I bought a MinisForum UM790 Pro just over 18 months ago. It generally worked just fine - I bought it barebones and kitted it out with 2x 2TB Samsung nvme drives and 64gb of ram. It was a beast of a HTPC and emulated just about everything I threw at it amazingly well. However, every so often it just restarted for no clear reason. It would sometimes be idling away and it would sometimes be under load.

The UM790 Pro is an absolute beast…when it’s stable

The instability got pretty bad at one point and I upgraded the Bios..which didn’t fix it. I tweaked a few settings and it generally got to the point it was only restarting a couple of times a week. There are plenty of threads on Reddit etc from people who have had similar issues. After many hours, I get the impression that the fault may lie more with AMD than with MinisForum and that supplying power to the diffrerent compoenents of the board was something of an issue.

Lots of people complain about the Chinese brands of MiniPC on the market now - MinisForum, GMKTek, Beelink etc. I get it. It was part of the reason I spent a little more to replace my Intel NUC server with an Asus model. I wanted slightly more assurance from an established brand that it wouldn’t spontaneously burn my apartment down!

However, I recently had a great experience with MinisForum customer support. I read that they actually offered a two year warranty on their PCs. I too a chance and mailed the support. Response took a few days (understandable - it was Chinese New Year) and I had to ChatGPT everything to/from Chinese, but they required some basic information and then sent me a mail with a delivery tracking number. They had a arranged for the PC to be picked (no charge to me) and examined at a service centre.

It took a couple of weeks (I got told to be a bit more patient when I emailed them after a week asking if there had been any progress), but the PC got returned to me by the delivery company (again, no charge to me). Since it has arrived, it hasn’t restarted a single time. It has been a couple of weeks now and I basically consider the unit fixed. I have no idea what they did- there has been no communication from them about it. However, the fact that they picked it up and delivered it back to my door with absolutely minimal fuss has really changed my mind on the company. I wasn’t in a rush to really ever buy from them again, but now I think it’s almost certain that the UM790 Pro will be replaced with another MinisForum PC in the future.

That said, that probably won’t happen too soon. The UM790 Pro is an absolute beast. It’s tiny, it’s quiet, it has enough I/O for peripherals - I’m happy!

Here’s a review from Patrick at servethehome.com about the UM790Pro: