This mini PC challenged the Mac Mini to a battle and arrived 2 years late

I love mini PCs every since I got my hands on one, and Minisforum has made some of the best ones I’ve tried. The Minisforum AI X1 Pro is not one of those. Don’t get me wrong, there are qualities to this product, with fairly powerful performance and a decent design.

But I had too many problems with it, and it just seems to be out of touch with the modern mini PC market. It’s big, somewhat loud, and worst of all, the Wi-Fi was nearly unusable for me. I have a hard time recommending this PC, even though it’s not terrible.

About this review: Minisforum sent me the AI X1 Pro for the purposes of this review. The company had no input in its content.

Minisforum AI X1 Pro pricing and availability

Minisforum announced the AI X1 Pro early on in 2025, and it became available for sale near the beginning of March through the company’s official website

The Minisforum AI X1 Pro comes in a few RAM and storage configurations, and it officially starts at $1,129 for a model with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. You can go all the way up to 96GB of RAM and 2TB of storage out of the box, though, which increases the price to $1,369 outside of discounts. All models seem to be on sale right now, so prices start as low as $899.

It’s as big as a Mac Mini

No, not the one you’re thinking of

When this PC was initially pitched to me (not by Minisforum directly, to be fair), one of the points made was that it’s the same size as the Mac Mini. But that’s the M2-based Mac Mini, while the latest M4 model is far smaller. I always believed that the previous Mac Mini models had no business being called mini PCs when other companies such as Geekom and Khadas were making PCs that are actually tiny. And Minisforum just barged into the party with a PC that’s about the same size as the old Mac Mini, which is not exactly exciting.

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That being said, there is a lot more going on here. The Minisforum AI X1 Pro has two USB4 ports, three USB Type-A ports, both HDMI and DisplayPort, dual 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports for advanced networking, and even an OCuLink connection if you want to use an external GPU with it. Plus, there’s a fingerprint reader here, which the Mac Mini lacks, dual speakers compared to the single speaker of the Mac Mini, and built-in microphones, whereas most mini PCs have none. There’s also a Copilot button, which does exactly what you’d expect.

The larger size also accommodates some nice perks on the inside, with dual-fan cooling for improved performance, a built-in power supply as opposed to most other mini PCs (though the Mac Mini also has one), dual SODIMM slots for RAM expansion and a whopping three M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 slots for additional SSD storage. It’s a fairly impressive combination of hardware specs we have here, and the chassis is still relatively small all things considered. It’s just barely comparable to other mini PCs.

In fact, I also can’t help thinking about another mini PC from Minisforum, the MS-A1 I reviewed last year. With a very similar size, that model included an actual desktop CPU which you can upgrade later with another AM5 processor. This doesn’t allow for that, which just reinforces how large this PC is for seemingly no reason.

While we’re on the topic of design, it’s also worth mentioning that you can set the Minisforum AI X1 Pro horizontally or vertically with the included stand. You can also mount it on the back of a supported monitor with a VESA mounting bracket.

This CPU is fast

Wi-Fi, on the other hand…

I need to get this out of the way before anything else: the Wi-Fi experience on the Minisforum AI X1 Pro is bad. The Minisforum AI X1 Pro often provided barely usable internet in my office, with speed tests showing speeds of about 54Mbps on a good day. Downloads take forever, and on worse days, things like using Discord or Google Meet were simply out of the question.

Whenever I talk about my Wi-Fi problems, people like to tell me I need to be closer to the router or have fewer walls in between me and the router — as if I don’t have other devices that work perfectly fine. My Mac Mini, used on the same desk in the same room, once showed me download speeds upward of 800Mbps, and not once have I had any internet problems with the Wi-Fi connection there.

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This seems to be the result of combining an AMD processor with a MediaTek Wi-Fi chip. I mention this because it’s the second time I have this exact problem, and the first time was when I reviewed the Geekom A8, which was also when I discovered that it’s common for some AMD/MediaTek devices to have bad Wi-Fi performance. There could be other factors at play, but this is a strange coincidence.

Setting that aside, however, we have a PC with very strong performance here, likely what you’d expect from an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. In terms of CPU performance, the Minisforum AI X1 Pro outclassed even the Mac Mini in terms of multi-core performance. However, the GPU tests show that Apple still has the lead here, even though my scores were a little below average for this hardware.

The PC also comes with up to 96GB of RAM, and my review unit specifically has 64GB, which can allow for very demanding tasks like running large language models (LLMs) on the device. If you’ve heard all the hubbub about Deepseek R1, you can run a distilled version of it here.

As impressive as the performance can be in benchmarks, there are some things that you only really notice while using a computer daily. The Minisforum AI X1 Pro can run the AI Denoise filter in Adobe Lightroom on a 24MP RAW photo in about 40 seconds, which is very close to what I got with the Mac Mini. However, when I run this filter on the AI X1 Pro, everything else slows down to a crawl while I do it. My ongoing Discord call becomes incredibly stuttery, and everything is just delayed. The Mac Mini can run this filter and everything else still runs smoothly while it does. This might be a problem with Windows PCs at large, though, as this isn’t the first time I’ve seen that.

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Additionally, even when it’s idle, the computer’s fans are clearly audible, and even more so during heavy workloads like photo editing. I can’t help but compare it to how silently the Mac Mini runs pretty much all the time.

Should you buy the Minisforum AI X1 Pro?

I don’t know if I can really recommend the Minisforum AI X1 Pro to a lot of people. There’s certainly some capable hardware here, but ultimately, this is a relatively large mini PC with performance that can’t really match something like the Mac Mini on the whole. That being said, if you’re a Windows user, this is one of the more powerful mini PCs out there, and the larger size accommodates better cooling and solid expansion options. I just think it’s in an awkward middle ground where it’s not truly tiny, but it’s not properly upgradable like a larger PC would be.

Of course, that’s assuming you can overlook the poor Wi-Fi performance at longer distances. If you plan to use the Ethernet ports, it shouldn’t matter, but Wi-Fi is very bad on this machine, and that makes it hard to recommend for me.

Minisforum AI X1 Pro

$899 $1129 Save
$230

The Minisforum AI X1 Pro has a powerful processor and lots of connectivity options, but falls short in too many ways to be easy to recommend.