The mini PCs worth your money.
The AceMagic AD08 wraps an 8-core Tiger Lake Core i9-11900H in a striking vertical chassis with magnetic side access, RGB lighting, and three switchable performance modes. It is a budget productivity machine first, a casual 1080p gaming box second, and a reminder that 'i9' alone does not make a 2026 chip.
$399 (street) / $619 MSRP
The AceMagic AM18 is the brand's gaming flagship — an angular RGB-laden chassis built around AMD's Ryzen 7 7840HS, the Radeon 780M iGPU, 32 GB of DDR5-5600, and the only USB4 port in AceMagic's lineup. For 1080p gaming, content creation, and on-device AI experimentation, it is genuinely fast. The aesthetic, however, is committed.
$549–$729 (depending on storage)
The AceMagic F2A pairs Intel's first-generation Meteor Lake Core Ultra silicon with 32 GB of DDR5, a 1 TB NVMe SSD, and Wi-Fi 7 in a chassis that fits in one hand. It's the most modern Intel-powered mini PC AceMagic ships — but the F2A skips Thunderbolt and USB4 entirely, and the fans never quite shut up.
$455–$649 (Ultra 5 to Ultra 7 configurations)
The AceMagic S1 is a budget Intel N95 mini PC that puts a customizable 1.9-inch LCD screen and an RGB strip on the front of a small vertical tower. For under $250 it includes 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB to 1 TB SSD, and dual Gigabit LAN — a credible little office, HTPC, or home-NAS box, as long as you understand exactly what an N95 can and cannot do.
$239–$309 (N95 / N97 / N100 configurations)
The PN64 is ASUS' commercial answer to the question 'what does an SMB actually need from a mini PC.' 12th and 13th-gen Intel Core H-series mobile chips, dual-storage capacity, a configurable rear port, and a deliberately understated black chassis built for a five-year service contract.
$649
Most mini PCs ship with mobile-class processors. The PB63 puts an actual desktop-socket Intel Core i5, i7, or i9 — up to a 14th-gen i9-13900 with 65 W TDP — in a 1.35-liter chassis tested to military standards. For commercial deployments that need real desktop performance, this is the mini PC built for it.
$599
Powered by Intel's low-power N-series chips and built in a half-liter chassis, the NUC 14 Essential is the cheapest entry in the ASUS NUC line. For digital signage, kiosks, classroom carts, and home offices that just need to run a browser and a video call, it punches above its weight on quality.
$300
ASUS took stewardship of the NUC line and used the 14 Pro+ to do something Intel rarely did: actually shrink the chassis, raise the build quality, and ship a Meteor Lake-class business mini PC that holds together for a five-year deployment cycle.
$1,050
What buyers are actually saying.
In early 2024, AceMagic admitted that three of its mini-PC models shipped from the factory with malware on the system image. The statement was unusually candid for the category — and the unanswered questions are still part of the brand's record.
ASUS now owns the future of the NUC. The signing ceremony is the easy part of the story; the support fine print, the discontinued partner programs, and the warranty handoffs are where buyers actually learn what changed.
Beelink's EX docking station is a genuinely original piece of mini-PC engineering — a PCIe x8 slot on the bottom of a 158 mm cube, paired with a 600 W brick that swallows an RTX 4090. The 'open-source' announcement that followed is more complicated than the headlines suggested.
Geekom marketed the Mini IT13 around its Core i9-13900H. Independent reviews from NotebookCheck, AnandTech, Liliputing and CNX Software all reached the same uncomfortable conclusion: the chassis cannot keep that chip fed.
GMKtec beat Framework, HP and every NUC successor to shipping a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini-PC. The hardware is real, the AI pitch is louder than the software stack underneath it, and the warranty is still the same one.
With 64 GB of unified memory and 273 GB/s of bandwidth, Apple's smallest desktop has quietly become the most underrated mini-PC for running 70B-class models on your desk — provided you can stomach the upgrade tax and the absence of CUDA.
Every 2025-2026 mini PC with a TOPS number on the spec sheet calls itself an 'AI PC.' Here is what that NPU actually accelerates today, what still runs on the iGPU and CPU, and why memory — not TOPS — decides how a 7B model feels on your desk.
For local AI development, the question used to be 'desktop or laptop.' In 2025-2026, ASUS and Beelink answered with two different ways to put a real RTX 4070 next to your monitor — one inside a 2.5-liter chassis, one in an external dock — and both genuinely change what is possible on a small desk.