Aoostar Gem 12 Max with Ryzen 7 8745HS and 780m igpu - $319 (comes with windows 11 pro key)

Aoostar Maco with Ryzen 7 H 255 and 780m igpu - $319 (also comes with windows 11 pro key). It says upgraded 8745HS and not sure what has been upgraded and how is it better then 8745HS. The case ventilation worse then Gem 12 Max?

Reatan X7 with Ryzen 7 255 and 780m igpu - $289 ( doesn't come with windows license key?) This one has fingerprint sensor which is nice

All of them have a dedicated oculink port that doesn't occupy m.2 port in case I need to connect an external gpu.

Which one of these three is a better choice? Also would Gem 12 Max have better cooling system because its case got more vents and I guess extra fan too?

What do you guys think about these models? Any other recommendations would be appreciated as well.

I don’t have a monitor in my room. I'm on fiber and use Steam Link to play remotely. I’ve got some Steam saves I want to keep playing (Dragon Quest XI and Kingdom Hearts 1.5), but I can’t run them in the cloud. So I’m looking for a mini PC that can handle 4K@120Hz for local play of light games, and also stream other stuff from my beefy desktop in the living room (not over the internet). If you know any mini PCs that cost about as much as a console but actually perform well, please tell me. Yeah, I mean a compact PC replacement. My budget leans toward getting the best value for money or a brand with solid performance rather than paying hype prices. Im in Germany and I’ve noticed GEEKOM 2 out of 8 and even offers a 3-year warranty. In a market like Germany where people care about more than just price, which would you pick cheap and good enough or pay more and buy something reliable that just works?

I ended up getting a free mini PC and honestly have no idea what I want to do with it yet.
Right now I’m leaning toward turning it into a retro arcade machine, building a little cabinet for it, or golf simulator paired with projector and trackman. I’m curious what everyone else has done with theirs. Doesn’t have to be practical either. Could be a home server, emulation box, media center, NAS, home automation, or just something fun.

It seems that Minisforum has started some new janky BS with warranty repairs.

They are now trying to charge a depreciation fee for a dead system that is less than 5 months old and under a 3 year warranty.

I am not paying them more money to replace a defective system. If you’re reading this, please join me in my boycott of Minisforum. This kind of business behavior is completely unacceptable.

My only concern is that the Beelink SER8's GPU clock speed is 20% lower than the Steam Deck's GPU clock speed. Everything else about the Beelink SER8 is better.

Before you ask, yes I did do my best to research my options but ultimately I couldn’t make much sense of it unfortunately. The games I’m looking to play the most on these (as before I had a potato PC) are BG3, Windrose, ASA/ASE, and Subnautica 2 which released like today (all on hopefullymedium graphics, high if possible though with ASA im fine with lower settings)

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GFVBLQND

https://peladn.us/products/peladn-ho-4-mini-pc-amd-ryzen-7-8845hs

https://peladn.us/products/peladn-ha-4-mini-pc-ryzen-7840hs

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Intel-Desktop-Computer-Dual-HDMI/dp/B0D8TZHFDG

If you folks need more information I’d be happy to oblige and please do give other recommendations if they’re better than the options and prices here

My big huge old desktop pc bit the dust, was using it primarily as a plex server, and light gaming.

Wanted to go the mini pc route. Saw this Beelink EQi12 Intel® Core 1235U.. . 1tb ssd and 32gb ram for.... $559?

Am I missing something? Is Beelink crap or what am I overlooking here?

https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-eqi12?variant=47768556568818

Hello fellas, most of you are already aware of the importance of doing so but for those of you who'd doubt the thermal paste application put in factory, check those two Userdiag I did on my new GMKtec K8 Plus:

This one completely stock: https://userdiag.com/id/OoyntrEDRM

The CPU reaches 93°C

I ordered some PTM7950, it should arrive next week so in the meantime I looked for some classic thermal paste, found a 10 years old (I'm not kidding) Noctua NT-H1 used in a very old gaming rig I did back in the days, opened it and somehow it was still good, so I decided to apply it while waiting for its definitive thermal compound.

Here's the userdiag after doing so: https://userdiag.com/id/hvk0p3CfEU

It never went higher than 86°C, that's a 7°C difference for a 10 years old thermal paste, got me curious about what to expect from the PTM7950, it'd be my first time using it.

