Minisforum has a new mini PC that is trying to be more than a desk ornament. The M2 pairs Intel’s Core Ultra 7 356H with a five-inch chassis, starts at $575 barebones, and climbs to $1,039 if you want 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD preinstalled.
That price spread matters because Minisforum is clearly pitching two audiences: tinkerers who want to build their own machine and buyers who want a ready-made box for AI work or a compact home server. With mini PCs, the spec sheet often does the heavy lifting. Here, the interesting bit is not just size, but how much hardware Minisforum squeezed inside it.
Core Ultra 7 356H, 128GB RAM, and 8TB storage
The M2 uses Intel’s Panther Lake architecture, and the Core Ultra 7 356H is a 16-core, 16-thread chip with a 45W TDP. Minisforum says the chip’s combined AI performance reaches 90 TOPS, split between a 50 TOPS NPU and a 40 TOPS integrated GPU. That puts the machine squarely in the current wave of ”local AI” PCs, where vendors are selling the promise of running models without handing every prompt to the cloud.
Memory support is the real headline for power users. The M2 can take up to 128GB of DDR5-5600 RAM across two SO-DIMM slots, and storage tops out at 8TB through two M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 slots. In practical terms, that makes the box more interesting for running open-source large language models locally than for casual browsing, which is probably the point.
- Processor: Intel Core Ultra 7 356H
- Memory: up to 128GB DDR5-5600
- Storage: two M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 slots, up to 8TB
- AI performance: 90 TOPS total
Ports and networking suit a home lab
Minisforum also gave the M2 a port mix that makes sense for people who actually use mini PCs as utility machines. On the back are two 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, which make the device a plausible soft router or small NAS. It also supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, plus HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, and a front-facing USB4 port for data, video, and power delivery.
Three 4K displays are supported at once, which is a tidy flex for something this small. The chassis measures 130 by 127 by 50mm, weighs 520 grams, and includes a VESA mount so it can disappear behind a monitor. Cooling comes from a dual heat pipe design and a centrifugal fan, with Minisforum saying the CPU hits about 78 degrees Celsius under full load and produces around 42.5dB of noise.
A crowded field for Panther Lake mini PCs
The M2 lands in a fast-moving niche. Chuwi recently introduced the AuBox X Mini PC with an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V and triple 8K display support, while Dell has also entered the picture with the Pro 5 Micro Mini PC powered by Intel Panther Lake CPUs. That kind of overlap usually means the battle will be less about raw processor bragging rights and more about price, thermals, and how much RAM each vendor is willing to let buyers stuff inside.
For now, Minisforum is betting that a compact chassis, dual Ethernet, and serious memory capacity will be enough to stand out. The bigger question is whether buyers shopping for local AI hardware want a mini PC that can do everything, or one that does one or two jobs extremely well. The market for small boxes with oversized ambitions is getting crowded fast, and that usually forces the better products to prove themselves the hard way: in real use, not on a spec sheet.