Both of these companies are huge in the mini PC space. Most people have never heard of them because all they do is mini PCs.
Minisforum latest 7940HS lines are better than M2. More powerful, fairly close on power efficiency, better GPU, cheaper, and without all the nonsense that comes with buying Macs. Their fully juiced model is $800 (and doesn't lock you in to a model that milks casb from you like a sow).
There is also the fact that the AMD CPU is newer, has a 50% higher TDP, and is built on a smaller node, but is far from providing 50% better performance than the M2 [0]
On the other hand, I don't own a Mini, nor I'm on the market for a mini PC, but I don't feel like dropping $800 for a prebuilt PC unless they provide stellar support and warranty, and chinese OEMs aren't really known for that.
It isn't. As the Reddit link explains, the only benchmarks it wins in are synthetics.
You can play Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p at over 60fps. You can produce all the synthetic benchmarks in the world but this is as powerful as a console. This is the most powerful iGPU out there, it is about as powerful as 1060.
I'm not sure what Beelink is supposed to be mistaken for. I only know them for their micro-PCs and I'm not familiar with another brandname that it is supposed to remind me of.
I hadn't heard of Minisforum though. But the same goes there - not sure what is is supposed to be mistaken for.
I just priced the Ryzen Lenovo ultra small form factor, which is smaller than a Mac Mini and only slightly larger than a Playstation 2 slim, and it was £500 rather than £400 but other than that those numbers didn't seem far off the mark.
The Mini comes with an internal PSU, though. All these mini PCs come with external PSUs, some hilariously large at over half the size of the PC itself.
This is true about it being an external PSU, but it is nowhere near 1/2 the size of the computer.
I have one because I was able to get an i5 that was passively cooled, so great for a Plex server that's second hand for only £100. The PSU is more like 1/8th, maybe smaller.
I happen to own a Lenovo Thinkcentre. The PSU is perhaps 1/3 the volume of the computer itself, which I think is crazy for a computer with a mobile chip inside.
I know that some Intel NUCs have monstrous PSUs [0], which I think should constitute false advertising regarding the actual size of the computers.
Fair enough, if I had got that Intel one I would probably have a similar opinion. The power brick I have is about the size of the small Lenovo travel power supplies, maybe about 25% of that Intel one, at a guess without seeing it in person.
It's definitely smaller than 1/3 the volume of the unit unless I have a incredibly small form factor rather than an ultra small form factor unit? But I don't think so. It is very small.
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