Best mini-PCs in 2024: The compact computers I love the most

In recent years, the best mini PCs have really bulked up to become modest yet genuinely viable gaming platforms. The Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) in these tiny machines are made for laptops. They comprise a CPU running at a prudent wattage and an Integrated Graphics Processor (iGPU) to handle games and video. 

For years such chips weren’t really ideal for gaming, but when AMD launched the Radeon 780M iGPU, it raised the bar. It’s the graphics silicon at the heart of the best gaming handhelds and this little beast all but guarantees around 30 fps and better at 1080p, in modern games at medium detail settings. Running indies and older titles, you’ll enjoy still higher frame rates. 

Augmenting the iGPU with a discrete laptop GPU is the next step up, and you’ll find two such machines in this group test. For its all-round performance, with a discrete RX 7600M XT at its heart, the Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT gets my vote as the best mini PC. Naturally this raises the cost, and there’s no question that building your own PC gets you more bang for the same bucks, but this level of compactness can’t be matched by going DIY. On the cheaper side, however, the Venus UM970 Pro gets the nod as the best budget mini PC.

If your chief requirements are top frame rates and detail settings beyond 1440p for the lowest outlay, you are better off self-building. But if you’re after a tiny, off-the-peg PC with awesome everyday computing power and 1080p to 1440p gaming capabilities, well, you’ve come to the right place. 

The quick list

The best overall mini PC

Being more than capable of proper 1080p gaming performance and practically anything else you might want to do, the Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT is the best mini PC around. Housed in a compact chassis and mounted in its vertical stand, the AtomMan G7 PT is larger than your average mini pc, but still diminutive in terms of desktop footprint. Chances are, if you’re in the market for a mini pc for gaming, then space is a factor, and this wee beasty takes up very little.

LEDs in the right-hand side of the chassis illuminate the logo for the Taiwanese fantasy IP Legend of Ashoka, but if you’re not a fan, you can easily dip into the BIOS and turn those LEDs off. With this done, the chassis looks relatively clean, functional and understated in matte black.  

The G7 PT represents a performance-leap from regular mini pcs as it comes with a discrete midrange laptop GPU, in the form of AMD’s Radeon RX 7600M XT. With 2048 shader units, 32 CUs, a memory bus of 128 MB, a clock speed of 2,600 MHz and 8 GB of dedicated VRAM, It’s a strong 1080p performer. It can run games at 1440p, but be prepared to notch down some graphics settings to keep frame rates smooth. In all honesty, 2560 x 1440 is more the playground of NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 Mobile, a costlier and more performant mobile GPU, and one that you’ll find in the hyper-expensive Asus ROG NUC 970.

Processing duties are handled by the Ryzen 9 7945HX. Running at a default TDP of just 65 W, it’s a bloody monster, featuring 16 cores, 32 execution-threads and a turbo-clock speed of 5.4 GHz. And while it drives games fantastically, it’s geared to do way more. Tasks such as video rendering are water off a duck’s back to the 7945HX, and it puts many desktop processors to shame. You can even bump the TDP up to 85 W by hitting the turbo button on the G7 PT’s front-panel, though you’ll feel the benefit of that more in productivity tasks, less so in gaming.

You might think this compelling combo of components would make the G7 PT screeching-hot and noisy, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Minisforum’s proprietary Cold Wave cooling tech is fantastic. It tames heat, tightly manages airflow, keeps fan noise to a minimum, and dedicates supplementary cooling to the RAM and M.2 drives.   

When it comes to gaming, 1080p is where the G7 PT shines. You can expect a solid 60+ fps in most modern titles, with detail settings around the ultra mark, and you’ll see some games shoot way past 100 fps. We had A Plague Tale: Requiem, set to 1080p Ultra, running at 76 fps. Doom Eternal, at 1080p and Ultra Nightmare settings, blazes along at 172 fps. One feature you shouldn’t touch, though, is ray tracing, which slays the frame rate at any resolution; the RX 7600M XT just isn’t cut out for it.

But that’s a minor quibble. Paired with a quality, high-refresh 1080p monitor, the AtomMan G7 PT is a great machine for the price. Just bear in mind that as a barebones purchase, so you’ll need to pick up your own DDR5 RAM, M.2 storage drive and Windows key.   

Read our full Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT review.

The best budget mini PC

When it comes to mini PCs, at PC Gamer we’re looking for machines which can run games comfortably at 1080p. The Minisforum Venus UM790 Pro is the best budget mini PC and represents one of the most affordable options to meet this gaming threshold.

