If you’re interested in mini PCs, you’ll be familiar with Minisforum. This manufacturer is often very daring in presenting avant-garde products that are particularly well placed. We’ll soon be presenting a project to equip our studio with a Minisforum solution. But in the meantime, the company has just launched a new product that looks like a NAS…but is in fact much more than that. Announced a few weeks ago, the brand has finally opened orders, and expects to deliver in July. There are 2 versions of the N5, sharing the same compact chassis that weighs 5 kg and measures 199 x 202 x 252 mm. The first is powered by a Ryzen 7 255 and a top-of-the-range version is equipped with a Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370.
Minisforum N5 Pro: a UFO for content management
If you look at the N5 and N5 PRO from the NAS angle, you have a chassis offering five 3.5″ bays that can accommodate conventional hard disks or 2.5″ SSDs. But internally, you’ll still have three M.2 ports combining different formats. All in all, you can count on up to 144TB of hybrid storage, with a choice of RAID modes.
Turning now to the heart of the N5 Pro, we can see that this product is indeed a UFO, as its use really goes beyond the realm of simple NAS. Equipped with the Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370, a 12-core processor based on the Zen 5 + Zen 5C architecture, with single-core speeds of up to 5.1 GHz you can also consider handling intensive workloads such as 4K video transcoding, multi-user access and simultaneous transfers of large volumes of data. In our case, we could see it reprocessing all our images on the fly. Because in addition to storage and computing power, on paper we’ll also be able to use AI for our photos. Equipped with a 50 TOPS NPU and a Radeon 890M GPU, the system offers up to 80 TOPS of AI performance on the device, a power that enables image recognition and semantic photo search.
But things don’t stop there, since the network is also very muscular, with a 10G port and a 5G port that can do aggregation. If you’re impatient and nearby, you can also connect via USB 4 at 40Gbps. And there’s more to come, as you can see from this photo.
Obviously, we’re no longer talking about the price of a Mini PC. But given all the possibilities offered by this product, we think you really should pay attention. At overclocking.com we’ve already got plenty of ideas on the subject. But let’s talk price. The big version will make your CB suffer at a price of €1199. However, for the launch, the brand is offering a 30% discount on the price with the code N5Pro30. The other configurations are all available on the brand’s website here.
If you want to dig a little deeper into the subject and the possibilities of this NAS, Minisforum has published a video with several explanations, exchanges and questions: https://www.youtube.com/live/qH7WaH9h0UU?si=jD9b78f8pn7aQ7Cz
