Minisforum has shown off its new Mini-ITX motherboards for next-gen Mini PCs featuring AMD Dragon Range & Intel Raptor Lake-HX Mobile CPUs with up to 24 cores.
16-Core AMD Dragon Range & 24-Core Intel Raptor Lake-HX Mobile CPUs Coming To Mini-ITX Motherboards For Enthusiast Mini PCs
The majority of Mini PCs available today max out at either 8 cores (AMD) or 14 cores (Intel). This is because they use BGA parts and that's the maximum limitation on mobile platforms. However, with AMD and Intel's latest enthusiast offerings, things are going to change very soon.
The pre-built Mini PC ecosystem is designed around the BGA form factor since socketed designs require more cooling and additional room. We have seen a lot of Mini PCs reusing mobile SKUs in the past but so far, we haven't seen a lot with higher-end offerings. Intel was the first to release a desktop-grade chip for laptops in a BGA form factor with its Alder Lake-HX 12th Gen lineup and the company recently extended it with the 13th Gen Raptor Lake-HX offerings. AMD also tackled back with its own Dragon Range-HX parts.
This opened up an opportunity within the Mini PC segment which can now put the same high-end BGA chips on Mini-ITX form factor motherboards and use it for their next-gen PCs. Minisforum is the first to display such options at its Computex booth. The vendor showed off both AMD Dragon Range (Ryzen 9 7945HX) 16-Core and Intel Raptor Lake-HX (Core i9-13900HX) options at Computex.
Both motherboards are very similar in design and feature two SO-DIMM slots, a single PCIe Gen 4.0 x16 slot, and dual M.2 slots. The power is provided through a single 8-pin connector & you get all of the latest I/O. These Mini-ITX motherboards are going to be used for more high-performance Mini PCs where additional cores are required. The PCIe slot will be connected through a riser cable that will extend to a separate compartment that can house a dual and maybe even a triple-slot card.
Currently, there's no ETA on when we can see these Mini-ITX motherboards in action but since the company has already finalized most of the design, we can get some products announced later this year. These options will be great for the Mini-ITX and Mini PC segment and it's great to see vendors such as Minisforum innovating and offering a diverse set of solutions here.