The APU at the heart of things is AMD’s Ryzen 9 7940HS. It’s a fantastic chip, wielding eight cores and 16 threads which can hit a turbo clock speed of 5.2 GHz, and folds the mighty little Radeon 780M into its design. It has since been superseded by the newer Ryzen 9 8945HS, but you won’t see a generational shift in performance between the two.

Architecturally these two chips are nigh-on identical, but as a newer chip, the 8945HS drives up the price of machines which carry it. That’s a premium which offers marginal performance benefits. The bottom line is that the UM790 Pro offers a better price-performance ratio, so you can be confident you’re not losing out by opting for this ever-so-slightly older CPU. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 has recently been launched in laptops, but we’ve yet to see that chip, with its 890M iGPU being made available in any mini PCs, and they certainly won’t come cheap.

The UM790 pro will happily run most modern games past the playable 30 fps+ mark at 1080p and default medium settings, and can go higher with extra detail down-tweaks. Forza Motorsport is smooth at 47 fps, Cyberpunk 2077 sees 48 fps, and Warhammer 3’s battles hit around the 42 fps mark. At the same settings in indies and older, less demanding titles, things ramp up most agreeably, with Stray running at a comfortable 45-60 fps, Soulstone Survivors ranging from 45-90 fps, and Doom Eternal seeing 75-95 fps.

While you can pick up the UM790 Pro from Amazon (it’s always worth shopping around for the best price), it can be bought direct from Minisforum, and there’s a range of price options, from the barebones basic kit to various preloaded configurations of RAM and M.2 storage. We always say go barebones and source the RAM and storage yourself, so figure on adding around 130-150 bucks to the bill for 32GB DDR5-5600 plus a 1TB M.2 drive, and possibly less if you catch some components at sale prices.

Popping the UM790 Pro open to install your parts is easy, though not the most elegant process. Four screws on the underside hold the upper shell to the component-tray, but these are hidden beneath the unit’s four glued-on rubber feet. So getting at them involves tugging the feet off and breaking the rubber seal; it’s worth putting another dab of glue on them when you put it back together. 

There are two TDP settings in the BIOS which run the APU at different wattages; Balanced runs it at 54 W, while Performance bumps this up to 56 W. The performance difference is negligible in practice, though 56 W does run the chip a little hotter, and the cooling solution a little louder. Not that the latter is a worry though, the UM790 Pro runs cool and quiet, and in Balanced mode, it’s totally unobtrusive.

All in all then, a lovely little piece of engineering. If you’re looking for an inexpensive yet performant mini PC with a corking iGPU, it’s our budget-best pick.

Read our full Minisforum Venus UM790 Pro review.

The best mini PC for gaming

Like the AtomMan G7 PT, the ROG NUC from Asus packs a discrete GPU, which pushes it to the larger end of the scale for a mini pc, but it’s the most powerful graphics silicon you’ll find in such a small chassis, making the Asus ROG NUC 970 the best mini PC for gaming. Just don’t ask how much it costs… We still class these machines as mini pcs, as they’re wilfully compact and powered by mobile computing components. The ROG NUC combines some excellent choices in this regard.

Geared towards high-end laptops, the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H CPU offers a mix of efficient, ultra-efficient and performance cores, with the purpose of drawing reduced wattages in times of low demand and ramping them up when games and apps require it to. For gaming though, it’s the six multithreading performance cores, which cap out at 5.1 GHz, which we’re most interested in. As mobile components go, it offers competitive performance with AMD’s APU, and while Intel’s own top 14th-gen Core i7 and i9 mobile chips outrun it in terms of core-count and raw speed, they also draw very high wattages and generate a lot of heat. This makes the Core Ultra 9 an altogether more elegant solution for a compact machine such as this.

The ROG NUC 970 pairs this with NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 Mobile GPU, which features 4608 shader-units running at a boost clock of 1,695 MHz and has 8 GB dedicated VRAM to play with. While it doesn’t share the same vital statistics and grunt as its desktop namesake, it’s still a solid GPU, comfortably outperforming the RX 7600M XT in the Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT, pushing the ROG NUC’s capabilities into genuine 1440p territory. 

It also handles ray tracing well, and as an RTX 40-series RTX card it benefits from DLSS and Frame Gen, in games which support them. Hitting 76 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p, using the Ray Tracing Ultra preset with DLSS and Frame Gen enabled, ain’t to be sniffed at. Neither is a solid average of 72 fps in Helldivers, at 1440p with top detail settings.

