On a whim I bought a MinisForum UM690 Pro (Venus), a small form factor PC to use for light gaming on my TV. It’s fairly beefy for a small box, AMD 6900HX processor, Radeon 680M graphics, 32G of RAM. All for $430 on Amazon. More than double what I paid for the N100 server I bought last year but this was the cheapest I could get for what I wanted. My metric here was something with a real GPU, not just integrated. Then I kept bumping up the price a bit to hit the sweet spot of price / performance / newness. I also picked a dual LAN model in case I want to repurpose it as a router.
Hardware
The hardware seems pretty good. My only complaint is that the fan comes on pretty quickly and is not as quiet as I’d like. It’s nothing terrible, not like the vacuum cleaners of old, but it’s definitely not silent. The BIOS makes it look like there’s two fans maybe?
The GPU is OK but not amazing, benchmarks and specs put it at ⅓rd of a Radeon 1080 or 2x a Steam Deck.
At full synthetic load the system pulls about 90W. CPU is at 80°, GPU is at 60°. Fan is noisy but not awful. During normal light use it’s about 30W and the fan is a very quiet hum. 60W playing DRG: Survivor, a light 3d game. Idle is 10W and full sleep mode is 1.5W. It’s not great thermal engineering but it seems to do the job.
I have a beloved Logitech K830 wireless keyboard/mouse that I’m using with it now. Curious about weirdo keyboards like this one: obviously no good for regular typing but enough for pressing a few buttons to log in or launch something.
For games I’m using an old Xbox controller with the unobtainium USB dongle. The pairing is flaky and won’t wake the system from sleep. I gather Xbox controllers are still the best choice for PCs. 8BitDo also makes good controllers for cheaper, I’ve pre-ordered the Ultimate 2C. Note there’s a feeling you’d rather have proprietary wireless because Bluetooth has high variable latency.
Windows 11
Windows 11 sure does not spark joy. There’s so many upsells and manipulations from Microsoft I feel like I’m fighting a war. OFGB is a help with that. I was originally going to reinstall Windows because I wasn’t sure I trusted whatever MinisForum installed but it seems fine. No bloatware at all. It does come with a Windows 11 Home license so that’s a bit of a nuisance, I’d really like Pro so I had remote desktop access. I may yet buy a cheap license key to upgrade.
I had a brief moment of excitement when I flashed the BIOS and it rebooted demanding my BitLocker key. I guess the drive is encrypted? I had no idea what the key might be. Fortunately Microsoft has a thoughtful recovery system, the BIOS displayed a URL to visit and I found my key there in my Microsoft account. All this stuff requires networks and logins of course but these days I just accept that’s the thing.
MinisForum has a nice driver distribution in the support page. Nothing too exotic, mostly it’s just AMD drivers. The only problem I’ve fun into is nothing seems to be able to read the fan speed. Hardly a big deal.
Software
I’m resisting the urge to install too much on this machine. Keep telling myself it’s for games, not a real working machine.
Steam, of course, for games. Its Big Picture mode is really nice. I haven’t yet figured out how to get the computer to boot into this mode, it may not be possible since Windows really wants you to type some sort of login PIN or something when the computer starts. That also means I need to keep a keyboard around, ugh. (“Local only account” I think is the solution for the PIN but I haven’t tried it.)
Playnite is an interesting alternative cross-platform game launcher. I gave it a quick try and I think I’ll stick with Steam. Playnite is interesting if you are playing a lot of games from other sources. The UI is pretty databasey though and it lacks Steam’s great “show only controller games” filter. Also doesn’t seem to fully support controller itself although it does in full screen. I do like how it uses IGDB though.
I’ve also installed UltraVNC for remote access. It’s clumsy software but does seem to work. The remote access world has gotten real weird, there’s a zillion different products out there that all seem a bit sketchy. VNC is still alive and well, TightVNC is the other one that comes recommended. RustDesk also looked interesting to me for something new.
I installed Controller Companion. It’s a $3 Steam app that lets you use a game controller as a keyboard and mouse replacement. The mouse is great but the on-screen keyboard is clumsy. But it does kind of work and seems useful. It’s nearly abandonware: the last real work was in 2017 and the last update at all was 2020. JoyXOff is a free alternative that had an update in the last year.
I’m having problems swapping between a running game and other stuff. Big Picture is 2160p and the game is 1080p fullscreen and when I Alt-Tab out of the game, Big Picture is in a window covering the top ¼ only. I think it’s supposed to be full screen though, maybe I didn’t tab to it on top?
I had a maddening problem where games would only run at 1080p 30Hz with vsync turned on. Without vsync they’d run at 120fps, so it wasn’t the GPU not keeping up. Finally figured out Windows had for some reason decided to run the display adapter at 2160p 30Hz, despite all the cables and monitor working fine at 60Hz. Took awhile to figure out: the Very Fancy AMD Adrenaline software that claims to optimize everything never noticed. Neither did Windows, nor Steam.
Nelson's log 