Morefine M600 6900HX review – A Ryzen 9 6900HX mini PC tested with Windows 11 and Ubuntu 23.04

Morefine M600 6900HX Review

Under review today is Morefine M600 6900HX mini PC which is a generational update to the previously released S500+ (5900HX or 5700U) although it should be noted that Morefine will soon be releasing a newer version of the M600 with either a Ryzen 7 7840HS or Ryzen 9 7940HS. The current M600 (6900HX) brings both processor and iGPU improvements over the S500+ together with a couple of port upgrades and the welcome introduction of USB4, DDR5, PCIe Gen 4.0, and an additional M.2 storage slot. This review will look at Windows 11 performance together with a quick look at running Ubuntu 23.04 and experiences from using the new features.

Morefine M600 6900HX product specifications

The Morefine M600 6900HX specifications are as follows:

Morefine M600 6900HX specifications

 

Product overview

Overview of hardware

The M600 physically consists of a 149 x 145 x 40 mm (5.87 x 5.71 x 1.57 inches) square metal case with detachable metal top and bottom. As an actively cooled mini PC, it uses AMD’s Rembrandt Ryzen 9 6900HX processor which is an eight-core 16-thread 3.3 GHz mobile processor boosting to 4.9 GHz and includes AMD Radeon 680M graphics which has 12 graphics cores at a frequency of 2400 MHz.

The front panel has an illuminated power button, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and a USB4 (Thunderbolt 3) port. The rear panel includes a 3.5mm headphone jack, two 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports, an HDMI 2.1 port and a DisplayPort 1.4, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port and a USB 2.0 port, dual USB 2.0 ports, and the power jack.

Internally, the underside of the motherboard accessed from the bottom of the device, contains an M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD drive (the review model included a 1TB Crucial P3 Plus drive complete with Windows 11 Pro installed):

Morefine M600 6900HX motherboard

The topside of the motherboard contains an additional M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slot, an M.2 2230 WiFi 6E (or 802.11ax) Mediatek MT7921K (RZ608) card which also provides Bluetooth 5.2, and two SODIMM memory slots supporting up to 64 GB of memory with the review model including two sticks of Crucial 16 GB DDR5 4800 MHz memory for a total of 32 GB:

Morefine M600 6900HX motherboard M2 SSD M2 WiFi

As part of the metal top of the device are mounts that support adding a 2.5” SATA drive for increased storage. It should also be noted that this detachable top is also covered with a thin layer of plastic as there are some cutouts in the metal to allow the WiFi antennas to be stuck to the underside of the plastic to ensure good reception. Care must be taken when removing the top to prevent the two antennas from ripping off the WiFi card resulting in damage to the card’s IPEX/U.FL connectors as the glued aerial attachments are somewhat stronger and will inevitably win when put to the test.

In the box, you get a 120.08W (19.0V 6.32A) power adapter and cord, an HDMI cable, a VESA mounting bracket together with a small packet of miscellaneous screws, a 2.5” SATA mounting kit comprising of connection cable and sticker, and a multilingual quick start guide.

Overview of software

The Morefine M600 came installed with a licensed copy of Windows 11 Pro which I upgraded to the latest 22H2 build 22621.1778 for testing purposes:

Windows 11 Pro About M600

Key Observations

A quick look at the hardware information shows it is aligned with the specifications:

HWiNFO64 Win element M600
TechPowerUp GPU-Z Rembrandt

The processor’s ‘Power Limits’ (PL) are configured with ‘PL1’ set to 54 watts and ‘PL2’ set to 65 watts:

Morefine M600 power limits

The memory is configured to run at its maximum speed of 4800 MHz:

Windows 11 Pro DDR5 4800MHz

although it is only single rank:

Morefine M600 6900HX single rank memory

The 2.5 gigabit Ethernet uses a Realtek RTL8125 network interface controller:

RTL8125 Windows 11 2.5GbE

and the WiFi 6E is provided by a Mediatek MT7921K (RZ608) M.2 2230 card:

MediaTek RZ608 WiFi 6E module Windows 11

which theoretically could deliver a throughput of up to 1.2 Gb/s as well as provide support for Bluetooth 5.2:

MediaTek WiFi 6 1201 Mbps

An additional specification image lists all of the ports:

Morefine M600 6900HX ports

and shows the various Type-A USB ports as either 3.2 Gen 2 or USB 2.0. I tested each of them 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). This confirmed that all the ‘blue’ USB ports were indeed USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 i.e. 10 Gbit/s:

USB 3.2 ports 10Gbps

and that the ‘black’ rear USB ports were USB 2.0 ports:

Morefine M600 USB 2.0 ports

For the front USB4 port, I first tested it as ‘USB’ where it ran as USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 i.e. 10 Gbit/s:

USB4 10Gbps USB speed

and then tested it as ‘Thunderbolt 3’:

USB4 Thunderbolt 3 speed

For display, I confirmed that both the DisplayPort and the USB4 port work with older cables including a DisplayPort 1.2 to HDMI cable and a USB-C to HDMI (4K) cable:

Morefine M600 6900HX dual display

Everything else worked without issue except for the second M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slot which is covered in more detail below.