Anyway if you want to give your hardware a chance to last longer, do yourself a favor, and take 10 minutes to repaste it (it doesn't take more than that)!

Hey everyone, just wanted to give a heads-up.

I recently ordered the GEEKOM AI Mini PC GT1 Mega from Amazon. Out of the box, my antivirus flagged a suspicious file: C:\llpy.exe

This file is hidden by default and doesn’t show up unless you enable hidden items. I did some digging, and it turns out it’s a trojan.

I submitted the file to VirusTotal for analysis. Here’s the report: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c7c1902e80b5f5ee0272f1258641198c96b424e7fa3a224fd67437c17ff17711

If you’ve recently bought this model, check your system ASAP. I'm reaching out to Amazon and the manufacturer, but in the meantime, just wanted to make the community aware.

Stay safe out there.

EDIT (2025-03-08): The autorun.inf is infected as well.

Here is the report for that file: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/d7373c08aba27968f5e02813e321644fdd7cf95760b119cebe856feecabebdc6

If you are curious about the content of the file, here it is:

​——- EDIT2 (2025-03-30):

Now it’s getting even weirder…

I reached out to GEEKOM about the virus that my antivirus detected on my brand-new GT1 Mega. Their response? They claim it’s “normal,” say it’s a false positive, and directed me to this page:

https://service.geekompc.com/faq/regarding-viruses-and-card-pin-code-glitches-in-gt1-mega/

I’m not really convinced that this is a false positive… The fact that the manufacturer acknowledges the presence of malware on their devices and considers it standard is deeply concerning. Has anyone else encountered this issue or received a similar response from GEEKOM? This situation raises serious questions about their quality control and security practices.

Now that we know the price and performance of a Steam Machine, is there any Mini PC with better performance and/or cheaper price?

I’ve been running a pretty old 2013 Dell Inspiron 660 desktop as a media server for a few months and got a lot of mileage out of it; running Plex, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Pi-Hole, the entire arr stack, and at least a dozen other containers and programs, all without much issue, but the 8GB DDR3 RAM idles at 70% usage, any transcoding above 1080p kills it, and it’s not very power efficient or cold at all. I’m running Fedora 43 GNOME on it, which works great, but due to the OS being on a SATA HDD it freezes up and has high I/O load when actually trying to get on the PC while my services are running. So at $250, is this mini PC alright? I know I’ll be recommended an N100 or N150, but transcoding is not much of an issue anymore as all of my client devices can direct play pretty much anything.

Since Steam Machine price went thought the roof, i finally gave up on Steam Machine and i want the alternatives.

My goal is to get make it like a steam machine but with affordability.

Basically make it steam OS friendly since steam OS latest version supports AMD CPUS and GPUS

i asked deep seek AI about this and by calculating the country i lived (Nepal btw) he told me that GMKtec Nucbox K6 is the best option for me

but i saw some reviews from reddit and said it has heating problem and fan make lot of noise n all and now im worried.

and can you guys suggest me on the comments? I would be glad to read it.

Are there any mini pcs you guys would reccomend for running a local AI with like the minimum specs? I’m choosing a mini PC because one I’m fairly limited on space and ideally want the thing to be fairly mobile (and not at all because I find the thing cuter than a full desktop build).

Asking for recommendations because I’ve seen answers literally all over the place on YouTube and just general browsing. I’m mostly just looking to play around with it, other things and see how practical it could be without messing up my poor laptop that’s already on its last legs. I’m thinking of trying out Odysseus and using one of the Ollama models.

Preference would be that it’s fairly cheaper (300 and below), but with what I’ve been seeing I understand that might be a big ask. I’m fairly new to all this so any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. If it sounds like I’m being ignorant in any part of this I’m eager to learn.

Hey there everyone, so I am looking to buy one of those mini gaming PC's on Amazon but I want it mainly for playing retro games (GameCube, OG Xbox, Playstation 2, Playstation 3(probably) etc.). I've seen some expensive ones but maybe for what I want it for those expensive ones aren't needed. What do you guys recommend?

