Leo Says Ep. 80: Ryzen AI Max Looks Great… So Why Did I Buy This?

At CES 2025 we saw some fabulous new products based on AMD's new Ryzen AI Max and Max+ 395 chip. These highly integrated PCs from HP promise great things and look fascinating however both the price and delivery date are unknown. By contrast we know the price of the three versions of Framework Desktop and we know that delivery will take many months, which leaves us in a bit of a quandary.

Time stamps

00:00 Start
00:49 Ryzen AI and upcoming solutions
04:54 Minisforum BD795i spec
05:42 A closer look / Install
07:51 PC is up and running
09:02 Benchmarks / Discrete GPU
10:22 FarCry 6
10:37 Leo's thoughts

Minisforum BD795i SE ITX motherboard key features:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX – 16 cores/32 threads Zen 4
Power: ATX
Integrated Graphics: AMD Radeon 610M with 2 Graphics Cores, RDNA 2.0
Support for PCIe 5.0 graphics
TDP: Default 55W, 100W sustained
Memory: DDR5 SODIMMs

The obvious move was to buy something completely different that is actually available, and that is how I came to take delivery of a Minisforum BD795i SE ITX motherboard along with 64GB of DDR5 SODMIMM memory. The integrated graphics are fairly dire so thank goodness for the PCIe graphics slot!

KitGuru says: Minisforum has mounted a Zen 4 laptop Ryzen 9 CPU on a desktop ITX motherboard and the result is impressive.  

Become a Patron!