Comparing Minisforum B550 with Intel NUC 11 Extreme

Recently Minisforum launched a powerful AMD chip mini PC, the B550. It is a mini PC with dock to connect with a discrete graphics card. Here is a hardware and interfaces comparison between B550 and a very popular mini PC, the Intel NUC 11 Extreme.

First let’s take a look at the processor. The B550 use AMD B550 chipset which can support various AMD 4000 and 5000 series CPUs with TDP lower or equal to 65W. Minisforum also sells the mini PC with 5700G. The 65W eight-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 5700G comes with a 3.8 GHz base and a 4.6 GHz boost clock, 16MB of L3 cache, and eight Radeon RX Vega CUs that operate at 2.0 GHz. As with all Zen 3 processors, the Ryzen 5000G chips step up from DDR4-2933 to DDR4-3200 interface, which will help boost gaming performance with the integrated GPU. On the other hand, the NUC 11 Extreme comes with a Core i9-11900K CPU. It is a 14nm process desktop processor with 8 cores, 16 threads. It uses the Rocket Lake-S architecture. It has 16MB of L3 cache and operates at 3.5 GHz by default and can be boosted up to 5.3GHz. However, according to PCMAG, the chip is rated around 400MHz slower on the Max Turbo Boost clocking than the standard Intel Core i9-11900K.

For GPU, both mini PC can support most 2-slot GPUs on the market. NUC is limited to 12 inches long while the B550 have no length limitation.

Memory and storage expansion wise, both can support up to 64GB of dual channel DDR4 memory across two SO-DIMM slots. However, the B550 has two M.2 slots supporting 2280 SSDs while the NUC has 4 M.2 slots.

For interfaces, the NUC 11 Extreme has 2x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A, SD card slot, headphone jack, 6x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports, Ethernet ports, HDMI 2.0b, 2x Thunderbolt 4 ports, Lock slot. The Minisforum B550 has 2xHDMI ports, 1xDisplay ports, 4xUSB3.2 ports, 1xUSB-C port, 1xRJ45 2.5Gb Ethernet port, 1x line out and 1x mic. We can see that the NUC has 1 more USB ports, 1 SD card slot and 2 more thunderbolt ports than the B550 but 1 less HDMI port and 1 less Display port than the B550. And the Ethernet port on the B550 is 2.5Gb while the NUC has a 1GB Ethernet port.

Price wise, the NUC 11 Extreme is about $1350 for the Core i9-11900K version bare kit while the Minisforum B550 Ryzen 7 5700G barebone is about $600 on the Minisforum site.