Windows 11 performance with Morefine M600 6900HX

I first set the power mode to ‘High performance’ and ran some well-known benchmarking tools to look at performance under Windows.

Storage performance from the M.2 NVMe was:

Morefine M600 6900HX SSD CrystalDiskMark

The overall Windows performance was:

Ryzen 9 6900HX 3DMark Fire Strike Benchmark Ryzen 9 6900HX Passmark Rating

with CPU performance measured as:

Morefine M600 6900HX Cinebench R23 Win element M600 Geekbench 6

and iGPU performance measured as:

Win element M600 Geekbench 6 OpenCL

Morefine M600 6900HX Unigine Heaven Benhcmark 4.0

For real-world testing of the iGPU, I played various videos in Edge and there were no issues encountered playing videos up to 4K 60 FPS:

YouTube 8K video playback

I also briefly looked at gaming by testing Shadow Of The Tomb Raider (SOTTR) under Steam. At ‘1920×1080’ resolution using the ‘high’ preset default settings, the built-in benchmark averaged 38 FPS:

Morefine M600 6900HX Shadow Of The Tomb Raider(SOTTR)

With the ‘low’ preset default settings the benchmark average improved to 51 FPS:

Morefine M600 6900HX SOTTR Low Preset

Whilst the ‘low’ preset nearly reached that magical 60 FPS mark, this could be achieved by dropping the screen resolution to ‘1280×780’ with ‘high’ now averaging 61 FPS:

Morefine M600 6900HX SOTTR 61 fps

and ‘low’ averaging a respectable 79 FPS:

Morefine M600 6900HX SOTTR Low Preset 1280x720 79 FPS

I also tried Grand Theft Auto V at ‘1920×1080’ resolution using default settings which averaged 86 FPS:

AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX GTA-V FPS

Ubuntu 23.04 Performance

After shrinking the Windows partition in half and creating a new partition I installed Ubuntu as dual boot using an Ubuntu 23.04 ISO:

Ryzen 9 6900HX Ubuntu 23.04

After installation and updates, a brief check showed working audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet.

The key hardware information under Ubuntu 23.04 is as follows:

Morefine M600 6900HX Ubuntu inxi


The processor’s ‘Power Limits’ (PL) are configured the same as Windows with ‘PL1’ being set to 54 watts and ‘PL2’ set to 65 watts:

Morefine M600 6900HX Power Limits Ubuntu 23.04

The memory is also configured to run at its maximum speed of 4800 MHz:

Ubuntu Memory Speed 4800MT per second

Finally, a quick check of the USB ports confirmed the Windows findings of three Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports:

Morefine M600 6900HX Ubuntu USB speed 10Gbps

three Type-A USB 2.0 ports:

Morefine M600 6900HX Ubuntu USB 2.0 speed 480Mbps

and a USB4 port:

USB4 10Gbps Ubuntu 23.04 USB4 Thunderbolt speed 40 Gbps

I then set the CPU Scaling Governor to ‘performance’ and ran some Linux benchmarks. CPU performance is measured as:

Win Element M600 Geekbench 6 Ubuntu 23.04

and iGPU performance measured as:

Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 Ubuntu 23.04 OpenGL AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX

I also ran Thomas Kaiser’s ‘sbc-bench’ which is a small set of different CPU performance tests focusing on server performance when run on Ubuntu:

Morefine M600 6900HX SBC Bench

For real-world testing of the iGPU, I played various videos in Firefox and there were no major issues encountered playing videos up to 4K 60 FPS except just the occasional dropped frame which was invisible to the eye:

Morefine M600 6900HX YouTube 4K Ubuntu 23.04

Network Performance

Network connectivity throughput was measured using ‘iperf3’ on Windows. The 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports performed as expected at 2.37 Gb/s:

iperf3 2.5GbE Windows 11

WiFi performance was also good with download on the 2.4 GHz band averaging 174 Mb/s and upload averaging 169 Mb/s. For the 5 GHz band, the download was 621 Mb/s and the upload averaged 607 Mb/s.

