Minisforum has turned AMD’s flagship mobile-workstation chip into a NAS. The company’s new N5 Max-P495 pairs the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495, the top-end part in AMD’s Gorgon Halo lineup, with support for up to 200TB of storage, according to a Liliputing roundup that also flagged a second Gorgon Halo machine, the MS-S1 Max-P495. Minisforum specifies that 200TB figure itself; Notebookcheck relayed it from the company’s announcement rather than from independent testing, so it’s a rated ceiling, not a number anyone has verified by filling the drive bays.
Gorgon Halo NAS specs and storage
The Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 is the same silicon AMD ships in high-end mobile workstations: a large integrated GPU paired with enough memory bandwidth to make unified-memory setups viable for work that would otherwise need a discrete card. Putting it in a NAS is a different bet than putting it in a laptop. A NAS spends most of its life idle, waiting on file requests, so the chip’s GPU and multithreaded cores point less at desktop responsiveness and more at on-box transcoding, virtualization or inference work, the sort of thing that turns a storage box into a small server. Neither outlet says whether Minisforum tuned the N5 Max-P495 for that or just had the chip in supply.
That pairing matters for NAS buyers specifically because self-hosted software has moved past simple file serving. Photo-management tools that run local face recognition, media servers doing hardware-accelerated transcoding, and increasingly local large-language-model inference all lean on GPU compute and, for the LLM case, on memory capacity a graphics card alone doesn’t have. A chip built for unified CPU/GPU memory access is a better fit for that mix of jobs than the low-power ARM or Celeron silicon most consumer NAS boxes ship with.
This isn’t new territory for the company. Liliputing’s own roundup notes that Minisforum continues to make ridiculously powerful NAS units, and the N5 Max-P495 arrived alongside a second Gorgon Halo machine, the MS-S1 Max-P495, in the same announcement. Neither outlet’s coverage says how many drive bays the N5 Max-P495 carries or what either machine costs, which matters more for a NAS than for a laptop: bay count and drive tiering decide whether 200TB is a realistic build or a theoretical maximum nobody will actually populate.
The chip that keeps showing up
This isn’t the first time teqpost has tracked the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 turning up somewhere unexpected. Acemagic used the same chip in its two-litre F9A mini-workstation, announced on 2026-09-05. A mini PC and a NAS built around the same top-end Gorgon Halo die, within the same fortnight, says more about how AMD is positioning the part than either product does on its own: it’s being sold to OEMs as a general-purpose high-end SoC for whatever chassis a segment wants, not a chip designed around one category.
What to watch: Minisforum hasn’t published pricing or a shipping date for the N5 Max-P495, and neither outlet’s coverage includes one. Until that lands, the 200TB rating and the Gorgon Halo branding are the only confirmed details, worth checking against Minisforum’s own listing once it goes live rather than treating the storage ceiling as a tested benchmark.
