And what are they, you might be asking? Well, it's not really building a PC from scratch, as all that needs to be done here is installing the motherboard, GPU, PSU and RAM, before booting the PC and ensuring that it posts correctly.

Which, if I'm honest, makes me feel a bit better about myself. I normally dally around a bit with the CPU installation, admiring the shiny new chip and thinking about all the infinitesimally small pathways inside. Then I have a cup of tea, debate once again how much thermal paste to use (it's a pea-sized amount, always), and by that point it's usually time for lunch.

Anyway, Newegg has posted a timelapse of two of its top competitors going head to head, in a competition I would surely be disqualified from for interfering with my opponents machine. We also have photos of four winners holding various bits of hardware as prizes, with two of them managing times under five minutes.

The winning time? Four minutes, nine and a half seconds. Even discounting the fact that they didn't have to unbox the components, install the CPU, or mess around with various cable configurations to make things look pretty inside the case, that's darn impressive.

Our winner appears to have nabbed themselves an Intel Arc B580 GPU, an Intel Core 7 Ultra CPU, and a $1,000 Newegg gift card. That's the beginnings of an excellent gaming PC right there, so well done them.

One thing I would like to know is how many of our brave competitors managed to drop a screw inside the casing. I have yet to manage a build where this hasn't happened at least once, and I'm pretty sure you can tell which PCs I've built the quickest simply by picking them up and shaking them around a bit to listen for tell-tale rattles.

Don't tell anyone though, alright? I've got a reputation to protect, and a career to continue. Oh goodness, I've said the quiet part out loud, haven't I? Move on, everyone. Move on.

It's done this via a simple post on X, highlighting what an AMD AI PC can do better than a common-or-garden PC: "Handle AI tasks more efficiently with the world's most powerful built-in Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which supports the CPU and GPU for faster and smarter everyday use." On the other hand, non-AI PCs "can run AI tasks, but lack[s] an integrated NPU. AI runs on the CPU and GPU, but with less efficiency for multitasking."

Well, there you have it. Surely that's all the convincing anyone would need to go out and buy a spangly new AI PC with an NPU-equipped AMD Ryzen processor, right? AMD clearly doesn't think anyone actually needs to know any kind of specifics about the 'faster and smarter everyday use' bit because we all want our PCs to be faster and smarter. Every day.

The CPU in my main PC has an NPU (it's an Intel one) but as of yet, it's not been used for anything other than running a single benchmark to see it being used. Last year, I sat through a press briefing from one big system vendor in which it spent a good deal of time explaining why AI and an NPU were going to make things so much better.

I know how an NPU can be used but I'm still totally none the wiser as to what real, tangible benefit they bring to the PC industry as a whole. Let me clarify: With an NPU, one can run a small AI algorithm locally, without having to send lots of data to a distant cloud server, which means you retain far more privacy over your details and content that are being AI'd. Summarising your notes, for example, or improving your CV—that kind of thing.

But as AMD points out, your PC can do that without an NPU. It just uses the CPU or GPU to do it instead. Ah, but that's less efficient, you might say (or at least, AMD does). How much less efficient is it? Is it slower, a lot slower; does it involve a lot more power, draining your laptop's battery faster or using up more electricity from an outlet?

Without specifics, in the form of real-world examples being showcased in front of you, I can't imagine anyone will be nodding sagely at AMD's words and being converted into a champion of the AI PC. To be blunt, it's such a weak attempt at promoting AI PCs, that AMD has potentially done more damage than good.

While X isn't well-known for inviting reasoned and well-balanced comments these days, the replies to AMD's post are not in the least bit surprising. "Scam," writes one user, whereas another expounds more with "I'm good with the non-AI PC. I can't really think of anything AI does which would benefit me as an actual creator." Only one reply was positive, though there was not a great deal there at the time of writing.

To be fair to AMD, though, I don't think there's any reasoned argument that would make a tech-savvy buyer deliberately seek out an AI PC, even if they're a fan of generative AI or the like. The reason is that such users are already using their non-AI PCs to do all of this, either via the cloud or locally via the GPU. An NPU can be used to handle a RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) algorithm, to improve the results from a locally-run LLM but I've not seen any general-use software do this yet.

AMD's latest laptop processors are fantastic chips, and any one of those paired with an Nvidia RTX GPU will make for a potent computer capable of blasting through AI workloads. If your portable PC is on its last legs, then by all means, grab an AMD 'AI PC' and enjoy a blisteringly quick computer, that's equally capable of gaming and content creation. The fact that it will sport an NPU doesn't really add to that, though at least it doesn't detract from it.

