Minisforum AI X1 Pro review: a powerful but expensive workstation gaming PC

Mini gaming PCs have, over the last few years, typically become smaller, lighter, and more portable. The Minisforum AI X1 Pro somewhat goes against that grain. It’s bigger and heavier than some of its competitors, with a design that seems heavily inspired by Apple’s own mini contender.

Minisforum has carved out a good chunk of the best mini gaming PC market for budget gamers in recent years, but the AI X1 Pro is a rig aimed firmly at the top end of the market. The 12-core AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 gaming CPU it ships with is a powerhouse for general use, while its AMD Radeon 890M integrated gaming GPU – a high-end mobile GPU option found in recent handhelds like the AOKZOE A1 – delivers decent 1080p gaming performance.

With a hefty amount of RAM thrown in, this machine leaves plenty of room for growth, but the price means it won’t appeal to all. This is a high-end mini PC that could replace your desktop machine, but it isn’t specifically built with gaming in mind.

That said, I tested the Minisforum AI X1 Pro out for a few days to see how well it performed as a full desktop gaming PC replacement.

Specs

The Minisforum AI X1 Pro is a seriously powerful mini PC. It ships with a 12-core, 24-thread AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU, with a base clock speed of 2GHz that boosts up to 5.1GHz, and a thermal design power (TDP) rating of 28W.

More impressively, it has a huge amount of memory. We tested a model with 64GB of Crucial DDR5 RAM, running at 5,600MT/s, but it can also be upgraded to 128GB. Minisforum also sells variants with 32GB and 96GB. You don’t need quite that much for gaming just yet, but it does leave plenty of room for memory-intensive apps you might want to run, such as local AI models. I tested it by running several virtual machines at once, for instance.

Gamers, however, will be more interested in the integrated AMD Radeon 890M GPU, based on the company’s RDNA 3.5 architecture with 16 Compute Units. It doesn’t boast specs that will rival the best graphics card for desktop PCs, but it’s still far more powerful than most mini PC GPUs.

The AI X1 Pro also comes with an OCuLink port, allowing you to hook up an external GPU (eGPU) and use a dedicated graphics card for even better performance for gaming. Many gaming laptops and PCs can also be augmented with an eGPU via a fast USB/Thunderbolt port – such as you can house in the just-announced Razer Core X V2 – but the OCuLink gives you a dedicated port.

For storage, you can choose between a 1TB and 2TB NVMe SSD, running at PCIe 4.0 speeds over four lanes. There’s two spare NVMe slots for further storage upgrades, however one is capped at PCIe 4.0 over just a single lane, which would leave that drive seriously speed-limited compared to the other two. There’s also a built-in SD card slot, accessible on the side of the machine.

Features

Like a lot of top-end mini PCs, there’s plenty of connections on the Minisforum AI X1 Pro. To begin with, it offers both Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support, with two 2.5G Ethernet ports. That leaves plenty of bandwidth capacity for streaming or playing games with low latency, assuming you’ve got a good enough internet connection and network to handle it.

This Minisforum mini gaming PC is pretty stacked on the back I/O, too. There is one DisplayPort 2.0 and one HDMI 2.1 port each for video connections, along with two USB Gen 4 ports with Type-A and Type-C connectors. There’s also the OCuLink port along with a 3.5mm headphone jack for your audio output.

There are more USB connections on the front, with two additional Type-A and one Type-C Gen 4 ports, as well as another 3.5mm port for plugging in a headphone, microphone, or headset. A Copilot button on the front gives instant access to Windows’ AI assistant, while a fingerprint scanner on the top of the case will make it easy to use secure authentication for your PC, whether it’s for your password manager or to sign in and out of Windows itself.

On the side, you’ll also find a micro-SD card reader, which will be handy if you’re using a microSD card with a handheld like the Steam Deck and want to quickly move files between that machine and your PC.

As far as warranty support goes, this Minisforum AI X1 Pro comes with a two-year warranty, along with a 30-day returns period. You can check out the full warranty coverage at the Minisforum website via this link.

Design

Like a lot of premium mini PCs, the Minisforum AI X1 Pro looks very Mac Mini-like, taking a lot of inspiration from Apple’s design. Much of that is down to the silvery aluminum chassis, with its rounded edges and flush inset I/O on the front. It’s bigger than some mini PCs you’ll see on the market, though, taking up 7.67 x 7.67 x 1.67 inches (195 x 195 x 42.5mm) of space.

That’s a footprint larger than the Geekom AX8 Pro, as our Geekom AX8 Pro review shows, although the AI X1 Pro does come with a supplied vertical stand, allowing you to stand the PC up to save space. The AI X1 Pro is hardly enormous, and with a 3.3lbs (1.5kg) weight, it isn’t too heavy to cart around. However, it isn’t as light or small as other mini gaming PC options like the Geekom A6, as we found in our Geekom A6 review.

