MOREFINE M9 Pro Mini PC Review - Powered by Intel Core i7-1260P Processor
In the realm of Mini PCs, the Intel Core platform holds a distinct advantage due to its superior single-core performance. Additionally, the integrated Iris Xe core display boasts impressive codec capabilities, rendering it highly suitable for deployment as a home entertainment audio-visual center as well as for office and productivity applications. Regrettably, the Core platform Mini PCs are typically not priced affordably. Popular products like the Intel NUC 12 Wall Street Canyon, Acer Mini PC, and Xiaomi Mini PC (i5 version barebones) continue to be sold for over 390 USD.
If you've been coveting the compactness of the NUC 12, a Mini PC that is smaller than 0.5L yet boasts impressive performance and expandability, but find its price hard to swallow, then MOREFINE's newest offering, the M9 Pro Mini PC, might just be the solution you've been looking for. Designed to deliver a similar experience at a more affordable price point, the M9 Pro allows you to enjoy the advantages of a compact and versatile system without breaking the bank.
The core competitiveness of MOREFINE M9 Pro is that it provides the 12th generation Core i7-1260P processor, 0.5L ultra-small metal body, dual M. consumption release. The overall strength is stronger than competing products equipped with i5-1240P, i5-12450H and i7-12650H processors, and it is also cheaper.
Let's delve into the exceptional experience that the MOREFINE M9 Pro offers, surpassing its own price by a remarkable margin.
Unboxing
The packaging box of the MOREFINE M9 Pro is not too big, it adopts a boxy shape, and the light blue MINI PC and Intel logo are superimposed on the white background, which is more simple and refreshing.
The package is divided into upper and lower layers, the upper part is the M9 Pro PC, and the lower part is the attached accessories. The latter includes an instruction manual, wall mount, fixing screws, a 1-meter HDMI cable, and a power adapter.
Different from the brick-type power adapter of NUC 12, the standard 120W charger of MOREFINE M9 Pro comes from HuntKey, which is smaller and weighs only 262g, so it will not feel cumbersome to carry along with the PC for long-distance travel.
The measurements of the MOREFINE M9 Pro PC are 113mm×106mm×42mm, about 0.5L, which is infinitely close to the Intel NUC12 Wall Street Canyon (0.48L) and Xiaomi Mini PC (0.47L), both of which can be held with one hand.
Design
The machine has installed dual memory and a 2280 SSD inside. At this time, the weight of the whole machine is about 409.5g, which is also very light.
MOREFINE M9 Pro adopts a one-piece all-metal body frame. Its top cover is an acrylic mirror cover, which is light and visible. Compared with frosted and skin-like treatments, it is more classy. The Intel Core label in the middle and the The brand logo also makes it look less monotonous.
The interface of the front panel is also embedded in a bright cover, which echoes the top cover of similar craftsmanship. However, the mirror surface is beautiful, but it also has the defect that it is easy to get fingerprints. When you move the mainframe of the MOREFINE M9 Pro, it is best to pinch the sides of the fuselage. If you touch the top cover or the front panel with your fingers without washing your hands, Inevitably, it needs to be cleaned up.
The two sides of the fuselage of this Mini PC are opened with a large area of [skylights], and the surface is covered with dust-proof nets. The north-south transparency is conducive to air circulation and improves heat dissipation efficiency.
The interface is located at the front and rear ends, and the front panel is equipped with two USB-A3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps), and a power switch with built-in indicator light.
The back of the fuselage is equipped with a power jack, headphone jack, 2 HDMI2.0, 2.5G network port, USB-A2.0 and USB-A3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps), USB-C3.2 that supports video output function Gen1 interface.
2 HDMIs and 1 USB-C, which means that MoreFINE M9 Pro can connect to 3 monitors at the same time , which is very friendly for users who are engaged in professional design or stock trading.
The bottom cover of this product is also equipped with wall hanging holes and screw holes for fixing the bracket. As for the wall hanging method, it depends on the design of the display or wall bracket in your home. But no matter which one is used, you need to remove the foot pad on the side of the hole to be stable when you hang up.