Cutting-edge technology always needs a 'killer app' to make it really take off but we've yet to see that for the little NPU. Until then, it looks like we'll just have to put up with more half-hearted marketing exercises that will leave us all still wondering the same thing: What use is AI to me?

You might be surprised to hear that I've used an Intel CPU and an AMD GPU for this mid to high-end hero: a Core Ultra 5 245K and RX 7900 XT. I built it prior to the launch of the RTX 50-series, not that you can buy one anyways, but I wanted to try to be a little more sensible with my money—a $2,000 GPU isn't in the PC Gamer budget.

My main takeaway from this build is just how easily it came together. A spacious chassis with room to manoeuvre, paired with a motherboard with some of the simplest SSD slots known to humankind, and topped off with chip cooling powered by a single cable—small shortcuts that made the process of building this PC feel like child's play. And that's not me bragging about my magnificent building ability—I've had an absolute 'mare with PCs plenty of times. Not here.

The specs

Total: $1,904 | £1,767

When I was planning out this build, I had one thing in mind: 'don't go overboard, mate'. I mostly managed that, though you'll forgive a PC gamer for a little overzealous ordering.

As mentioned above, this gaming PC is built on Intel's latest processor platform, Arrow Lake, and the Z890 chipset. I've opted for ASRock's Z890 Steel Legend WiFi to provide the necessary LGA1851 socket required for the Core Ultra 5 245K, though it's a stellar choice for a few reasons. Namely, the RGB light bar along the lower SSD slots.

Only joking. The lighting is a nice touch but I'm reppin' the Steel Legend for its pair of Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, 18+1+1+1+1 phase VRM, and some of the best NVMe slots in the biz.

All this talk about SSD slots—what's the big deal? Usually where a motherboard would employ a screw, or many screws of varying sizes (yuck!), this absolute legend stuffs a couple of quick release sliders to unleash any one of the three covered NVMe slots (there's one uncovered slot, too). More than that, once you're under the hood, there are no tiny screws to unleash the SSD itself—just a twisty locking mechanism. I was in and out of those slots in no time, and without even reaching for my screwdriver.

I don't get the benefit of heaps of NVMe slots rated to PCIe 5.0 speeds on this motherboard, just one. That's due to the Z890 chipset's available lanes, and is in direct contrast to AMD's top chipset with many. But I'm not opting for a PCIe 5.0 SSD in this build to help reduce costs. Instead, the Solidigm P44 Pro 1 TB sits within this machine—a stalwart pick for its reliability and affordability.

If I were using one of Intel's last-generation processors, the fiery 14900K for example, the door would be largely closed to an air cooler. Though with significantly reduced wattage by comparison, the 245K works just fine alongside the Be Quiet! Dark Rock 5. In fact, as you'll see in the performance section, temperatures remain pretty low throughout testing. And this isn't even the largest version of this air cooler available. With only a single fan to install, I had but a single fan header to connect before moving onto the next job.

The Dark Rock 5 didn't cause any compatibility issues with the RAM I've chosen for this build: Corsair's Vengeance RGB DDR5-6600 32 GB. This Vengeance gear isn't like the stuff of yore, it's still rather large for all the RGB LEDs stuffed under the hood. The more important part is that it's rated to 6,600 MHz (effective), which is a speed the Intel chip could actually benefit from to some very tiny degree. The main thing is it is actually relatively affordable memory, even for its speed, lighting and capacity.

The 245K might not be top of the performance charts, nor the sales charts, but it is a better chip than some give it credit for. Namely, I can reasonably pair it with an air cooler, as I have for this build, and enjoy playable temperatures and low noise. You can't say that of a 14th Gen chip. The alternative here was one of AMD's smart and affordable Ryzen processors. While one of those would be a great fit, I wanted to give Intel's latest processor a run for its money.

The 245K comes with a mix of P-cores and E-cores—six and eight, respectively. There's no Hyper-Threading so it totals just 14 threads. Nevertheless, it's relatively impressive in encoding and rendering benchmarks, such as Handbrake and Cinebench, and draws relatively low power for this performance compared to previous generations from Intel. However, if you want the fastest gaming chip around, this isn't it. Even following a series of performance patches from Intel, I'm still left wanting for more.

Thankfully, the graphics card takes on most of the burden with rendering frames these days, especially at higher resolutions. I've opted for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT for this build for a few reasons: 1) they're cheap by comparison to the outgoing RTX 40-series; 2) the RTX 50-series wasn't yet available when I made this PC, though good luck getting one now; 3) the RX 9000-series is set to launch sometime in early March, so isn't available.

If I'm going to opt for a last-generation card, at least at the time of building, I could get a lot more for my money out of the RX 7000-series. The RX 7900 XT, too, has been frequently discounted and features a healthy, long-lasting pile of GDDR6 memory chips—20 GB of the stuff, to be precise.