The bottom and back I/O plates are switched out for black plastic, but they don’t feel cheap, either, with the panels looking smart and feeling strong and rigid.

On the bottom, four rubber feet provide a gap to allow air to flow up through the AI X1 Pro via the rounded fan grill holes at the bottom. The fans get plenty of use, too. In my experience, this is a noisy machine, with the main CPU fan becoming noticeably loud under any kind of load.

That’s often the price to pay when you’re gaming or working on a small machine like this. While the noise was a little distracting, it wasn’t jet-like as the Geekom AX8 Pro sounded under heavy load when I tested that machine.

One thing the AI X1 Pro is good for is upgrades, with both the SSD and RAM slots easily accessible under the bottom panel. Accessing the panel is easy enough, but you’ll need to remove the rubber feet first to be able to access and remove the screws.

Benchmarks

The Minisforum AI X1 Pro has a solid enough GPU in the integrated AMD Radeon 890M, but it isn’t going to blow you away if you’re expecting to see the performance of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 here. 4K is out of the window, and even reliable 1440p performance is a bit of a stretch.

That leaves this machine firmly in 1080p gaming territory for the most consistent experience. Even then, as our benchmarks show, the performance you get isn’t all exactly stellar.

Testing Cyberpunk 2077, we can see that even for a top-end integrated GPU like the Radeon 890M, the AI X1 Pro managed just 45fps on average, using low graphics preset settings, with lows of 35fps. Switching AMD FSR on did bring the frame rate up to above 60fps, but the low starting point at 1080p for the upscaling made it a graphically awful experience – it’s worth just taking the frame rate hit and switching it off entirely.

F1 2024 was much better, however. Running it with low graphics preset, the AI X1 Pro was able to hit 96fps on average, with lows of 85fps. That results in a far more playable experience than Cyberpunk 2077, but F1 2024 is an easier game to run so is to be expecte.

Our final test in Total War: Warhammer 3 showed that this PC can hit a respectable 64fps on average, with lows of 59fps in this game. That’s just over the magic 60fps mark for you to notice decently smooth gameplay, with very few stutters, throughout.

We also put the Minisforum AI X1 Pro through some synthetic benchmark tests. In Cinebench R24, the CPU scored 117 in the single-threaded test and 1,214 in the multi-threaded test. Meanwhile, the 3D Mark’s TimeSpy test showed the AI X1 Pro returned a CPU score of 9,154 and a GPU score of 2,811, with an overall score of 3,161.

Both sets of tests show the CPU is ultimately the powerhouse in this machine, with the AMD Radeon GPU providing decent, but not outrageous, performance. The Cinebench R24 scores are particularly promising, with the faster AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 360 CPU, with its 12-cores and newer Zen 5 architecture, comfortably outperforming the older Zen 4, eight-core AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS used in the Geekom AX8 Pro.

Price

The Minisforum AI X1 Pro is a high end, premium mini PC with powerful mobile-grade hardware. That, unfortunately, means it comes with a premium price tag, with an MSRP that ranges from $1,129 to $1,369, depending on the RAM and SSD options you choose.

Luckily, those prices seem more theoretical than anything, with “sale” prices starting at $899 for 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD, $979 for 64GB RAM and a 1TB SSD, and $1,089 for 96GB RAM and a 2TB SSD. Even at $899, this is one of the most expensive mini PCs on the market today, and while the AMD Radeon 890M is certainly powerful for an integrated GPU, it isn’t on par with a dedicated equivalent.

That makes this mini PC a bit of an oddity from a gaming point of view. The benchmarks prove this is a reasonable gaming machine for casual gamers, but with a $1,089 starting MSRP, there are better options for more serious gamers.

The best gaming laptop models out there, for instance, can be found with dedicated Nvidia GeForce RTX gaming GPUs that offer much better gaming performance.

Verdict

The Minisforum AI X1 Pro is not a budget machine. Aside from slightly slower RAM speeds, everything about it has been made to be pushed to its max. It comes with one of the fastest mobile CPUs on the market right now in the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, which you can couple with a frankly ridiculous 96GB of RAM during purchase, should you wish to.

Ultimately, the Minisforum AI X1 Pro looks and feels high quality, and if you need a performance machine that can replace your main gaming PC or laptop, this could be it. The price is its biggest sticking point, however. The $1,129 starting MSRP for a mini PC is a tough ask, especially when it doesn’t come with a dedicated GPU, although the $899 sale price for the base model does help to make it a more competitive option.

As a product for the average gamer, the Minisforum AI X1 Pro isn’t the best option out there. For casual gamers who need a compact full-sized PC replacement, however, with the option for solid 1080p gaming performance on the side, then the AI X1 Pro will give you that.

Check out our best mini gaming PC guide next, where you can review our selection of some of the best small form factor PCs on the market today.

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