Disassembly
Disassembling the MOREFINE M9 Pro is a straightforward process. The bottom cover of the device is secured by screws located within the four-foot pads. It's important to note that the inner layer of the foot pads does not contain any glue and is instead held in place by the screws. Therefore, caution must be exercised when unscrewing the screws to prevent the foot pads from accidentally falling off and getting lost.
The bottom cover of this machine fits tightly with the frame of the fuselage. When removing the bottom cover, you can use a crowbar to start from the wall hanging hole, and it can be opened with one pry.
The internal design of the MOREFINE M9 Pro is very similar to that of the NUC 12. It accommodates 2 memory slots in a compact space of about 0.5L, supports up to 64GB memory capacity (32GB×2), and a 2280-length M.2 hard drive bits, and one M.2 hard drive with a length of 2242.
Among them, 2280 hard drives support PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, while 2242 hard drives are compatible with both PCIe 3.0 and SATA channel SSDs.
Intel AX201 wireless network card and battery are located under the 2280 hard drive. No way, with such a compact body, the wireless network card can only take a backseat here. However, during the actual measurement during this period, there were no problems such as wireless signal instability caused by temperature, so please rest assured.
The method of disassembling and installing the memory and hard disk of the MOREFINE M9 Pro is the same as that of the notebook, and students with a little DIY experience should be able to do it by themselves. Students who pay attention to cost performance are strongly recommended to buy the barebones version (excluding memory and hard disk). Taking advantage of the cheap memory and hard disk, you can save more money by buying it yourself.
The heat dissipation module of this product is located on the back of the main board. We did not disassemble it in depth. You can refer to the official promotional picture.
Performance of MOREFINE M9 Pro
The core competitiveness of MOREFINE M9 Pro is to provide Intel’s 12th generation Core i7-1260P processor at a price of less than $300. This chip uses 4 large, 8 small, 12 cores and 16 threads, built-in 18MB cache, and the highest acceleration frequency It can reach 4.7GHz and integrates a full-blooded Iris Xe 96 core graphics card with 96 execution units.
The mini pc obtained by we is equipped with two 8GB DDR4-3200 Micron memory as standard, with a read and write speed of 47GB/s or higher, and a delay of 86.5 nanoseconds.
Some students may ask, will the standard i7-1260P consume a lot of power? Rest assured, mobile processors today support dynamic power and frequency adjustments. It can be seen from the display of the power monitor that the power consumption of the whole machine of MOREFINE M9 Pro fluctuates between 0.7W and 1W when it is in sleep state.
The power consumption of the whole machine in standby state fluctuates between 7W and 8W after starting up, and the noise close to the main unit is less than 37 decibels. Even if you forget to turn it off when you travel for a long time, you don’t have to worry about the electricity bill.
Next is the link that everyone is most concerned about. How high is the power consumption, full-load temperature and noise of the MOREFINE M9 Pro processor? How about the actual running score and game experience?
Let's take a look at the oven test first. In an environment of 22 degrees room temperature and 35 decibels of indoor noise, the oven test was carried out through AIDA64. When running the CPU and FPU baking machine at the same time, the M9 Pro's processor can reach 55W in the first 30 seconds (the whole machine exceeds 80W), and then slowly drops and stabilizes at 41W (the whole machine is about 65W). At this time, the core temperature is 83 Celsius, the CPU frequency is around 2.63GHz.
The noise measured by placing the noise tester next to the PC fluctuates between 55 and 58 decibels. If the tester is brought to the edge of the computer desk close to the user, it will drop to less than 49 decibels.
If you choose FPU single baking, the power consumption of M9 Pro will drop to 38W, the temperature will drop to 81 degrees, and the main frequency will be around 2.49GHz.
If the FPU and GPU are double-baked at the same time, the power consumption will further rise to 45W, the temperature will be about 84 degrees, and the CPU frequency will further drop to about 1.62GHz.
During the baking process, the highest temperature of the top cover of the MOREFINE M9 Pro is located at the rear edge, which is close to 48 degrees Celsius. Facing the cooling air outlet on the back, the temperature here is about 52 degrees Celsius.
top cover temperature
Maximum temperature of rear air outlet
Then there is the specific running score. Master Lu’s running score exceeded 1.06 million, surpassing 73% of users nationwide.