It can get a bit blowy under load, but fortunately there are three performance settings in the preinstalled Asus Armory Crate app which raise or lower the TDP and the maximum fan speed. We found that setting it to Silent mode resulted in the loss of only one or two fps, which is a great trade-off for unobtrusive operation.  

The only downside is the RRP. For its asking price of two grand, you can build a system with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, an RTX 4080 Super and all the trimmings, in a small form-factor chassis. This will absolutely demolish games at 1440p and run them comfortably at 4K. In this context, the Asus ROG NUC is objectively not a bargain, or even particularly good value. But if you’ve money to spare, you’re disinclined to self-build, and you want a super-compact machine with solid performance on a 1440p panel, you’ll be pleased with what the ROG NUC has to offer. 

Read our full Asus ROG NUC 970 review.

The most compact mini PC

In a marketplace full of dinky PCs, the AX8 Pro from Geekom is the dinkiest. Measuring just  11.1cm x 11.7cm x 3.8cm, and housed in a cool, light-blue aluminium chassis, it’s crisp and visually appealing. It also has has a reassuring mass and sense of density about it, which speaks to a weighty cooling solution and closely-packed internal components.

Armed with AMD’s Ryzen 9 8945HS, which features 8 cores, 16 threads and a turbo-max of 5.2 GHz, it’s a quick and capable machine, and utilises the Radeon 780M for gaming and video tasks. Out of the box, its CPU is set to the highest of the BIOS’ three performance modes, which are Silent (51 W TDP),  Normal (59 W TDP) and Performance (65 W TDP).

This is pretty much overdrive for this CPU, giving the AX8 Pro a small edge in frame rates over other Radeon 780M-equipped APUs, but it also sees CPU temperatures sitting in the low-90s Celsius under heavy load. This is still a comfortable distance from its max operating temperature of 100 °C, but to keep it steady, the cooling system has to work hard. This results in a noisier box, though it’s the passage of air you hear; there’s no high-pitched coil-whine, which is a blessing. Heading into the BIOS and knocking the TDP back to its 59 W Normal mode reduces noise and heat significantly, and it barely affects the machine’s gaming performance, so that’s our recommendation for day-to-day operation.

It’s highly competent with indie games at 1080p and medium settings, and we tested a range of titles including Subnautica (55-75 fps), Stray (52-75 fps), Soulstone Survivors (80-120 fps) and finished up with some good old Doom Eternal (70-80 fps).

It outperforms other 780M-wielding machines by a small amount, and offers a competent and playable experience at 1080p with medium presets in more demanding modern games too. Total War: Warhammer III hits 42 and 33 fps in battle and campaign respectively, while Forza runs at a very smooth 46 fps. Cyberpunk even breaks the half-century with 51 fps. 

In short, it’s a great little box, with the emphasis very much on little. The only downside is the price. There’s a cheaper version of the AX8 available which drops the M.2 storage from 2TB to 1TB, keeps the same 32GB DDR5-5600, and replaces the Ryzen 9 8945HS with the Ryzen 7 8845HS. This is a very minor downgrade; the chips have with the same core/thread count and iGPU, with the 8845HS’ turbo clock speed just 100 MHz slower. The full-fat 8945HS brushes a grand in price. For the same outlay, you can pick up Minisforum’s discrete-GPU-packing AtomMan G7 PT barebones. And there’s no Barebones option at all for the AX8 Pro. 

If your priority is pure 1080p performance and size is secondary, there are better-performing machines for your needs than this delightful little device. But if you want the smallest, most svelte little square of agile computing, and the aforementioned benchmarks meet your needs, it’s an excellent choice. 

Read our full Geekom AX8 Pro review.

The best-looking mini PC

I’ve never seen a PC elicit so many wide-eyed exclamations of delight. For the Retro Mini AM02, handheld specialist Ayaneo has gone to town on the retro styling, and one glance at its charming exterior is all it takes to make you go “ooh!” 

It’s a gunmetal-grey homage to the original Nintendo Entertainment System, complete with a tidy front-flap which conceals USB and headphone ports, and a dinky touchscreen on top. This displays detailed system info and enables you to switch between TDP presets, with the future potential for visual customisation. It adds to the neat looks, and once you have it set up, the whole machine pleases by simply being there.

Its beauty isn’t just skin-deep, as the Retro Mini AM02 is built around AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840HS, and gets its kicks with the Radeon 780M. This puts it in same 1080p league as competing machines, with one caveat.

