While enthusiasts continue to wait for the Core Ultra X9 388H flagship promised back at CES, Minisforum has quietly started shipping the more modest sibling in its M2 lineup. The standard M2 trades the unreleased Panther Lake-HX chip and discrete-class Arc B390 graphics of the M2 Pro for a 45-watt Intel Core Ultra 7 356H, a 16-core Panther Lake processor paired with 4-core Intel integrated graphics and a 50 TOPS NPU.
The chassis stays true to the compact mini PC formula at 130 x 127 x 50 mm (5.1 x 5 x 2 inches), and the internals are friendly to tinkerers and Linux users who want to bring their own components. Cracking the case reveals two SODIMM slots accepting DDR5-5600 memory, two M.2 2280 slots wired for PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe storage, and an M.2 2230 slot already populated by an Intel BE200 card handling Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. Linux users will find the BE200 a familiar component, with Intel's iwlwifi driver covering the card in the mainline kernel since version 6.5 and delivering Wi-Fi 7 without any out-of-tree work. At the SoC level, Intel completed Panther Lake NPU driver support ahead of hardware availability, with NPU firmware upstreamed to linux-firmware.git and IVPU kernel driver support landing in Linux 6.13, as Phoronix reported, though no community reports of M2-specific Linux testing had surfaced at launch. Dual heat pipes and a fan handle thermals for the 45-watt SoC.
Connectivity is generous for a system this size. The front and rear panels offer a 40 Gbps USB4 Type-C port, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a single USB 2.0 Type-A, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, a 3.5mm audio jack, and dual 2.5 GbE Ethernet ports driven by Realtek RTL8125D controllers, making it a plausible candidate for a homelab router, Proxmox node, or compact NAS. A 120W external adapter handles power.
The M2 starts at $575 (€530) for a barebones configuration with no RAM, storage, or operating system, which suits Linux users planning to install their own distro and source memory and SSDs separately. A configured model with 32GB of DDR5, a 1TB SSD, and Windows 11 runs roughly $1,040 (€960) at launch. The Core Ultra X9 388H variant of the M2 Pro, with its Arc B390 graphics, remains unreleased five months after its CES debut.
