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MINISFORUM has been selling small form-factor desktop computers for a few years, but the new MINISFORUM Mercury EM680 is the company’s tiniest system to date.

It measures 80 x 80 x 43mm (3.15″ x 3.15″ x 1.69″), making it almost small enough to slide into a pocket. But it has the guts of a reasonably good laptop computer, including an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor, up to 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory and a user-replaceable PCIe 4.0 SSD.

At first glance the little computer seems a lot like the 2.8 inch or 3.4 inch mini PCs that have been making the rounds for the past few years. But those systems are usually powered by Intel Jasper Lake or Alder Lake-N low-power processors, while the EM680 has a 28-watt chip that should deliver significantly better performance thanks to a combination of 8 Zen 3+ CPU cores and 12 RDNA 2 GPU compute units

The Ryzen 7 6800U offers performance that’s good enough to make the EM680 a contender for use as your primary computer rather than a secondary device, and the Radeon 680M graphics are powerful enough that this chip has been popular with handheld gaming PC makers over the past year.

That said, this isn’t exactly a no-compromise form factor. The RAM is soldered to the mainboard, which means it’s not user upgradeable. Instead of an M.2 2280 slot for storage, the system has an M.2 2230 slot which could make it harder to find compatible SSDs.

But MINISFORUM offers customers the chance to buy a system with a decent amount of memory and storage pre-installed:

RAM + SSDPre-order priceRetail price
16GB + 512GB$399$499
32GB + 512GB$449$559
32GB + 1TB$489$609

The company says the EM680 should begin shipping to customers in late June, 2023.

Another necessary compromise when making a system this small? There’s more room for ports than you’d find on a laptop, but fewer ports than you’ll get with some larger desktop PCs.

Here’s what you get with the MINISFORUM EM680:

  • 2 x USB4 (with DisplayPort Alt Mode and USB Power Delivery)
  • 3 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
  • 1 x HDMI 2.1
  • 1 x 3.5mm audio jack
  • 1 x microSD card reader

The system has a wireless card with support for WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, supports up to three displays, and comes with a small 65W GaN USB Type-C power adapter.

MINISFORUM seems to be committed to this form factor – the company also showed off a similarly-sized EM780 mini PC at Computex last week. That model appears to have the same design as the EM680, but it will ship with an AMD Ryzen 7040U series processor rather than a Ryzen 7 6800U chip, which means it will have Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 graphics.

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  1. You can put it in your pocket…. and then what? No LAN, no RAM upgrade… very niche product

    1. The specs page above doesn’t say. As thunderbolt is mostly an Intel domain, I wouldn’t count on it. But it does say: USB4 (8K@60Hz) ×2. So, if it’s your hope to hook displays to those USB C’s, as long as one delivers power, it looks like it’ll do it.