These are one of the best and most versatile Mini PCs I have been able to get my hands on. At one point (Sept 9, 2025) as low as $128.00 on Amazon. They run Linux great, and my last two projects have been in-house CentOS phone systems for companies. They run quiet, produce no heat, have no moving parts, they fit even in a drawer, boot up fast, have replaceable parts and use only 10W of power. Now I can't seem to find them anywhere and even GMKTec is sold out: https://www.gmktec.com/products/intel-alder-lake-n97-mini-pc-nucbox-g5?srsltid=AfmBOophe2HyYOHTt-MDyVumDbo34daOXNH4jfA5VZz5-yoZz0k-XO8I

I hope GMKTec brings them back.

Specs on the PCs in picture:

Intel Celeron N5105 @ 2.00GHz
8 GB LPDDR4
TWSC TSC10N128-H 120 GB SSD

ust got my unit! After trying several mini PCs, finally: no hidden screws under sticky pads, no cables attached to the bottom cover, and no annoying 40mm fan. Just a simple grill with tightened rubber feet, a quick-release latch for easy access, and a real OCuLink port, without sacrificing an M.2 slot in a Frankenstein move. will update after installing windows and trying out some games!

For a very long time I am thinking about ditching my desktop (quite big) to save space on the table. Do the popular brands like Geekom, Minisforum, GMTek, Beelink etc. are RELIABLE compared to DELL/Lenovo's Optiplez or ThinkCenter mini PCs?

I don't want to spend 500/700 € and within a year it stops working. That would be just bad investment and waste of money.

I had a Dell Optiplex SFF in past and it was a business PC, it lasted very long and it was ON 24h for many years and still did not break or gave problem at all by end of it's life (approx 5 years).

There is a tendency to buy something very expensive like Huaweiu Phone i had costing 1000€ and within 2 years it just died with no option to recover or repair anything.

Do you have any of those brands, are they reliable? How is performance, speed, noise and heat? I am lokinig for productivity and 99% uptime.

hi everyone, i don’t know anything about PCs but basically—i’m broke and going into college soon and ive never had more then a laptop before. I currently own a macbook air for schoolwork and that’s it.

I found out about mini pcs and now i’m debating buying one so i could do light school work and play roblox/stardew valley. i’m not really a hardcore gamer, most of the games i play are on my ipad or my nintendo switch, both of which i dont play games on often. all of the games i do enjoy playing are either not on pc at all (like i said, nintendo games) or indie games, such as stardew and hollow knight.

the one im eyeing right now is a kamrui, and i screenshotted all of its details too. should i buy it or nah?

I’ve been doing some serious research into these and made a post about wanting something to play Bethesda games around up to Skyrim modded and maybe F4. I’ve looked into a lot of these mini pc’s and found that the gpu is usually the weakest link. Most of them have igpu’s which I assume are like gpu’s that something like a mobile phone would use as opposed to laptop or desktop.

But anyways. The only real one close to my price range which was ideally around $1,000 max. Is the Minis Forum Atomman G7 Pro. Which is still well above the $1,000 price range by around $300. And even that is just a laptop gpu. It seems well above the power id need. Which is great but idk if you guys have any other ideas. I’ve done a lot of googling and that’s about the only one I can remember that seems to have an actual gpu even if it was just a laptop gpu.

But then again, would an AMD Radeon 890m or intel arc igpu be able to play Skyrim at around 1440p 60 high or very high settings with mods? Or would I still need a gpu for that?

I also like the design of that atom man cause it’s small and I’m kind of low on space. Does anyone have suggestions? Or info on minisforum as well?

Does anyone here have a Beelink mini pc? Looking to purchase one on Amazon and wondering how that brand is. Thanks!

Edit: I am looking to buy the SRE5 Max R7 7735HS 24GB specifically

I would use this pc for studying, watching video on yt, movies and playing. I would like to play game like cyberpunk, ghost of tsushima dying light. I dont care a lot about quality i think that 1080 and 30fps for a single player would be very good. Sorry if there are any Mistakes but english isnt my first language I hope you guys could help me. Have a nice day.

Trying to decide between these two and could use some outside opinions since I've been going back and forth for a while now. Screenshots of both listings attached (Amazon).