The final two pieces of the puzzle are the MSI MAG A850GL PCIE5 PSU, which needn't be PCIe 5.0 for AMD's card, which lacks 12VHPWR or 12x6 connectors, but feels the right choice for longevity (and because I had it close to hand). Then, last but not least, the Be Quiet! Shadow Base 800 FX.

The Shadow Base 800 FX is wicked. Partially that's because of its simplicity and spaciousness. There's ample room for near-enough anything inside this case. The four Light Wings 140 mm fans make for quiet operation too, befitting the brand on the box. But it's more that I have very recent memories of building in the Be Quiet Dark Base 900.

The Dark Base 900 has sat in various living spaces of mine for at least five years. At one point it was fitted with parts for my own PC, but these days it's surrounding my partner's PC instead. It has ample room for components and lots of flexibility—though perhaps a little too much. It's a massive hassle to do near-enough anything in it. The screws are fiddly, some are now threaded, the motherboard tray is a nightmare, the PSU shroud feels awkward to remove and reinstall. Altogether, I'd be happy to see the back of it—but the Shadow Base 800 FX has shown me just how far PC cases have come in recent years.

The Shadow Base 800 FX comes part with ease, leaving a cavernous interior ready to fill with all manner of cable mess. Cable mess that is neatly hidden beneath the huge PSU shroud and cable management shroud running vertically through the centre of the case. I've taken multiple pictures of the space between the PSU and front fan, as you could fit nearly two more PSUs inside it. The case doesn't feel excessively large, however.

The fans in the Shadow Base 800 FX come connected to a controller on the back of the motherboard, which only needs to be connected to a motherboard fan and RGB header for easy operation. It also comes away with a single thumbscrew to ease cooler installation.

I've been thoroughly impressed with this chassis. Not because it does anything spectacular, it's simply easy to build into and looks smart without much effort on my part. As I mentioned in the headline, altogether this felt like a gaming PC build on easy mode. From start to finish, I hit no roadblocks, cut no fingers, and when I reached for the power button, it booted first time.

The build

Scroll through the gallery above for the step-by-step of how I put this build together.

The performance

Far from the highest scoring, fastest gaming PC in our testing, there is something to be said for how well the RX 7900 XT runs in most modern games. Comparing a few similar builds, the 7900 XT is often ahead of the RTX 4070 Super, and not far behind the RTX 4070 Ti Super. The RTX 50-series might crush it game-for-game, but its 20 GB of GDDR6 keeps it in the game for longer.

The Core Ultra 5 245K manages to keep up in games, though I'm sure I could eke more out of this graphics card with a speedier X3D chip in this machine. It does perform admirably next to the Ryzen 7 9700X more broadly in system benchmarks, and while slightly dampened by the occassionally higher performance of the Core i7 14700K, it is thankfully much cooler.

Temperatures are a real benefit of this lower-power processor. Despite a single-tower air cooler with just one fan in the Dark Rock 5, the 245K remained chilly under high load.

Gaming benchmarks

System benchmarks

Temperatures

The conclusion

So there you have it: a gaming PC born of simple, straightforward parts that has made me appreciate the small stuff.

The SSD slots, the fan controllers, the roomy chassis—these are the little details that have combined to make a big difference when it comes to my experience crafting this gaming PC.

It really has made a noticeable improvement. When I was building in that Dark Base 900 a half-decade or so ago, the complexity and fiddliness felt like the price you pay for a case with all the extras. Nowadays, there's little of that.

And good riddance to the complexity.

Skytech Chronos gaming PC | Ryzen 7 9800X3D | RTX 5080 | 32 GB DDR5-6000 | 2 TB SSD | $2,949.99 $2,799.99 at Newegg (save $150)
This gaming PC not only has the brand-new RTX 5080, which comes with Nvidia's latest Multi Frame Generation magic, but it also packs a Ryzen 7 9800X3D inside. That's the best CPU for gaming on the market right now. And on top of this, you get 2 TB of storage and 32 GB of speedy RAM. Considering current low 50-series and high-end 40-series stocks, for the price this Skytech build is somewhat of a diamond in the rough right now.View Deal

It's not lost on me that the new RTX 50-series graphics cards we've been highlighting are about as rare as good sense in 2025. That's part of what makes gaming PCs like this RTX 5080-boasting Skytech Chronos for $2,800 at Newegg so special. And I say "part of" what makes it special because it's also rocking a similarly rare AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

Let's deal with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 first, though, as everyone loves a shiny new GPU. This graphics card is fresh out of the oven having only launched last week, and it's also sure to be the most high-end graphics card on the market barring the prohibitively expensive RTX 4090 and RTX 5090.

