MINISFORUM UM890 Pro for Proxmox Homelab 2026: Is the Ryzen 9 8945HS Worth It?

I run Proxmox VE on a Beelink GTi13 Ultra, and the question I see most often from people who've outgrown a budget N100 box is what to buy next. The MINISFORUM UM890 Pro keeps coming up: Ryzen 9 8945HS, Radeon 780M graphics, dual 2.5G Ethernet, and two DDR5 SO-DIMM slots. This post looks at it strictly as a Proxmox homelab node, based on MINISFORUM's published specs, AMD's spec sheet, and well-documented community experience with this chip family. I haven't run one myself, so you won't find made-up benchmark numbers here — just what the hardware is built to do and who it makes sense for.

This isn't a gaming review or a Windows benchmarking exercise. The workloads I care about are multiple LXCs running 24/7, occasional VMs, Ollama inference on 7B–13B models, and the concurrent background jobs that reveal whether a machine can hold up as a single-node homelab. That's the context that decides whether spending around $429 makes sense for you.

The short answer: on paper it's excellent hardware for a dense homelab, but it's only worth the premium over a budget N100 box if you know you'll use the headroom. If you're just getting started, the budget side is covered in my guide to the best mini PCs for Proxmox under $200, and that's where I'd tell most beginners to start.

How the UM890 Pro Compares at a Glance

That $240 gap between the N100 and the UM890 Pro is real money — you could buy a Beelink SER5 and still have about $130 left over. What you're paying for is twice the cores and four times the threads of an N100, a much newer integrated GPU (RDNA 3 Radeon 780M versus Intel UHD), DDR5 instead of DDR4, and networking and expansion that budget boxes don't offer. Whether those matter depends entirely on what you actually run.

What's Inside the MINISFORUM UM890 Pro

The heart of the machine is AMD's Ryzen 9 8945HS: 8 Zen 4 cores, 16 threads, built on TSMC 4nm, with a boost clock up to 5.2GHz and a configurable TDP that AMD rates at 35–54W. MINISFORUM's listing also advertises a higher-power performance mode. For an always-on Proxmox node, the lower power profiles are usually the sensible default — homelab services are mostly idle, and you rarely need the chip's full sustained output.

Memory is two DDR5-5600 SO-DIMM slots, with MINISFORUM supporting up to 96GB (2×48GB). That's an important point, because some listings and reviews describe the RAM as soldered — it isn't. You can buy the 32GB configuration today and move to 64GB or 96GB later, which makes the UM890 Pro one of the more future-proof options in the mini PC tier. DDR5 also gives the integrated GPU noticeably more memory bandwidth than the DDR4 used in budget N100 and Ryzen 5000-series boxes, and memory bandwidth is the main thing that limits local LLM token speed on integrated graphics.

Storage is two M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 slots, so you can keep the Proxmox boot drive separate from VM and container storage. Connectivity is where this machine stands out for homelab use: dual 2.5G Ethernet, two USB4 ports (40Gbps), an OCuLink port for an external GPU dock, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, and four USB-A ports. The Radeon 780M has 12 RDNA 3 compute units and shares system memory.

Proxmox Compatibility

Zen 4 mobile chips like the 8945HS are well supported in current Linux kernels, and Proxmox VE 8.x and 9.x ship kernels new enough to handle the platform. As with almost any mini PC, plan on disabling Secure Boot in the UEFI before booting the installer. Before buying any mini PC for Proxmox, check which Ethernet controller it ships with — Intel 2.5G NICs generally have the most mature Linux driver support.

For the container side, the same approach I describe in my complete Proxmox LXC self-hosting guide applies unchanged: unprivileged LXCs for services like Vaultwarden, Immich, a reverse proxy, Navidrome, a Forgejo runner, and monitoring. An 8-core/16-thread chip has far more headroom than that kind of stack needs at idle, which is where a homelab spends most of its time. The difference shows up during concurrent jobs: backups, CI builds, media imports, and inference all landing at once.

Dual 2.5G NICs: The Underrated Feature

Two physical NICs let you separate traffic without an add-in card or USB adapter. A common layout is one port on your main homelab VLAN and the second on a dedicated storage or backup VLAN connected to a TP-Link 2.5G switch. That keeps NAS transfers and Proxmox Backup Server jobs from competing with service traffic on a single link. It's the kind of network segmentation that's worth doing and usually requires extra hardware on a single-NIC box.

Local LLM Inference on the Radeon 780M

The 780M is the main reason this machine gets recommended for self-hosted AI. Ollama can offload to it through ROCm or Vulkan-based backends, which is not something an Intel N100 box can meaningfully do. Expect 7B models at Q4 quantization to be comfortably usable for a personal assistant, with performance driven mostly by memory bandwidth — which is why running the memory in dual-channel matters. Larger 13B–14B models fit in memory with 32GB but will be slower. If you need fast 30B+ inference, you're in discrete-GPU territory, and the OCuLink port is the upgrade path: it lets you attach an external GPU dock without giving up the mini PC form factor.

The full Ollama setup is covered in my post on setting up Ollama and Open WebUI on a mini PC for local AI.

How It Compares to the Beelink Lineup

Beelink's mini PCs remain my default recommendation for a first homelab node, as I explain in my EQ12 vs GTi13 homelab comparison. The UM890 Pro outclasses the budget Beelinks on every compute spec, as you'd expect from the price and the generation gap. The more practical differences are expandability (96GB RAM ceiling, OCuLink, dual NICs) and noise: a 54W-class chip in a small chassis needs active cooling, so it's better suited to an office or closet than a quiet living room under sustained load.

The value question comes down to whether the roughly $130 premium over the Beelink SER5 at $299 earns its keep in your workload. For a light homelab running fewer than eight containers with no LLM inference, the SER5 is probably the smarter buy. For a dense setup — 10+ LXCs, a VM or two, CI jobs, and Ollama — the UM890 Pro's headroom is what you're paying for.

Who Should Actually Buy This Machine

Buy the MINISFORUM UM890 Pro if you're already running Proxmox and bumping into the ceiling of a budget N100 box or an older Ryzen 5. Specifically: you're running more than eight LXCs and want real CPU headroom; you want local LLM inference at usable speeds; dual 2.5G NICs matter for your network layout; or you want a single node with room to grow — up to 96GB of RAM and an eGPU path — without a hardware refresh in the next few years.

Don't buy it if you're setting up your first homelab. At that stage, the extra money is better spent on your network and, critically, a quality UPS such as the APC Pure Sine Wave 1500VA. An unexpected power loss during a ZFS transaction is how you corrupt a dataset and spend a weekend restoring from backup. For a first node, a GMKtec G3 N100 at $189 plus a UPS is a smarter use of the same $400.

The UM890 Pro also won't satisfy you if you need ECC memory, internal PCIe slots, or a rack-mount form factor. None of those exist in the consumer mini PC category — if you need them, you're looking at a proper server chassis and a different budget.

Final Verdict

On specs, the MINISFORUM UM890 Pro is one of the most capable single-node homelab machines in the mini PC tier: 8 Zen 4 cores, a Radeon 780M that makes local LLM inference practical, upgradeable DDR5 up to 96GB, two PCIe 4.0 NVMe slots, dual 2.5G Ethernet, and OCuLink for a future GPU. The trade-offs are price and fan noise under sustained load.

If your current node is getting crowded and you're ready to upgrade, it's the machine I'd shortlist first. If you're just starting out, bookmark this page and start with budget hardware — you can always move up once you know what you actually need.