While the 7840HS generally runs at TDPs between 35-54 W, Ayaneo limits this to 47 W, which results in a top turbo clock speed of 4.7 GHz, rather than the chip’s theoretical maximum of 5.1 GHz. It’s no great loss to be fair, and set against similar APUs in other machines, it only drops one or two fps in more demanding and heavyweight games. otherwise it’s pretty much identical in performance to other APUs running the Radeon 780M.

What sets it apart from similarly-specced mini PCs is a unique level of out-of-the-box tweakability. The Retro Mini AM02 ships with Ayaspace 2.0 preinstalled, which is the principle interface for Ayaneo’s handheld gaming PCs. It runs at Windows boot, bundling all your installed games into an easy-access single library, and offers tons of power and speed customisation options. 

Under Ayaspace’s performance tab, you can switch between three power presets which alter the TDP and CPU/GPU clock speeds for different demands. You can also set up your own presets, and there’s a ton of BIOS-level tweakers to play with, including the APU’s TDP limit, sliders for CPU and iGPU clock speeds, a CPU turbo toggle, a general power-policy setting, and automatic or custom fan-curves for the CPU cooler. With some light tinkering, we had the CPU and iGPU running at their max permissible speeds, with a fan-curve managing heat generation effectively and fairly quietly.

While you can totally use the Retro Mini AM02 as a desktop machine, it’s equally at home under the TV, set up as an emulator to run retro games. The gamepad-friendly Ayaspace UI can be set to run fullscreen at boot, so it makes a lot of sense as a console and media centre, although you’ll want to keep the output resolution at 1080p for native PC gaming.

With a quality IO selection including HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 and plenty of USB ports, the whole kit is well-appointed. And while it can’t quite run its APU at full throttle, there’s little else to criticise about the Retro Mini AM02, and a lot to love.

Read our full Ayaneo Retro Mini AM02 review.

How we test mini PCs

We have a comprehensive test suite which we put our mini PCs through in order to gauge how effective they are. For a start, we want to know how good they are at gaming—this is PC Gamer, after all. For that we run them through 3DMark Time Spy to get an overall picture of relative performance, but then also through Forza Motorsport, for arcade performance; Total War: Warhammer 3, for balanced CPU and GPU-centric gaming; Homeworld 3, for CPU-focused strategy gaming; and finally Cyberpunk 2077 for the FPS fun-times.

We test those games at 1080p medium settings to give a good idea of how they will perform at the sort of levels that a standard gamer would want to use. For machines which have discrete GPUs inside them, however, we will also test at 1440p and at higher settings to see how far we can push them. We will also test some more PC games, such as Helldivers 2, Dead Space, Plague Tale: Requiem, and Doom Eternal.

We also test the CPU performance, because these machines also need to be good at general productivity tasks, too. So we run them through Blender and Cinebench to get an idea of their rendering performance.

Throughout all of this testing we will measure the temperature and power draw of each unit, and will perform more subjective acoustic testing as well.

Also tested

FAQ

Is a mini PC worth buying?

Whether a mini PC is worth buying for you really depends on what it is you’re after. If you don’t have the space for a desktop PC, but specifically want a machine that stays in one place—i.e. not a laptop—to go under your TV, for example, a mini PC is the perfect machine. They have genuine PC performance, and now that doesn’t just mean for office productivity tasks—such as video editing and photoshop—but the latest components can also deliver genuine gaming performance, too.

What is the disadvantage of a mini PC?

The disadvantage of a mini PC is that they have much less upgradeability than a small form factor PC. You will generally be unable to change the processor at its heart, and if there’s a discrete GPU it will be a laptop-class chip and won’t be upgradeable, either.

Do mini PCs overheat easily?

This used to be a problem for some mini PCs, but part of our testing methodology and our criteria for inclusion as one of the best mini PCs is that they have to have adequate cooling. And that doesn’t just mean the ability to run their components under heavy loads, but also to be able to do it quietly, too.

Are mini PCs bad for gaming?

While your mini PCs are never going to be able to deliver the same level of gaming performance as a full desktop gaming PC, they are nevertheless now fitted with the sort of components which are able to deliver proper 1080p frame rates in even the latest games. You might need to be a little more careful about what settings you use—for example, using medium settings as opposed to high or ultra—but you will still be able to get a great gaming experience in most modern games. Recent mini PCs use the same sort of components you’ll find in the best gaming handheld PCs, and some even come with the GPUs you’ll find in a modern gaming laptop.

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