That's both in terms of pure raster performance and all this newfangled AI-aided frame generation people are banging on about. On the former front, we're talking a small chunk of extra performance over the previous-gen RTX 4080 Super, which is still a great graphics card for 1440p and 4K gaming.

It's the latter front, the Multi Frame Generation, that offers the real allure of the new GPU, though. That's because in the games where it's enabled, in many cases at 4K or 1440p, you're talking 4x the frame rate of native res. Case and point, going from 20 fps to 130 fps in Cyberpunk 2077. And yes, it adds a little latency, but not much to bat an eyelid at in games other than competitive shooters.

Sure, you're on the bleeding edge of frame generation tech, but it's not a first-gen buggy mess and it actually works pretty damn well.

So much for the RTX 5080. The other side of the coin is the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, a CPU with AMD's revered 3D V-Cache technology that slaps a bunch of extra L3 cache underneath or on top of the CPU (underneath, in the case of the 9800X3D), which games absolutely love. This is without a doubt the best CPU for gaming right now.

And it's another component, just like the RTX 5080, that seems almost impossible to pick up standalone for a reasonable price. That's one reason why a PC like this is so appealing: it might be the easiest, cheapest, and perhaps only way to get your hands on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 5080 right now.

It's not even an outrageous price, either. Plenty of RTX 4080 Super gaming PCs retail for around this price, and even these are difficult to find in stock right now. Yes, you might find the odd RTX 4080 gaming PC on offer for about $2,000, but you're losing out on the chunk of extra raster and the bunch of new frame gen that the RTX 5080 offers.

If you do get your hands on one, you're getting a great deal for some of the latest PC gaming tech Nvidia and AMD has to offer. And the rest of the PC is more than up to snuff, too: 32 GB of fast RAM and a 2 TB SSD is ideal. Plus the chassis looks rather dashing with its 'white with dash of brown' front panel, don't you think?

I should also note that you might find this build or a similar one slightly cheaper elsewhere, but this one's sold and shipped by Skytech, unlike some other listings from third-party sellers. It's not a cheap rig, but it's reasonably priced and quite possibly the best way to get your hands on the best gaming CPU and one of the most powerful new GPUs on the market right now. Well worth a look.

During Microsoft's Q2 2025 earnings call, chairperson and CEO Satya Nadella revealed, "Edge surpassed 30% market share in the US on Windows and has taken share for 15 consecutive quarters" (via Seeking Alpha).

Which seems wild, right? Do some folks just… not download an alternate browser? Am I the weird one for not particularly liking Edge? [I'm the outlier, I really like Edge, -Dave]

It is perhaps a touch premature for me to disappear headlong into a crisis of conscience. Nadella went on to explain some of this success, saying, "The investments we have made in improving our ad rates are paying off and advertisers increasingly see our network as an essential platform to optimize [return on investment]."

In other words, Edge—and by extension Bing—is proving itself a real contender for any business that wants to ensure eyes on their products, and Microsoft is reaping the financial benefits of that. When you consider, for just one example, how cluttered Google Search has become—especially with the prioritised AI summary slumped over the top of many search results—you can maybe start to understand the appeal of Bing.

Nadella further detailed the growth, sharing, "Search and News advertising revenue ex-TAC increased 21% and 20% in constant currency, ahead of expectations driven by usage from a third-party partnership. Growth continues to be driven by rate expansion and healthy volume growth in both Edge and Bing."

To completely switch tracks from business brain back to the PC gamer train, Edge's Game Assist also comes in clutch for achievement hunters everywhere. While I personally prefer to deploy a second screen to feed my current Infinity Nikki obsession, many others will no doubt have the monitor space to justify pinning a video guide in the corner of their game.

Bearing in mind last year's news of the US Department of Justice's proposed remedies to break up Google's monopoly over search, the rise of Edge is perhaps no surprise. That said, I'm not exactly cheering on another massive corporation in Microsoft either.

It's a tower PC you can put under your arm and carry easily. It looks great, with its internal components in white (matching the case) against a black motherboard, and the graphics card enclosed in a cage that makes it look like a bridge that's fallen out of a Halo game. There are extra heat sinks arranged around the AIO CPU cooler's pump block, two RGB front fans that sit behind a perforated grating so you can see the glow diffused into hundreds of pointillist dots. Even the Omen branding is largely unobtrusive, restrained to a logo on the CPU cooler and a wordmark on the front and non-transparent sides.

HP's choice of case is a good one. There are easily accessible USB ports on the top and right at the front, including a 10 Gbps Type-C. There's only one Thunderbolt 4 to be found, at the back, which might trouble those using it for non-gaming purposes who want to hook up some fast external SSDs, but otherwise the Omen 35L is well specced in terms of inputs, and it's nice to see Wi-Fi 7 in a desktop PC.

