Minisforum HX90 Conclusion

In order to conclude the saga that was the Minisforum HX90, I ended up trying out Pop! OS 21.04 from System76. At first, the results looked promising because I was able to install Steam, VirtualBox, and import all of my VMs, and got them up and running. Never got around to testing the games in Steam though.

Unfortunately though, what appeared, initially to be a success eventually still ended up in a failure.

The system did freeze, eventually, at least once; at which point, it was clear and obvious that there is something either wrong with the system, the hardware, the engineering, compatibility issues, and/or a problem with software running on it.

I don't have the tools to be able to diagnose the root cause of the issue, even when I had Pop! OS installed on the NVMe SSD. Therefore; as such, I have sent the SODIMM RAM back for a RMA already, and I am currently in the process of trying to do the same with the HX90 itself as well.

This is a bummer/shame because I was really hoping that said HX90 would have been able to take the place of my former Intel NUC, be more performant, and not have the same kind of thermal throttling issues that's wayyy too common in my Intel NUCs.

Sadly, that just didn't turn out to be the case.

So now I have my old Intel Core i7-6700K taking on the duties that were originally designated for the HX90 and I have bought two sets of 2x 16 GB DDR4-3200 Kingston HyperX Fury RAM modules (4 DIMMs total, 64 GB total), in the hopes that I would be able to upgrade the RAM in the 6700K system, and make that take on those duties instead.

We shall see how that goes.