Thermal Performance

On Windows, running Cinebench R23 saw the CPU temperature rise to a peak of 90.0°C:

Morefine M600 6900HX Cinebench R23 CPU temperature

The Morefine M600 also includes a fan that is hardly audible during normal use and only reached 31.0 dBA on my sound meter next to the device during the testing. The maximum temperature I recorded on the top of the device was around 26.8°C in an ambient room temperature of 17.7°C.

I also ran a stress test on Ubuntu which saw similar results with the CPU temperature rising and flat-lining at 90°C where the CPU maintained an average frequency of 3735 MHz:

Morefine M600 6900HX Ubuntu stress test

Second M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slot

The key feature for me of the Morefine M600 6900HX (besides the obviously fast processor, dual-channel DDR5 memory, dual 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports, WiFi 6E, and USB4 port) is arguably the best inclusion given the size of the device, namely the dual M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slots.

As opening the top of the device is somewhat awkward because of the WiFi antennas being glued to the underside, I decided to relocate the installed NVMe drive from the bottom slot on the motherboard to the top slot. This would allow me easy access to the bottom M.2 slot for testing of an additional drive or with an eGPUs.

Unfortunately, I found that using the top M.2 slot can crash the device under certain circumstances.

First, however, let’s look at simply adding an additional drive in the top slot given the original drive occupies the bottom slot. I used the same Samsung 980 PRO PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD drive from the USB testing and confirmed that it works as expected:

Morefine M600 6900HX M2 SSD performance

Morefine M600 6900HX M2 SSD drives

However, after swapping the drives around, when I tried booting Ubuntu and running the Unigine Heaven benchmark, the device would just crash with a black screen before rebooting:

Morefine M600 6900HX SSD crash

After reporting the issue to Morefine they suggested trying Ubuntu 22.04.2. But, after installing it onto the same OS drive as Windows (which remember is now in the top slot), I still had no luck running the benchmark on Ubuntu.

At this point, I assumed it was some combination of Ubuntu and Heaven so I continued testing Ubuntu by playing videos. Yet again though, the device would randomly crash when playing 4K 60 FPS videos in Firefox. So I tried running Heaven on Windows and it also crashed. This suggested to me that the device was prone to crashing when the top drive was used for the OS and graphics were required.

After removing both M.2 drives I derived a simple test plan of installing the original Morefine supplied drive and running Unigine Heaven on each OS, then swapping the drive location and repeating, and then adding my own drive and repeating the whole process. However, I didn’t get that far as the pattern was clear to see:

Morefine M600 6900HX crash

Given that HWiNFO64 provides monitoring I tried to identify the cause of the crash by watching HWiNFO64 whilst running Unigine Heaven. Unfortunately, I forgot to start logging so when it crashed I had no data to analyze. However visually, nothing seemed to stand out. Repeating again but running Unigine Heaven in a ‘1280×720’ window and with logging resulted in no crash, as did a couple of subsequent runs. Looking at the data I had consequently captured suggested that the crashes were not temperature related:

Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 temperature monitoring

as there was no throttling of the CPU:

Morefine M600 6900HX no CPU throttling

and whilst the iGPU throttled

Morefine M600 6900HX GPU throttling

it stayed within the CPU’s ‘Maximum Junction Temperature’ of 90.0°C.

The other factor I looked at was power consumption. During the run, the power consumption as measured from the wall was observed to average around 85 watts:

Power consumption Unigine Graphics Benchmark

fluctuating with about a 5-watt variance, occasionally peaking at around 89 watts and also dropping briefly to around 79 watts.

Plotting temperature and power HWiNFO64 data does not show anything specific:

SSD GPU crash Windows 11 temperature

especially when compared to running HWiNFO64 and 3DMARK Fire Strike:

HWinFO64 Windows 11 Pro 3DMark Fire Strike CPU Temperature

given the latter has not caused any crashes.

As I’d successfully run a stress test in Ubuntu across all 16 threads for 20 minutes, I decided to run a 10-minute throttling test in Cinebench R23 which was also completed without issue:

Cinebench R23 complete

Again plotting temperature and power HWiNFO64 data did not indicate anything of concern:

HWiNFO64 Cinebench R23 multi core

The device did however sometimes crash in Windows when playing 4K 60 FPS videos in Edge so it again points to issues with a heavy load on both the CPU and iGPU. Certainly for the top drive, running Windows seems more stable than when running Ubuntu and both using graphics. My current (pun not intended) theory is that perhaps the current draw becomes too high and causes an automatic safety shutdown.

Given that the actual cause is unknown, I would be very hesitant to use the second i.e. top M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slot for fear of data loss, and as such, dual M.2 slots for storage is no longer a reality.

Summary

The performance of the Morefine M600 6900HX is very good and the upgrades of DDR5 memory, 2.5 gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6E, PCIe Gen 4.0, and a USB4 port really make this a next-generation mini PC.