The components used to make the PC are less restrained than its exterior. The GeForce RTX 4080 Super we're all familiar with, one of the best graphics cards for gaming and one that should retain its usefulness long after the RTX 50-series cards take all the top spots in the rankings. Less common is the new Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, an Arrow Lake CPU with 20 cores, eight of them full-fat P cores. It's the same arrangement as many Core i9 CPUs of the 13th and 14th generations, which has now trickled down to the 7 level, only with a maximum turbo frequency of 5.5 GHz and the K designation that means it's unlocked for overclocking.

And the new Core Ultra proves to be a very performant piece of kit. In the demanding Cinebench 2024 benchmark it powers past the 24-core Core i9 13900K and the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX. It passes the 20-core Apple M1 Ultra, and the 24-core Xeon W-3265M. Most surprisingly, it produces a better multi-core score than the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the current king of gaming CPUs. Single-core performance is important in gaming, and in this test the 265K beats the i9 13900K and draws level with the 9800X3D.

In other testing, the SSD—a Western Digital Black PCIe 4.0 model according to 3D Mark—produces speeds that are distinctly PCIe 3.0. It's unclear if this is by design, whether there's something improperly configured somewhere, or maybe a pin isn't connecting properly, but it's a disappointing showing. It transferred at 300 MB/s when other drives in other PCs regularly top the 500 mark.

Despite this, the PC does very well in gaming, its GPU beating other RTX 4080 Super boards and getting close to RTX 4090 levels in 3D Mark's Time Spy Extreme. That synthetic benchmark isn't the real world, however, but the card also does well in actual games, able to provide an average of 52 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K and in Ray-tracing Overdrive mode. Fiddle with the DLSS settings and you could easily get that over 60.

In other games, we get the kind of results that are becoming typical of the RTX 4080 Super in a desktop machine. You won't struggle to get 60 fps from this card, no matter what game you're playing, and the news that DLSS 4 may be coming to RTX 40-series cards after all makes it even more likely you'll be able to use this card for years.

The Baldur's Gate 3 result might seem like a bit of an outlier, but that's there to show what difference a good CPU can make. The game scales impressively with different processors, and you can see where the Ryzen 7 9800X3D pulls ahead thanks to its 3D V-Cache-enabled processing power.

But while all this gaming stuff is going on, the Omen 35L makes little more than a hum. While compressing a Steam game for backup onto an external drive the CPU fans (there's a 240 mm array on the AIO) span up but remained relatively unobtrusive, and the GPU fans followed suit while rendering complex scenes. It's remarkably cool-running too, with the CPU barely nosing its way up to 74 °C while video encoding.

Intel's investments into processor efficiency led to somewhat disappointing first generation of Core Ultra chips over in laptopland, which were pushed further down by the arrival of a new challenger in the form of Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, but this second generation of desktop CPUs seems to have hit the bullseye in terms of performance and efficiency.

And at least until AMD hits back and Snapdragon arrives on the desktop, both of which are bound to happen. Arrow Lake is not going to give you a silent running PC—the noise is there, but it's not going to bring relatives rushing up the stairs to see what the fuss is all about.

And not making a fuss is perhaps what the Omen 35L is best at. It's not a big or heavy machine, but it is quietly notable. The white case, cooler and component cages give it a sleek look, the build quality is excellent, and the results in games (and a PC like this has uses way beyond gaming) speak for themselves. While it may be a bit of a reach to drop nearly $3,000 on a pre-built gaming PC, if they were all like this the decision to do so would be so much easier. Goldilocks would happily sit down to this desktop gaming PC, while wiping the porridge away from around her mouth, for a few rounds of Diablo 4. She plays as a druid, naturally.

According to Cloudflare's quarterly DDoS threat report, the incident on October 29 was the largest attack of its kind ever reported (via Bleeping Computer). The volley was launched from a Mirai-based botnet of 13,000 compromised devices, lobbing requests from about 5,500 unique IP addresses per second.

Breaking it down further, Cloudflare shared, "The average contribution of each IP address per second was around 1 Gbps (~0.012% of 5.6 Tbps)."

Despite the eye-watering rate of this barrage, the entire attack only lasted 80 seconds. Naturally Cloudflare took the opportunity to toot its own horn, sharing that the attack was autonomously mitigated by its distributed defense systems.

The company shared, "It required no human intervention, didn’t trigger any alerts, and didn’t cause any performance degradation. The systems worked as intended."

