Morefine flips the traditional PC layout and puts four hard drives directly above the processor to beat the heat | Tech Radar
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Vertical GPU, top-loading HDDs: Morefine's 4-bay NAS is unlike any AI workstation PC I've ever seen, thanks to a simple physics law
Four hard drives sit on top while an RTX 5070 runs underneath
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Morefine MNAS-X1 stacks four hard drives directly above the processor to escape heat
The MNAS-X1 packs an 800W power supply into a 15.6L chassis
Four spring-latch drive bays let users swap storage without any tools
Morefine has released an AI workstation PC that stacks its storage drives on top of the chassis instead of beside the processor.
The MNAS-X1 arrives with a four-bay hard drive tray fixed directly above the motherboard rather than tucked beside it.
This unusual layout follows a fairly straightforward principle, since warm air naturally rises while cool air tends to settle lower, keeping the drives clear of the hottest components below them.
The chassis measures 218mm by 193mm by 372mm, giving a 15.6L footprint wrapped in a white aluminum alloy shell over a steel frame.
A glossy purple panel breaks up the front, and vents line the left, right, rear, and top surfaces for airflow.
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Each of the four 3.5-inch bays has a spring latch release, letting drives slide out without tools once the side button is pressed.
Connectivity runs to one USB4 port, several USB-A ports, dual 10G RJ45 network jacks, an SD card slot, and a single HDMI 2.0 output for 4K at 60 Hz.
Inside sits an AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 8845HS chip, an 8-core, 16-thread Zen 4 chip with a 3.8GHz base clock and a 5.1GHz boost, paired with a Radeon 780M graphics core rated at 2700MHz.
An onboard XDNA NPU adds 16 TOPS on its own and 38 TOPS when the CPU, GPU, and NPU work together.
Two DDR5 SO-DIMM slots hold up to 96GB, three M.2 2280 slots take PCIe 4.0 x 4 SSDs at 4TB each, and the four SATA bays add up to 30TB apiece for a combined ceiling near 132TB.
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Room for a full-size GPU and real benchmark numbers
The three-slot PCIe 4.0 x 16 opening accepts cards up to 330mm long and 66mm thick, backed by an 800W CRPS power supply built to the 2.0 specification with an 80 PLUS Platinum rating.
Fitted with 64GB of RAM, a 500GB M.2 SSD, and an RTX 5070 with 12GB of VRAM running in x 8 mode, a review unit posted a Cinebench R23 score of 16271 pts multi-core and 1794 pts single-core, plus a PCMark 10 total of 9966.
Local language model testing through ONNX Runtime returned scores of 3511, 3714, 3163, and 3408 across the Phi 3.5, Mistral, Llama 3.1, and Llama 2 benchmarks, respectively.
That Cinebench multi-core figure lands in roughly the same range as an eight-core desktop chip like the Ryzen 7 5800X, while the PCMark total edges past what most mid-range gaming laptops score.
During a 21-minute full-load stress run, CPU power held at 54W with an average die temperature of 86℃, while the GPU drew 250W and averaged 80℃.
Morefine has not confirmed pricing for the MNAS-X1, and the unit is currently listed for inquiry only through its regional distributor.
Stacking the storage above rather than beside the board is a small design choice, but it turns a routine barebones NAS build into something closer to a hybrid server.
Whether that trade-off proves practical will likely come down to how much heat a fully loaded GPU pushes upward once the drive bay sits directly in its path.
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Efosa has been writing about technology for over 7 years, initially driven by curiosity but now fueled by a strong passion for the field. He holds both a Master's and a Ph D in sciences, which provided him with a solid foundation in analytical thinking.
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