At CES 2025, Chinese PC manufacturer Emdoor (usually focused on rugged PC products, and we previously covered one of its Intel Core Ultra gaming handhelds) showcased a new modular Mini PC design dubbed Clink-X xCraft that has since been confirmed for a planned March 2025 crowdfunding launch. This Mini PC boasts an incredibly compact form factor and potentially offers some very interesting upgrades post-launch.
Of course, there are limitations to this modular mini PC design. Like modular Framework laptops or Framework-based devices, Emdoor Clink-X xCraft will only come with custom motherboards with soldered OEM CPUs. But since the motherboard is so easily removable compared to the majority of mini PC designs, long-term support could still offset the downsides of this, particularly if truly meaningful modular attachments like an extended heatsink, discrete graphics, etc, actually come to fruition.
As far as the current fixed specifications go, the only two CPU options currently given with the motherboard are Ryzen "Hawk Point" CPUs, but specifically the Ryzen 7 250 and 260— which are just a rebadged Ryzen 7 8840U and Ryzen 7 8845HS, respectively. Those two CPUs are also rebadged Ryzen 7 7840U and Ryzen 7 7845HS, respectively, which makes the additional renaming cycle quite egregious. With either CPU, you'll be getting eight Zen 4 cores and AMD RDNA 3 integrated graphics, with the differences boiling down to the CPU base clock.
AMD's Ryzen 7 250 and its eight Zen 4 cores have a base clock of 3.3 GHz and boost up to 5.1 GHz, and are paired with 12 RDNA 3 iGPU Compute Units for graphical horsepower. The Ryzen 7 260 and its eight Zen 4 cores have a base clock of 3.8 GHz, boost up to 5.1 GHz, and also have 12 RDNA 3 CUs. These are still good specs since part of the reason 7840U and its ilk were so endlessly rebadgeable was because their iGPU performance took that long to be exceeded by the competition, but it's still worth noting.
I/O is fixed regardless of your CPU and also replaces your PCIe expansion besides the dual NVMe slots. The fastest connectors are dual USB4 20 Gbps Type-C ports, with dual USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (one Type-A, one Type-C) following directly behind. There is also a USB Type-C port specifically for power input, one HDM1 2.1 port, one DisplayPort 2.1 port, and a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port.
Storage and RAM support seem a little more interesting — with dual NVMe Gen4 slots (M.2-2280, up to 4TB) and support for up to 128GB of DDR5 RAM at 5600 MT/s, this mini PC definitely isn't slacking in those options. It's just a bit of a shame the CPU is soldered, but going unsoldered likely would have pushed them in the direction of AM4 or AM5 and presented a greater technical challenge for this form factor.
As-is, I think it looks decently promising, but the fastest expansion effectively being limited to dual USB4 20 Gbps does concern me, particularly at a $500 starting price point. OCuLink or even just a PCIe slot would be far preferable, particularly for whatever future discrete GPU attachments may be planned.