To briefly recap, DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service and describes a cyber attack launched from multiple sources with the aim of making a targeted web service or device unavailable for normal use. For one recent example, last year Final Fantasy 14 was the target of the largest scale DDoS attack the game had seen in a decade, resulting in hours-long login queues just for a start.

Cloudflare's latest DDoS threat report shares a smorgasbord of data that I'm now going to serve up charcuterie-style. For instance, did you know that during the last half of 2024, Indonesia remained the largest source of DDoS attacks?

The company also says they've seen an uptick in hypervolumetric DDoS attacks, with a sharp quarter on quarter spike through the winter of 2024. The company shared, "The amount of attacks exceeding 1 Tbps increased by 1,885% QoQ and attacks exceeding 100 Million pps (packets per second) increased by 175% QoQ."

That said, Cloudflare claims that most of the HTTP and network layer DDoS attacks the company observed lasted less than 10 minutes—hence the move towards automated protection. Cloudflare explains, "Because the duration of most attacks is so short, it is not feasible, in most cases, for a human to respond to an alert, analyze the traffic, and apply mitigation."

The motherboard and case used in this build are from MSI's Project Zero line. This uses a system called Back-Connect to shift the cables and connectors usually facing frontways in a motherboard around to the rear. A case has to be compatible with Back-Connect to allow for these cable runs in the rear, though there are quite a few available these days.

You could take a dremel to a motherboard tray and end up with something that's loosely compatible at home, but I've got the fine pairing of MSI's Z790 Project Zero and MEG Maestro 700L PZ to make life easier. The result is a PC that is near-effortlessly clean and tidy when viewed through the windowed side panel… and a colossal mess in the back—much like a mullet.

The parts

Total: $2,363 | £2,234

The MSI Z790 Project Zero is the best of the best for Project Zero motherboards at the moment, though that's not going to be the case forever. While I'm stuck with an Intel Core i7 14700K, an older Intel processor, the latest Project X displayed by MSI at CES shows an even more radical shake-up with intention to keep this cable-free party going, likely with newer chipsets. These motherboards even had the rear I/O, um, not on the rear, but we're not quite going that extreme with this build.

One glance at this motherboard and it looks deceptively normal. I'm no cable management maestro—though I am using a case called the Mastro 700L PZ—no, this motherboard's claim to fame is reversed connections that sneakily hide those pesky connectors out of view. The power connectors, fan headers, and USB headers are on the rear, with few exceptions remaining up front bar the important bits including RAM, PCIe slots, and SSD slots.

A black motherboard might not benefit as much, or look quite as good, for having fewer cables running across it. But this bare-metal beast? It stands out. There's still some clutter to deal with even on this motherboard, however, namely the GPU power connectors. If you have a shiny new GPU, that's maybe only a single power connector, though anything older could be working with up to three discrete 8-pins. I'd definitely recommend some sort of custom modded cables or extensions if you were to follow in my footsteps with a Back-Connect build.

The lack of cables up-front means the back of this case looks like something a bomb-defusal expert would be sweating over. A combination of cables, connectors, and individually cabled RGB fans means I have a colossal mess to deal with in the rear of the MSI MEG Maestro 700L PZ.

Every MSI MPG F120 ARGB fan has two cables. There are 10 fans so that's 20 cables. One is the fan header, the other is an RGB cable. The latter I'm able to daisy-chain together, though convenient for limited headers, this doesn't reduce the number of cables and bulky loops of cables I'm tying together. Luckily the Maestro 700L PZ comes with a sizeable space for cable management and some extra large straps to tie it all down with. Altogether, I get it looking fairly neat back there, but I'd rather not talk about it.

The Maestro 700L PZ isn't just a case with a few extra cutouts for the Project Zero motherboard. It is, in its own right, a rather stunning beast. It comes with a gently curving panoramic side panel that slides off to access all areas of its innards. It has a sort-of floating look going on, with space for fans on all sides blowing inwards, upwards, outwards, and rearwards. The GPU is mounted vertically, too. Altogether, it's a great case to showcase the cable free look, though I can't help but feel a white interior might make more of a point of the lack of cables.

I've aimed to keep distractions to a minimum from the other components: the RAM is a set of plain-looking Crucial DDR5 Pro and the GPU is MSI's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super 16G Gaming X Slim. That's a powerful card and the RTX 4070 Ti Super is one of the better choices from the outgoing RTX 40-series, though it's not delivering the wow factor as other cards on the market. That's a good thing in this build, anyways, as it keeps all eyes on the shiny motherboard.

