Minisforum, maker of compact PCs, has announced its AR900i ITX motherboard featuring the Intel Core i9-13900HX mobile processor. Barely wider than the I/O shield, the AR900i should fit in any chassis you want.
The AR900i measures 170mm x 170mm and comes equipped with a 32-thread (8P + 16E) mobile CPU. The latter is rated for 55W but can boost up to 157W for a short duration. To cool it, the AR900i is bundled with a low-height heatsink that can be upgraded with an additional 120mm fan to improve its performance. Minisforum claims that its integrated cooling system supports up to 100W configurations.
The board has space for two M.2 2280 Gen4 SSDs, one M.2 2230 Key-E, plus a PCIe Gen 5 x16. It also supports up to 96GB of DDR5-5600 RAM in dual-channel mode. Minisforum cools the M.2 slots with an active solution, helping sustain performance under long loads. Note that Minisforum also talks about another two M.2 slots on the rear, but doesn’t give more information about them.
While Minisforum includes a CPU with the board, you’ll need to provide your own SODIMM memory, M.2 SSDs, PSU, and chassis. The Fractal Design Terra case is a perfect candidate for the latter.
Even though the air exhaust takes a chunk of the I/O, there’s still one HDMI 2.0, one DisplayPort 1.4, and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, allowing for a triple screen setup up to 8K. Alongside these, we also get two USB 3.2 Gen 1, two USB 2.0, a 2.5GbE port, and three 3.5mm audio jacks. That’s a fair few potential wires for such a tiny thing. There’s also Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 if you want ditch cords.
This is not the first time Minisforum has released this kind of compact platform. Previously, the brand launched a near identical solution dubbed BD770i featuring AMD’s Ryzen 7 7745HX 16-thread mobile CPU and AMD Radeon 610M integrated graphics.
The AR900i motherboard is available on Minisforum’s store at a discounted £549 / $559. Not bad for such a combo.
