The BD790i SE is MINISFORUM's latest Mini-ITX motherboard option, having released the BD770i andBD790iin October 2023 and February 2024, respectively. As far as we can tell, the BD790i SE effectively replaces theBD770i, which MINISFORUM has now stopped selling.

Accordingly, the BD790i SE is much cheaper than the BD790i, which comes with an AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX APU for $539. By contrast, the BD790i SE features the Ryzen 9 7940HX, which trails the Ryzen 9 7945HX by about 4% in our benchmarks. Please note that while theRyzen 9 7940HXcontains sixteen Zen 4 CPU cores, its Radeon 610M iGPU is not powerful enough for modern triple-A gaming.

Thankfully, the BD790i SE also has a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot for adding a dedicated graphics card. Meanwhile, a pair of M.2 2280 (PCIe 4.0) slots handle SSD expansion, which MINISFORUM complements with dual SODIMMs for up to 64 GB of DDR5-5200 RAM. On top of that, the BD790i SE features ports like DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and a variety of USB ports. Currently, the BD790i SE is available from MINISFORUM directly for $359 or Amazon for $374.90. Please see Amazon's and MINISFORUM's product listings for further details.