A single cable remains, however. The dastardly GPU has a single PCIe 5.0 power connector to pump it with hundreds of watts of power—luckily the MSI MAG A850GL PCIE5 PSU I'm using offers just one cable, or I'd be staring down an even uglier adapter instead. Though I'm able to tuck slightly out of sight from the vertical GPU mounting, it's noticeably a cable. In hindsight, this is the perfect opportunity for some sort of cable sleeve or connector. However, I've nothing to hand and have to settle for the standard approach of loosely pulling it out of view. It works, to an extent, though this approach does leave Project Zero feeling slightly less special in appearance than I was hoping.

This is likely why MSI has opted to offset the GPU to a more unusual position in its later Project X prototype—a true 'Zero-Cable' design. Though that doesn't do much to make my supposedly cable-free build feel less like it has a visible cable… it quite simply does.

The build

Click through the gallery below for the step-by-step.

The performance

The conclusion

I'm excited by the prospect of a cable-free computer—even one with the cables simply neatly hidden around the back. MSI's Project Zero parts get me some of the way there, though I feel an overwhelming need to get rid of the one remaining cable feeding the GPU. That's something neatly dispatched with Asus' competing system, BTF, which includes a specially crafted connector on both GPU and motherboard to deliver power, but also requires a specially crafted graphics card to work as intended.

As I said last year, I had begun to believe that motherboards with hidden connectors would be the PC hardware trend that actually caught on. I'm admittedly less confident in the short-term success of the system, but overall still pretty rosy on the general concept's longer-term success. At the time it had looked like case manufacturers were jumping on board with compatible cut-outs, but while that's still true, we've lacked the real ecosystem of motherboards and components to get the ball rolling.

That might change with Project X but more so the cheaper Tomahawk motherboards that are on the way with Back-Connect support. If we can rustle up some AMD-compatible boards and what looks to be a healthy, growing ecosystem of parts, I'll jump on the chance for my next gaming PC build. As in, my personal PC—sadly this MSI build's days are numbered.

But I'm not entirely sure I can get behind the aesthetic of the Montech Heritage PC case. It's got diagonal slashes, which are rather neat, and the front, rear, and top panels have plenty of holes for ventilation (via Techpowerup). But wrapping a PC case in leather? A step too far, if you ask me.

That's just my opinion, though. Our Jacob Fox has his eye on one of these, so on the off chance he hasn't read the specs sheet this next part's just for him:

It supports up to a 360 mm radiator in a top-mounted position, or a 170 mm air cooler, alongside up to eight fans. You can screw in (or should that be, sensually insert) either a Micro ATX or Mini ITX motherboard, and you can even cram up to a 400 mm GPU inside its surprisingly roomy-looking interior. Take those panels off, in fact, and it's quite a good looking chassis.

But a leather handle? Diagonal leather-bound outer panels? Nah, it's a little too far into the 60s/70s-kitsch aesthetic for my tastes. Still, some will get a kick out of it, presumably the same people who wear thick gold chains to the pub and reminisce about the good old days while cradling an over-sized cigar.

Alright, I'm being mean. Taste is the most subjective of things, and if you're the sort of person that craves for the days of pineapple and cheese on sticks at a cocktail party (it's a British thing, look it up) then this PC case may be just the thing for you.

It's actually pretty well-priced too, at $89 for the standard model, available in black or white. Ah go on, it's starting to win me over. No mention is made on whether its real or synthetic leather, so perhaps it's not one for the vegans in the room, either.

But if you too have fantasies of being an advertising executive from a bygone era with a penchant for the finer things in life, it's probably worth a look. Gosh, I'm catty today. Time to put on some Barry White and stare off into the middle distance.

I'm not a League of Legends player but I am enjoying Arcane. That's only partially the reason why this gaming PC over at Hyte's CES 2025 booth wins my gaming PC of the show award (a prize I just made up).

"Jinx was here!" is scrawled on the front of this PC case, but it's what lies underneath that I'm head over heels for. It's a Bitspower X Hyte Distroplate for the Hyte Y70 chassis, and it's a stonker.

For the non-custom watercooling lot, a distro plate is made up of various channels winding to and fro for shifting the cooling liquid within a custom loop. It can act like a reservoir for the loop, saving the need to have one elsewhere, and can also help route tubing without more complicated bends.

A distro can also contain two independent liquid loops, for cooling different components with discrete loops, as this one here does.

You can see the upper blue channel is keeping the Ryzen 5 7600X used here cool, while the lower pink channel is hooked up to the RTX 4080 Super inside this build. It's all Bitspower kit, and admittedly a little overkill on the CPU side for that choice of chip. Though I'm keen on it for the visuals and cooling, not the actual specs.

The Bitspower X Hyte Distroplate isn't quite ready for prime time yet. It's close, though, and Hyte had a couple of builds at its CES 2025 booth with one installed.

