Minisforum BD770i (Mobile on Desktop) Motherboard Impressions

Started seeing these sort of MoDt boards pop up over the last year or so;




Market seems to have grown a bit since then and took the plunge on the Minisforum BD770i board which is the Ryzen 7 7745HX variant. Overall roughly about $600 landed here, figured it'd be perfect in a mITX gaming system with the lower TDP and I've been getting itchy build wise.

Board arrived this morning (yes on a sunday) so what better to do than muck around with it for a bit.


It comes with a cooler preinstalled which stands at 37mm, haven't looked underneath yet but I understand that this is direct die. The little 40mm fan is for the M2 heatsink which holds 2x M2 drives on the topside of the motherboard, which I think is pretty neat.


Pretty cool mounting system too as you just pull the tag back and insert the ssd.


back is a bit barebones which is honestly kind of refreshing.

Installing the IO shield was a bit of a pain as you have to unscrew the network antenna nuts all the way out. But here's everything installed and a 25mm fan (Artic P12) all mounted up.




BIOS options, as expected are super basic.

Waiting for some other parts to arrive for now but banged in 32GB ram, a BIOS update and have run some quick benchmarks to get a gauge on general performance.

Cinebench R23


Geekbench


The processor itself does the thing where it'll boost as high as it can or throttle at around 91-92C, at a total package power of around 100w. Typically will go to 5ghz but did see clocks drop to around 4.5-4.6ghz during the multicore benchmarks.

Happy enough with it so far but I think I came in with the right expectations, this isn't a $900 namebrand motherboard. Keen to see how this goes more longer term in a gaming mITX build, just need to wait for these other parts to rock up.

 

Wow I thought they were pricier than that, $600aud seems more palatable. How much did the RAM set you back?

Looks like fairly solid performance from a MoDT - I'm sure it won't compete with 8700G with fast RAM but it's also not really designed to!

 

some more benchmarks

Looking around and all these numbers put this chip somewhere between the 7700x and 7600x desktop parts. More than happy with that, especially at the 100W package.

Running the Artic P12 with the heatsink and it's not audible at all. Granted it is basically still sitting on an open bench at this point, but thinking I might whack on a slim fan and see how I go depending on where I settle case wise.

RAM is DDR5 notebook ram, grabbed a 32GB crucial kit for $150 or so. Thought the chip supported 5600mhz but looks like it only does 5200mhz. Be interesting to see if there are any gains to be had with a lower latency kit but can't imagine that there would be any huge differences. Not that I have any bios options to muck around with that at the moment

 

I'd love this in a console style case

 

That's a huge bummer about the RAM, given how dependent on RAM speed the iGPU is! Fingers crossed they work out a way around that, or you can tighten some timings at least