Unfortunately, the issues encountered arising from the second (or top) M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slot are sufficiently concerning to avoid using this feature for storage. Hopefully, a simple BIOS update will fix the issue.

I’d like to thank Morefine for providing the M600 6900HX for review. The model reviewed here with 32GB DDR5 and a 1TB SSD sells for $615.19 on Aliexpress. It used to be found on their website,  however, the company is in the process of upgrading the website and it shows as a 404 page at the time of writing.

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9 Replies to “Morefine M600 6900HX review – A Ryzen 9 6900HX mini PC tested with Windows 11 and Ubuntu 23.04”

  1. Thank you for the detailed review, I can imagine it took quite some time.

    I find it quite remarkable that the temperature rises so quickly but then stays at exactly 90 degrees Celsius for a long time until it falls off just as quickly once the load is no more.

    Is the sensor limited to 90 degrees Celsius? Surely the actual temperature would rise further or at least fluctuate. Or what exactly is “package temperature”?

    Also, why is the “CPU frequency” not a smooth line or at least rectangular? Is the CPU frequency changing so fast that the sensor or recording software cannot keep up?

    1. It’s the normal behaviour of the newer ryzen processor, even the normal desktop CPU with oversized coolers get to the thermal limit (more like a thermal “target”) at around 90°C and then lower the power consumption.

      1. The power management can be so precise that the temperature stays at exactly 90 degrees Celsius and does not fluctuate by even a single degree? And there isn’t any overshoot above the 90 degrees either.

        1. The CPU’s ‘Maximum Junction Temperature’ is 90.0°C and what this means simplistically is that throttling will occur once this temperature is reached in order to prevent the CPU’s temperature rising further. This process happens very quickly (it’s a computer after all) but the HWiNFO64 logging I captured was only being reported using the application’s default settings so measurements were being reported every 2000ms and temperature was only captured with zero decimal places. For the Ubuntu stress test logging, the measurements were being reported every second and again temperature was captured with zero decimal places, however frequency was captured in GHz to six decimal places but plotted as rounded zero decimal place MHz. The frequency fluctuation seen is a simplified representation of the throttling in operation which has allowed the CPU to run at its maximum temperature.

  2. nice review,

    i have 3 of these, 1x morefine 6950hs, 2x topton 6900hx
    all 3 same unknown issue.

    i can tell you the crashes are not tied to heavy power draw.
    if you limit TDP in bios to 10 watts it also occurs, temps waay low , no throttling gpu/cpu

    assuming that your unit has the same rootcause as mine:
    your finding that the top nvme drive seems to be the culprit only makes the crashing more noticable (faster/more occurrence rate). it will still crash between 0-48 hours.
    Either GPU driver halts, or you get black screen, or reboot, or reboot+green crappy bios screen.

    i found that (with NVME in bottom slot or top slot)
    not using GPU is crashless.
    using 100% GPU load is crashless
    as soon as you have a game that is not using max GPU (like an old DX9 game)
    you are in the danger zone.

    i run now 3 games to keep GPU under max load 😛 and its fully stable (weeks 24/7) @ 28W BIOS TPD mode. if i run 1 game, it will eventually crash randomly <48h

    There is no BIOS to download for 7 months now, I have mailed them, and received a link to the driver set, but have not seen a bios update yet. I remain hopefull: If you obtain a BIOS update for this thing, i’m all ears

    I saw a review which mentioned the phoenix (7840hs) in the GTR7 has somewhat similar issues. and has a high temp DDR5 issue. Not sure what is behind that issue.

      1. I found out a fix. in UEFI
        Advanced > Demo Board > PCI-E Port > PCI-E Port Control set [Enabled]
        and all ASPM Mode to [Disabled], then the problem is gone.
        screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/2Seg95R
        I really hope this helps, as it did fix my problem, have been used for over 2 days now no crashes.

  3. I’m worried about the thunderbolt 3 port… will it work if I connect a eGPU with it? I already have the morefine m600 and im planing on getting an eGPU for it. My options are to use the thunderbolt 3 port or one of the m.2 slots.

    I’ve not seen any posts on whether the thunderbolt 3 port works or not, and in the forums I’ve seen discussing it are sceptical. If you got the chance to try please do tell.

    P.s. I’d also apriciate any specs so I can compare price and value

    1. I tested the Thunderbolt 3 port while on both Windows and Ubuntu during the review and it worked on both as expected. The port uses the JHL6340 controller so should in theory be fine with an eGPU with the usual and expected speed degradations. However, whether it actually works or not will be dependent on both what eGPU you use and equally what GPU is used in it. Have you tried asking Morefine for confirmation on whether your particular intended configuration would work as you intend?

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