consumption |