I've been a big fan of Minisforum's mini PCs (especially the AtomMan X7 Ti), and when the company launched the V3 tablet a few months ago, I was instantly intrigued. There are so few high-end Windows tablets out there, and to see one powered by AMD Ryzen processors was certainly interesting.

Now that I've finally had the chance to try it out, I'm somewhat disappointed. It's not a terrible device necessarily, but so much of what it does needs to be perfected, and devices like Microsoft's Surface tablet have had this figured out for years. The design isn't overly impressive, and neither is the performance for the most part. It just shows how much more complex it is to build a good laptop than a desktop computer, and Minisforum still has a lot to learn.

About this review: Minisforum sent us the V3 tablet for the purpose of this review. The company had no input in its content.

Minisforum V3: Pricing and availability

The Minisforum V3 was made available to preorder on April 15, 2024, and it's been available directly from Minisforum's website ever since. It's also available through Amazon.

Pricing officially starts at $975 for the tablet alone, but Minisforum's website currently has it discounted to $889, while Amazon is selling the tablet with the keyboard accessory for $949.

What I like

The screen

Potentially the best thing about the Minisforum V3 is its display. Not many tablets exist with 14-inch screens, and I do think it's a little too big for a tablet, but it does help make this a solid laptop replacement. I have trouble using anything other than my desktop monitor these days, but this is a decently large screen.

I was surprised at how easily visible the screen was in broad daylight

More importantly, though, Minisforum did a great job with the coating for this screen, which has a soft anti-reflective finish that makes it great for outdoor use. When I was taking pictures of the tablet outside, I was surprised at how easily visible the screen was in broad daylight, and the reflections didn't bother me at all.

It's also a screen with very solid color reproduction. Minisforum touts 100% coverage of DCI-P3, and sure enough, that's very close to what I saw in my tests.

The resolution and high refresh rate are nice, too, so the screen looks pretty good all around. It gets just past 500 nits of brightness, too, though the contrast could be a bit higher. The blacks get a little too bright at max brightness.

It has a good supply of ports for a tablet

Tablets aren't devices that typically have a lot of ports, but Minisforum actually put some effort into making this a solid experience. Despite having AMD processors, you get two USB4 ports here so you can use high-speed peripherals including eGPUs. On top of that, you get a third USB-C port, a headphone jack, and even a full-size SD card reader, which is pretty crazy for this kind of device.

Perhaps the best part, though, is that third USB-C port I just mentioned. This is a VLink port, meaning that in addition to connecting peripherals to the V3, you can use this port to connect another computer to the V3 and use the tablet as an external monitor. This is something any tablet should do, in my opinion, especially when you have a nice screen like this. I connected it to my Mac Mini and aside from default to the wrong resolution, it worked like a charm and it looked great.

The speakers get pretty loud

Initially, I thought the speakers on the Minisforum V3 weren't all that impressive, but after putting them through a more careful test comparing against my favorite laptop speakers (on the Asus Zenbook S 14), I was actually fairly impressed. I think the Zenbook is a bit sharper on the high-end and when it comes to voices, but the V3 still delivers some great quality audio at max volume without too much distortion. It can feel slightly muddy at times, but it's powerful and clear enough for anyone to have a good time watching a movie.

The GPU is surprisingly solid

While I wouldn't say I came away very impressed with performance overall (I'll dive more into that in a bit), I was positively surprised with how the GPU in the MInisforum V3 performed in Adobe Lightroom. While the benchmark scores put it behind Intel's competing processors, Adobe Lightroom was very surprising. Applying the AI Denoise filter to a 24MP RAW image took about 50 seconds, which is well ahead of the over two minutes it would take with Intel's Meteor Lake processors that launched around the same time.

In fact, these numbers put AMD's integrated GPU closer to Intel Meteor Lake when it comes to Lightroom performance specifically. Usually I just use manual denoise when editing photos on a laptop so I don't have to wait, but I actually let the V3 apply the AI denoise filter to all the photos in this review.

What I don't like

It feels cheap and it needs a built-in kickstand

The first big problem with the Minisforum V3 is that it feels kind of cheap. Admittedly, compared to the competition at the time, it was relatively cheap, but it doesn't feel like a ton of love was put into this one. The chassis is made of a magnesium alloy, which naturally feels a bit cheaper than aluminum, but what's really frustrating is that the tablet doesn't have a kickstand. Instead, you get a magnetic back cover that can fold backwards to serve as a kickstand, and it just feels poorly thought out.

A detachable kickstand like this has multiple downsides. For one thing, it takes away from the portability of the device. This is already a fairly thick tablet, so to add to it with a back cover is not good, especially when devices like the Surface Pro have done it right for over 10 years. Secondly, it looks kind of ugly in this case in particular. What's worse, it's noticeably wider than the tablet itself, so it makes it that much more uncomfortable to hold. And finally, you can't actually use this back cover if you're using the device as a tablet, because it covers the fan intakes on the back of the tablet. It's only suitable when it's being used as a kickstand, not as a protective cover.

AMD still struggles with performance on battery

It's been said a million times already, but AMD's laptop processors are not good for laptops, and while that changed significantly with the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series, this tablet predates that. Featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U, it's incredibly obvious just how much performance is degraded on this PC when it's used on battery. Here's a rundown of the benchmarks:

As you can see, the PCMark 10 score crashes so much more compared to Intel processors of the same time, and especially so compared to the latest laptops available. It gets even worse when you switch to the Balanced power mode, and while day-to-day performance was mostly fine, there were some unusual scenarios. For example, installing Adobe Creative Cloud on any Windows PC is often accompanied by the Windows shell restarting (I don't know how this hasn't been fixed), but the process of crashing the Windows shell and restarting it on the Minisforum V3 was the slowest I've ever seen. Even simply changing a YouTube video to full-screen mode was weirdly slow.

This unfortunately doesn't mean battery life is all that great, either. The most I got out of this tablet was 5 hours and 17 minutes.

The touchpad

While the keyboard accessory for the Minisforum V3 is solid and feels pretty decent to type on, the touchpad that's also included doesn't enjoy the same quality. Using this touchpad has been a pretty bad experience, with it often not recognizing my movements and clicking the mouse instead. It only seems to happen occasionally, but when it does, it's miserable.

The cameras are bad

I don't think anyone will be getting a Windows tablet for the cameras, but it's worth noting that they're not very good here. The front-facing camera has 1080p resolution and it works fine for video calls, even if it's not impressive, and it does have Windows Hello facial recognition. But if you were hoping the rear camera was better because of the 5MP sensor, that's not the case at all. Even in broad daylight, photos look terrible.

Should you buy the Minisforum V3?

It's very hard to recommend the Minisforum V3 in a world where a tablet like the Surface Pro 11 exists. It has a processor that's so much better across the board, it has a fantastic display, and a better design with a built-in kickstand. While the V3 delivers on some fronts, it's hard to ignore all the ways in which it's so much worse than Microsoft's tablet.

That being said, I think there's some merit here, and I'd like to see Minisforum give this another go to refine the design and use a better processor.

You should buy the Minisforum V3 if:

• You want a large Windows tablet with a nice display and speakers
• You can accept the middling performance on battery power
• You want a tablet that can double as a second screen

You shouldn't buy the Minisforum V3 if:

• You do want the best performance and battery life you can get
• You want a properly portable device with decent battery life
• You need the webcams for anything beyond the bare minimum