Minisforum releases N5 NAS with unusual AMD Ryzen APU starting at under $550
Seemingly, the Ryzen 7 255 misses out on the 16 TOPS NPU that AMD includes with the Ryzen 7 260. In that sense, it looks like the Ryzen 7 255 is a rebadged Ryzen 7 8745HS, itself a lower wattage version of the Ryzen 7 8745H that AMD only offers in China. As a result, the Ryzen 7 255 will likely perform significantly worse in AI tasks. Likewise, 100 MHz downclocks will likely yield slight performance drops in CPU and GPU tasks compared to the Ryzen 7 260. Elsewhere, the Minisforum N5 features the same core components as the company's more powerful N5 Pro variant. For instance, the N5 offers dual DDR5 SO-DIMM slots for up to 96 GB of 5,600 MT/s RAM. An important distinction to note is that the N5 does not support ECC RAM like its Pro counterpart. Other I/O appears unchanged though, such as 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps LAN connections, a PCIe x16 (PCIe 4.0 x4) slot and OCuLink connectivity. Moreover, the N5 can run Linux, MinisCloud OS or Windows 11 Pro. Currently, the Minisforum N5 starts at $553 when applying the coupon code NAS30 at checkout without any RAM but with 64 GB of storage . Alternatively, Minisforum offers a variant with 16 GB of pre-installed RAM for a $48 surcharge. Please see Minisforum's website for more details.