Morefine S500+ Review – An AMD Ryzen 7 5700U mini PC tested with Windows 11, Ubuntu 20.04

Morefine has recently released their S500+ series of mini PC series which features models with either a Zen 2 or Zen 3 AMD mobile processor. Morefine kindly sent one for review and I’ve looked at performance running both Windows and Ubuntu.

Morefine S500+ Hardware Overview

The S500+ physically consists of a 149 x 145 x 40mm (5.87 x 5.71 x 1.57 inches) square metal case with a plastic top. As an actively cooled mini PC, it is available with either an AMD Zen 2 or Zen 3 mobile processor. The review model came with AMD’s 7 nm Zen 2 Ryzen 7 5700U Lucienne processor which is an eight-core 16-thread 1.8 GHz mobile processor boosting to 4.3 GHz with Radeon Graphics.

The front panel has a power button, a light to indicate power, two USB 3.1 ports, and a Type-C USB 3.1 port with Alternate Mode.

The rear panel includes a 3.5mm headphone jack, a 2.5 gigabit Ethernet port, a gigabit Ethernet port, an HDMI 2.0 port, a DisplayPort, four USB 2.0 ports, and the power jack.

Internally there is an M.2 2230 WiFi 6E (or 802.11ax) Mediatek MT7921K card which supports the new 6 GHz band, an M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 3.0 SSD drive (the review model included a 512 GB ADATA XPG Gammix S11 Lite drive complete with Windows 10 Pro installed) and the ability to add a 2.5” SATA drive to the lid which is connected to the motherboard by the included cables:

It is also possible to add another M.2 2280 NVMe or SATA SSD drive on the underside of the motherboard:

Morefine has a video showing the installation process for memory and drives.

The two SODIMM memory slots support up to 64 GB of memory and the review model included two sticks of Crucial 8 GB DDR4 3200 MHz memory for a total of 16 GB noting that this particular memory is single-rank:

The specifications state:

and lists two of the USB ports as ‘3.2 Gen 2’ so I tested them together with the Type-C USB port using a Samsung 980 PRO PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD housed in a ‘USB to M.2 NVMe adapter’ (ORICO M2PAC3-G20 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure) which showed that they were all USB 3.1 (USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 i.e. 10 Gbit/s):

Box contents

In the box, you get a power adapter and cord, an HDMI cable, a VESA mounting bracket together with a small packet of miscellaneous screws, a SATA drive connector, and a 2.5” drive insulation sticker. Also included is a multilingual user manual:

Review Methodology

When reviewing mini PCs, I typically look at their performance under both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) and compare them against some of the more recently released mini PCs. Where possible I review using Windows 11 version 21H2 and Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS although, in the future, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will be used now that it has been released. I test with a selection of commonly used Windows benchmarks and/or equivalents for Linux together with Thomas Kaiser’s ‘sbc-bench’ which is a small set of different CPU performance tests focusing on server performance when run on Ubuntu. I also use ‘Phoronix Test Suite’ and benchmark with the same set of tests on both Windows and Ubuntu for comparison purposes. On Ubuntu, I also compile the v5.4 Linux kernel using the default config as a test of performance using a real-world scenario.

Prior to benchmarking, I perform all necessary installations and updates to run the latest versions of both OSes. I also capture some basic details of the device for each OS.

Installation Issues on Morefine S500+

Initially, the S500+ came installed with Windows 10 Pro and had a preconfigured user account ‘PC’ already set up and which Windows boots into:

On Ubuntu, it was initially not possible to connect to the 5.0 GHz WiFi network as the ‘Activation of network connection failed’:

In order to successfully connect I found that it was necessary to ‘unbind’ the driver first and then ‘bind’ the driver again:

Additionally, the ‘dmesg’ showed some ACPI errors and the significance of which was unknown at the time of testing:

Otherwise, running the benchmarks went smoothly with the exception of the ‘Selenium’ test from the ‘Phoronix Test Suite’. When running the test with ‘Chrome’ selected it errored with the message ‘The test quit with a non-zero exit status’. This is typically caused by the benchmark driver used by the test not supporting the newest Chrome release and has been encountered before. As a result, the Octane tests were run manually and edited into the final results.

