All Things 3D

It is pretty sad when you hype a Minisforum product, in this case the and series of Mini PCs which are still the world’s smallest AMD APU based PCs out there (and now the world’s SMALLEST STEAM BOX), but at the time when they were first released they were pricey. Now a year later, they seemed to be discontinued but you can still find refurbished units on their refurbished site ( https://refurbished.minisforum.com/products/refurbished-minisforum-em680-em780 ) for less than half the price. Why talk about them now? It seems they are perfect match for loading from Valve ‘s recovery ROM and updating to SteamOS 3.8 - making it the smallest “Steam Box!” Paired with XREAL glasses , a compact 8BitDo gamepad and portable keyboard, along with a number of 100W battery packs, some just a little larger than the EMx80 allows for hours of gaming (my favorite, as seen in the image, is the Powdeom 100W, 24500mAH column battery). Not only does it allow rocksteady PD 20VDC at 100W, but it also remains close to its 88.56 Wh capacity, which means if you are drawing 20W per hour, you will see 4 hours of operation. Obviously if you run this at 45W (available if you install their custom BIOS ROM), you are only going to see a couple of hours of gaming, but the neat thing is you can charge it without disconnecting it and more important it does not disrupt the power briefly allowing you to continue playing without powering down. This means you can power it with a 120W AC power supply (needed for charging while playing) or even another LiION based power bank. Another advantage of the EMx80 series of mini PCs is the two USB-C ports that allow PD 20V power at the same time. Allowing you to connect a battery to one, and AC to the other. These too allow for instant switchover, again preventing you from losing power while in the middle of a game. That being said, there is NO built in battery, so if you lose power to both, you will shutdown hard, possibly corrupting the boot drive. Windows is more problamatic to losing power while in operation, but SteamOS is more resilent and have not once had to enter a recovery mode after many power removals (a problem when you are testing new design and setups) as has happened as I am designing my own 180Wh battery system that magnetically attaches to the bottom in the same form factor and also send via USB data like a UPS to prevent hard shutdowns.

So why am I sad? I have been promoting “The Worlds Smallest Steam Box” on YouTube and Reddit lately and identifying the low price of refurbisheed units. Yesterday I placed one in the cart, this morning it was gone. THEY HAVE SOLD OUT OF THE EM780! Now I won’t be able to test the other part of my goal. To create the “The World’s Smallest SteamVR system, attached to the Bigscreen Beyond series or VR goggles. Of course you won’t be able to use these at their highest resolution, but for lower resolution I have already been able to play “Air Car” using SteamOS and SteamVR together. With the EM780 I was hoping due to its more powerful 780M GPU, to play Valve’s Half-Life Alyx. I guess that won’t ever happen since MinisForum has sold out of this model (but the EM680 with 32GB/512GB storage is still avaiable for $279 Still a killer deal).