In the CrossMark test and PCMark10 modern office test, the total scores of MOREFINE M9 Pro can reach 1800 points and 5700 points respectively, which can provide excellent productivity.
In the price range of $300~$400, most of the Core platform Mini PCs we can buy are equipped with i5-1240P or i7-12650H. Let’s compare them with i7-1260P. The testing software is CPU-Z and CineBench.
In terms of CPU single-core performance, the performance of i7-1260P even slightly exceeds the 45W i7-12650H, which is 14%~20% ahead of i5-1240P.
In terms of CPU multi-core, the i7-12650H regained its strength by relying on more large cores, which has an average increase of about 6% compared with the i7-1260P. The difference between the i7-1260P and i5-1240P is very small, as they have the same core count, which is also expected.
However, in the 3DMark test, the i7-1260P integrated with the full-blooded Iris Xe 96 core display can significantly lead the other two family brothers. Although the i7-12650H belongs to the category of standard pressure processors, it integrates the UHD64 core display with the worst performance, and the number of codec engines is reduced from 2 to 1. The performance of multimedia and games is not even as good as i5-1240P.
In the game test session, "League of Legends", 2K resolution, the highest picture quality, after a round of nearly 40 minutes of the game, the average frame rate of the MOREFINE M9 Pro can reach 111FPS, the highest frame rate is 148FPS, and the lowest is 67FPS. The experience of the process is just one word - cool, the only pity is that there seems to be no shadow effect when playing LOL with Intel core graphics, and friends who know how to solve it are welcome to barrage or leave a message.
In the actual measurement of AAA Games, the resolution is set at 1080P. The average frame rate of "Far Cry: New Dawn" in high quality is 19FPS, and it can be adjusted to 23FPS in low quality.
"Assassin's Creed: Odyssey" has an average frame rate of 19FPS in high quality, and can be increased to 29FPS when adjusted to low quality.
"Shadow of the Tomb Raider" has an average frame rate of 20FPS in high quality, and can be adjusted to 27FPS in low quality.
The average frame rate of "Horizon: Zero Dawn" is 18FPS under quality priority, and it can be increased to 25FPS when adjusted to performance priority.
Overall, the 12th generation (including 13th generation) Core graphics is still a bit stressful to play AAA Games, and you need to sacrifice the image quality to get a barely playable smooth frame rate.
Compared with the Ryzen 6000 mobile platform of the same level, Intel Core Graphics performs better in multimedia and natively supports AV1 decoding. Whether it is playing 8K resolution AV1 encoded video or 4K resolution HEVC encoded video, it can It can suppress the CPU usage rate to single digits, and can perfectly play the role of TV box and home audio-visual center.
Experience the most valuable 12th Gen Mini PC at the same price
Upon observing these features, it becomes evident that the MOREFINE M9 Pro resonates with individuals on a deeper level. With its compact form factor of merely 0.5L, this Mini PC boasts an impeccable body design and impressive expansion capabilities, including dual M.2 hard drives. What truly propels it into the limelight, however, is the incorporation of the 12th-generation Core i7-1260P processor, effortlessly catapulting it into the mainstream market for under $300. Garnering further acclaim is its highest power consumption of 45W, solidifying its status as the most formidable contender among Core platform Mini PCs within the same price range.
Of course, MOREFINE M9 Pro also has some deficiencies. For example, the number of 4A1C USBs is still relatively small (compared with notebooks), and USB-C is not Thunderbolt 4 and does not support PD power supply, but the standard mini charger has made up for this defect to the greatest extent.
On the whole, the MOREFINE M9 Pro is a Mini PC with excellent value for money. In the past, We suggested that you choose the i5-1240P first, and choose the i7-1260P carefully, because the performance difference between the two processors is not worth the high premium. However, people sell the i7-1260P cheaper than the i5-1240P, so we naturally have to keep pace with the times and give priority to the more powerful and cheaper MOREFINE M9 Pro.