Morefine S500+ Windows Performance

Initially, the S500+ came installed with a licensed copy of Windows 10 Pro version 20H2 build 19042.631:

which I upgraded to Windows 11 Pro version 21H2 and after applying updates the build was 22000.593. A quick look at the hardware information shows it is aligned to the specification:

A brief check showed working audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and video output from the Type-C USB port:

I then set the power mode to ‘High performance’ and ran my standard set of benchmarking tools to look at performance under Windows:

I also tested Cinebench R23:

For my specific set of Phoronix Test Suite tests the results were:

All these results can then be compared with other recent mini PCs:

Ubuntu 20.04 on an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U mini PC

After shrinking the Windows partition in half and creating a new partition, I installed Ubuntu using an Ubuntu 20.04.4 ISO as dual boot. After installation and updates a brief check showed working audio, Wi-Fi (after applying the above fix), Bluetooth, Ethernet, and video output from the Type-C USB port:

The key hardware information under Ubuntu 20.04.4 is as follows:

I then set the CPU Scaling Governor to ‘performance’ and ran my Linux benchmarks for which the majority of the results are text-based but the graphical ones included:

and the latter can be directly compared to when run in Windows using the OpenGL render:

I also ran PassMark PerformanceTest Linux:

which can be directly compared to the results from when it was run on Windows:

For the same set of Phoronix Test Suite tests the results were:

The complete results together with a comparison against other recent mini PCs are:

Video playback in browsers & Kodi

For real-world testing, I played some videos in Edge, Chrome and Kodi on Windows and in Firefox, Chrome and Kodi on Ubuntu. No video playback issues were encountered playing up to 4K 60 FPS videos:

However, the fan was noticeably audible during 4K playback on Ubuntu in both Firefox where it reached 50 dBA at times, and also Chrome where it was slightly better reaching only 45 dBA sometimes.

Gaming

The AMD integrated Radeon Graphics are relatively powerful for a mini PC as indicated by the Unigine Heaven scores. Testing Shadow Of The Tomb Raider using the built-in benchmark under Steam on both Windows and Ubuntu at 1080p and 720p resolution with the graphical preset of ‘high’ and ‘low’ resulted in the average FPS as follows:

with Windows being marginally better than Ubuntu.

Thermals

The S500+ uses active cooling and running a stress test on Ubuntu saw the CPU temperature climb to a peak of 80°C before dropping down to 68°C where it remained for the duration of the test:

If the CPU frequency is monitored during the stress test it can be seen that it initially averages around 2975 MHz before dropping to an average of around 2745 MHz as a result of thermal throttling when the temperature peaked:

During the stress test, the maximum temperature I recorded on the top of the device was around 31.0°C at an ambient room temperature of 21.0°C. The fan however is audible reaching 50 dBA on my sound meter next to the device during the stress test. This was also the case for a Cinebench test on Windows whereas at idle the fan was around 34 dBA.

The BIOS (see below) does include fan control options which are set to manual by default:

Networking

Network connectivity throughput was measured on Ubuntu using ‘iperf’:

Morefine S500+ Power consumption

Power consumption was measured as follows:

• Initially plugged in – 1.3 Watts
• Powered off (shutdown) – 0.6 Watts (Windows) and 0.6 Watts (Ubuntu)
• BIOS* – 23.0 Watts
• GRUB boot menu – 21.0 Watts
• Idle – 6.2 Watts (Windows) and 4.8 Watts (Ubuntu)
• CPU stressed – 39.6 Watts (Windows ‘Cinebench’) and 36.0 Watts (Ubuntu ‘stress’)
• Video playback** – 17.2 Watts (Windows Edge 4K60fps) and 36.1 Watts (Ubuntu Chrome 4K60fps)

*BIOS (see below)
**The power figures fluctuate notably due to the fan so the value is the average of the median high and median low power readings.

Aptio Setup BIOS

Powering up the mini PC and hitting the F7 key results in a boot menu that includes access to the BIOS. The BIOS is unrestricted and the following video includes the ‘Fan Control’, ‘POR’ and ‘AC Loss Control’ settings:

Final Observations

One of the key highlights of the Morefine S500+ series is the additional storage configurations with the ability to add an additional NVMe drive. This could also be used to add an eGPU via a ‘PCIe x16 to M.2 NVMe adapter’. Unfortunately during intensive CPU or iCPU processing the fan does become audible however the overall performance is very good.

I’d like to thank Morefine for providing the S500+ for review. It retails at around $769 for the tested configuration from Morefine.

Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium)

Ian is interested in mini PCs and helps with reviews of mini PCs running Windows, Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter.

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