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| A NAS powered by AMD Strix Halo will hit shelves soon |
The world of tech is full of beautiful, strange creations—products that take a perfectly good component and shove it somewhere it was never meant to go. Despite launching as laptop chips, AMD's Strix Halo line of APUs has found itself in a wide range of devices, such as mini-PCs and even handheld gaming consoles. The latest and most audacious example of this trend comes from Minisforum, which has decided to stuff one of these powerhouse processors into a NAS. The result is the beastly N5 Max, a storage hub that’s more powerful than most people’s primary desktops.
A NAS With a Laptop's Brain
Minisforum has built the N5 Max around the top-of-the-line AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, also known as the "Strix Halo" chip. This isn't your typical low-power NAS processor. It's a 16-core, 32-thread Zen 5 beast that can clock up to 5.1 GHz. To put it simply, you’re getting the same raw compute power you’d find in a flagship laptop, but it’s now dedicated to managing your files and running local AI workloads. The device ships with 64GB of LPDDR5X unified memory, and while most Strix Halo systems using the chip usually come with 128 GB, Minisforum probably had to settle given how precious memory is these days.
The Price of Overkill
If all this power sounds appealing, you’ll need to have deep pockets. As revealed by our colleagues at Tom's Hardware, the Minisforum N5 Max will set one back by an eye-watering $2,899. That’s a lot of cash for a NAS, but you are getting a fully-fledged mini-PC and an AI server rolled into one.
For a complete breakdown of the specs and the official announcement, you can check out the source coverage here: Minisforum's beastly N5 Max NAS comes powered by AMD Strix Halo — $2,899 for 'AI NAS' with pre-installed OpenClaw, supports up to 200TB capacity.
If you're in the market for an overpowered NAS, you can buy one on April 23. Storage is extra, obviously, and the barebones machine ships with a measly 128 GB drive, which occupies one of the five available NVMe slots. It also has five SATA drive bays, allowing you to add up to 200 TB of storage to your NAS. The total AI compute power hits 126 TOPS, making it a surprisingly capable on-device AI hub, especially with the open-source OpenClaw assistant pre-installed on the system drive.
More Than Just Storage
Alongside its impressive network storage prowess, the Minisforum N5 Max also offers an impressive range of I/O. You get two 10 Gb/s Ethernet ports for insanely fast network transfers, two 80 Gb/s USB 4 ports, one 40 Gb/s USB 4 port, and even an HDMI 2.1 port for display output—something not commonly found on many NAS devices. Essentially, you get a standard Strix Halo mini-PC (sans wireless connectivity options), with the option to hoard copious amounts of data locally.
The N5 Max is clearly overkill for just backing up photos. It’s designed for creative professionals who need lightning-fast local storage for 8K video editing, tech enthusiasts who want to run virtual machines on their NAS, or early adopters looking to experiment with local AI models. It’s expensive, it’s excessive, and for a very specific group of people, it might just be the perfect machine.