Snag a great deal on a powerful but petite Minisforum PC with an eight-core CPU and discrete Radeon GPU.
The mental image that appears when you think of a ‘desktop PC’ is probably a big black box—or beige and horizontal, if you’re of a certain age. Certainly there’s still a massive market for DIY PCs in tower cases, but the majority of folks buying desktops these days could probably be best served by a mini-PC. For regular office work, something like the Ayaneo AM01 will do just fine, but buying a mini-PC doesn’t mean giving up gaming.
For one thing, you can of course play thousands of games without compromise on the integrated graphics of modern CPUs. If you’re after a more contemporary gaming experience instead, there are mini-PCs with discrete GPUs, too. This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon—your author used a Zotac Zbox Magnus EN1070K as his primary desktop for some time. The performance that you can get out of a mini-PC now is absolutely bonkers in comparison, though.
Take, for example, the Minisforum Neptune HX100G. This machine is less than 3 liters in volume, yet packs in an eight-core Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU and a discrete Radeon RX 6650M GPU with its own 8GB of video RAM. That part offers similar performance to the desktop Radeon RX 6600, which means capable 1080p gaming on current-generation titles without dropping the settings through the floor.
The system has ample connectivity: four display connections, including a pair of HDMI ports and a pair of DisplayPort connections. You also get three 10 Gbps USB Type-A ports, two 5 Gbps Type-A ports, and a single 5 Gbps Type-C port around front.
