Overall, the Minisforum NPB5 Mini-PC is a solid offering that delivers impressive performance in regards to general computing thanks to its Intel Core i5-13500H featuring 12 cores and 16 threads (4P + 8E cores). Even the Intel Iris Graphics with 80 EUs does fairly well, even if it doesn't quite live up to what AMD has to offer on that front. That said, during testing, the unit was fairly quiet, with a peak noise from 6 inches away of 50 dBA at max load and just 45 dBA once the boost duration has run its course. During the torture tests, the CPU peaked at 88°C when boosting, and once that is over and the CPU is TDP limited, temperatures drop to a 70°C average. As for power draw figures, the system pulled 13 watts at idle, 30 to 40 watts under light loads, and 65 to 70 watts at sustained heavy loads (total system power draw). However, the system was pulling 130 watts from the wall when the CPU was allowed to boost, which puts a great deal of load on the included power brick, which is rated for roughly 120 watts. That said, the system remained quiet enough to be unobtrusive during day-to-day tasks and never once thermal throttled, which is a testament to the usage of both a proper dual heat pipe cooler and liquid metal as the thermal interface material.

Minisforum's usage of both liquid metal TIM and a proper heatsink with two fin arrays and two copper heatpipes had no problem keeping temperatures under control. But while this is likely a benefit for most users, it can make things a bit difficult as well. Suffice it to say due to the overall design of the system, removing the motherboard requires the removal of the heatsink, which will also likely destroy an adhesive gasket used to keep the liquid metal thermal compound away from other components. The chassis design requires the removal of the heatsink in this particular instance, so some changes would be required to fix that issue. However, it's not a huge deal since most users won't ever have any need to remove the motherboard during the system's lifespan. In terms of features, the system does support USB4 and can drive up to four displays, including 2x HDMI at 4K 60 Hz and 2x DisplayPort over USB4 at 8K 60 Hz.

It was also quite a surprise to see that while the system's BIOS is quite limited, it has a couple of key features potential buyers should know about, and keep in mind your mileage may vary here. That said, my review unit allows for custom TDP settings in the BIOS, and you can also customize the fan profile to a certain degree. When it comes to Intel's Core i5-13500H, in this particular system, it's allowed to hit a 95-watt TDP, but once the boost duration is exhausted, the system drops back to 45 watts. Setting the unit to 65 watts may hurt quick burst performance; however, in a test like Cinebench R20, it actually resulted in a performance uplift. Pushing the unit from its typical range of 4400 to 4700 up to 5300 since the CPU was allowed to maintain higher overall clock speeds through the test thanks to the 20-watt bump in sustained power limit. Doing this will obviously result in a higher power draw, but it also results in a lower peak power draw. Thanks to this, enterprising users can likely eke out more performance and lower noise levels than the system offers out of the box, as long as Minisforum doesn't block user's access to those BIOS settings via an updated BIOS.

The Minisforum NPB5 is a good general-purpose system that excels in office work, light photo and video editing, etc. In regards to gaming, the DDR5 memory does allow the Intel Iris Graphics to perform better than I expected, but it still isn't as capable as AMD's Radeon 680M in the Ryzen 7735U and other CPUs, so if you are looking for a Mini-PC that can handle older games and provide a decent experience I would look at AMD offerings instead. That said, the system did decently well as an emulator system, with the unit proving capable enough to handle most PS2 titles. Only the most demanding games like Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater proved to be too much.

Beyond that, while checking Minisforum for support and documentation on eGPUs via USB4 / Thunderbolt 3, their FAQ at the time of writing says it will not work. However, when asked, they did confirm that eGPUs will work via USB4. To make sure, I picked up an Akito Node Titan as listed support from numerous manufacturers, not just Minisforum could be better. I hooked up an NVIDIA GTX 1650 4 GB via the Akito Node Titan, and it resulted in doubling the GPU performance over the Intel integrated graphics. So, if you already have a USB4 / Thunderbolt 3 eGPU setup, it should work with the NPB5 without an issue.

In summation, if you are looking for a responsive home office system that can easily chew through most workloads such as spreadsheets, photo editing, or even some light video editing, the Minisforum Venus Series NPB5 is a great option. Especially at the discounted price at the time of writing; however, at MSRP it does become a little bit harder to recommend.