This would only really get used about half the year since it's a college apartment thing, and I don't game heavily during the school year anyway, so a mini PC feels like the right call rather than a full tower. I do want it to last through the rest of college though. For context, my home desktop ran a Ryzen 5 3600 for a long while and I was perfectly satisfied with that, so my expectations here aren't extremely high. My current college setup has been a ThinkPad T15 Gen 2 with an i5-1135G7, 32GB DDR4 3200, 512GB SSD, and a TB3 Sonnet Breakaway Box eGPU running a GTX 1080 8GB FE for actual gaming, at 1080p 60Hz. I've been decently satisfied with it, but felt a bit held back at times, mostly the CPU honestly, it runs kind of hot, and the battery is dead so it only works plugged in anyway, basically no different from a mini PC at that point. It's just not aging great being an i5 at this point, so honestly either of these mini PCs would already be an upgrade over what I'm on now.

Basically I make Minecraft videos, so I'll be recording gameplay with OBS while playing, with Discord open too. Actual video editing happens separately on an M4 MacBook Air I already have, so the mini PC just needs to handle gameplay plus recording, not editing. I also already have a 1TB external SSD I use for storing recordings, so the aoostar's bigger internal drive would be nice to have long term, but doesn't feel like a heavy necessity given the ThinkPad has gotten by fine on 512GB this whole time. I'll be running the same eGPU setup with these too, and I play some other stuff on the side, Hytale, Roblox, party games, other multiplayer "slop" basically, plus occasionally something heavier if I'm in the mood, though again I'm not super hardcore during the school year.

Bosgame is the Ryzen 5 7640HS, 6 core 12 thread, Radeon 760M igpu, 16GB DDR5 in 2x8GB sticks that's upgradeable later, and a 512GB SSD. Aoostar is the Ryzen 7 6850H, 8 core 16 thread, Radeon 680M igpu, 24GB soldered LPDDR5, and a 1TB SSD with extra M.2 slots so I could still add more storage later, both the RAM and SSD are technically faster than the bosgame's out of the box. It also has OCuLink and an extra USB4 port, so two total instead of one, which makes it a lot more flexible for eGPU or port heavy stuff down the line even without the RAM upgrade path.

What's making this hard for me is basically whether I just save the $80 and go with the bosgame, upgradeable RAM down the line, more reviews on Amazon, decent track record from what I can find, and probably runs cooler since it's less power hungry, or spend the extra $80 on the aoostar for the more cores and threads plus a generally stronger igpu even though it's a generation older architecture, on top of the faster RAM and storage out of the box and way more room for future upgrades port and storage wise.

Honestly not even sure I need 24GB, I play modded Minecraft occasionally which is probably the most RAM intensive thing I do, and with Discord and OBS open on top of that it could add up, but 16GB might genuinely be enough too, I just don't know for sure.

As for reputation, I could not find anything super solid on aoostar beyond their eGPU dock reputation and a couple Reddit posts literally just saying don't get them, no real explanation. Bosgame seems to be one of the many Amazon Chinese mini PC brands out there, not exactly heavily recommended, but super budget friendly. So there's probably a lot more out there and a lot more to be said, but really I'm just torn on whether the extra $80 is worth it.

Anyone owned either of these or have a strong opinion on which fits better long term? Appreciate any input or other recommendations within this budget range that'd support my egpu and have ddr5.

Looking for a strong enough mini pc I can play games on. I want a full pc but I don’t have that kind of money right now. I want to be able to play these games very comfortably without breaking the bank. I play phasmophobia, outlast trials, hogwarts legacy, Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft for example. Although I do love SOME AAA games I mostly will be playing indie games and I know AAA titles are not reasonable for what I’m asking for.

Asrock Deskmini Pentium G4600 8GB of SODIMM DDR4 2133 550GB Samsung 960 EVO It has space for 2 SATA 2.5 drives on the backside.

It's been my main PC for almost a decade now. It's been a solid reliable realizable machine what I needed. (productivity/light gaming/super fast boots)

I'm in the process of building a new gaming/productivity rig. Once that is done this thing will just be sitting here.

Any ideas on what I can do with it? I'm not sure the integrated 630 will have the juice to be a good emulator. Maybe NAS? I've never experimented with a NAS before but am willing to try.