I did spot another contender for my made-up award over at the Pro Gamers Group booth (Ducky, Havn, Noblechairs owner). A runner-up. It's a Duck-themed build, ducks all the way down, and it's quacking. Cracking. Sorry. It's packed with liquid cooling, too, with a green reservoir and multiple screens, including one saying 'Quack Hunt', in homage to the classic game Duck Hunt.

For those unfamiliar with the term NUC, it stems from an innovation drive by Intel around 12 years ago. The Next Unit of Computing was supposed to bring powerful yet tiny computers to homes and offices around the world but despite being relatively popular in business and education, it never really caught on with general consumers. In 2013, Intel pulled the plug on its NUCs and handed the baton over to Asus, which has been 'gamifying' the NUC since then.

Essentially nothing more than the innards of a gaming laptop stuffed into a tiny box, the ROG NUC eschews the traditional dull design for something considerably more bling. However, two things have stood in their way of becoming an outright triumph: one, the choice of hardware, and two, the very high price tag.

In the case of the former, the 2025 version of the ROG NUC looks set to address those concerns on all fronts. CPU-wise you get the choice of a Core Ultra 9 or 7 Series 2 ARL-HX, aka laptop versions of Intel's Arrow Lake chips. While the desktop versions aren't amazing for gaming, their low power consumption is likely to be a boon in this format.

For the moment, there's only one choice of GPU and that's the new GeForce RTX 5080 Mobile. The Blackwell architecture is all about AI wizardry for gaming but outside of that scope, you're still getting 7,680 CUDA cores and 16 GB of GDDR7 VRAM.

It's not clear at this stage what power limit Asus will use with the chip but I suspect neither the CPU nor GPU will be able to reach their full capacity, as it would mean a combined TDP of 310 W and that's too much for a NUC to deal with.

Asus says the NUC's cooling solution is good for 135 W which might seem very low but Arrow Lake really doesn't use much power when processing games. That said, it doesn't leave a huge amount for the GPU.

It's good news on the RAM front, though, as the 2025 ROG NUC sports between 16 and 96 GB of DDR5-6400. While I'd have preferred 32 GB to have been the minimum spec, I'm pleased to see that Asus has paired the mobile Arrow Lake with the fastest base RAM that it supports and it should go no small way to help counter its relatively weak gaming chops.

For storage, you've got a 1 or 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, and just a single screw separates you and the chassis if you want to upgrade it for something even more substantial.

Connectivity-wise, the 2025 ROG NUC is pretty decent—a WiFi 7 module and 2.5G Ethernet socket for speedy downloads and four display sockets (2x DisplayPort 2.1 and 2x HDMI 2.1). Round the back, there's one Thunderbolt 4 Type-C port and four 10 Gbps USB Type-A ports, with a further three (1x 20 Gbps Type-C, 2x 10 Gbps Type-A) in the front.

The main reason why one would ever consider the ROG NUC is, of course, its tiny size. With a volume of just 3 litres, the footprint is so small that you could pop it anywhere on your desk and barely notice it. However, the design suggests that it can only be used in a vertical arrangement and while that's great for not cluttering up your desk, it's not ideal if you want to tuck it underneath a monitor.

Whether the 2025 Asus ROG NUC fares any better than its predecessors will come down to the price. Previous models were hugely expensive, though Asus has shaved a fair bit of their price tags of late. But even so, you're still looking at over £1,600 just for an RTX 4060 model.

For that kind of money, you'd be better off building your own SFF gaming rig or just getting a decent gaming laptop. Neither will be as compact as the ROG NUC, but you're certainly getting a lot more for your money.

Let's hope the new year and new NUC are paired with a new, sensible price.

I first saw this model in October of last year during MSI's Shenzhen factory tour. Other than now sporting one of Nvidia's new RTX 50-series graphics cards, the overall design and specs haven't changed. You get an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K in all variants, but the exact model of GPU, amount of RAM, and storage will depend on how much cash you want to hand over.

I've not seen any prices yet but given that MSI's top-end desktop PCs are all extremely expensive, you can be certain that this one will be too. To help you part from your hard-earned money, the feature that will certainly grab your attention is the 13.3-inch IPS touchscreen on the front panel.

Its specs aren't super high-end—1080p resolution, 60 Hz refresh rate—but it looks better in real life than it does in pictures. I found it very easy to use, being fast and responsive to touch. Not that MSI really wants you to be poking it for everything because the screen's big party piece is voice control.

Thanks to its built-in microphone and speakers, as well as MSI's ubiquitous AI software, one should be able to yell all kinds of commands at it and get the desired response. I wasn't able to test it when I used it (the feature wasn't available at the time and I was far more interested in playing around with its Arrow Lake chip) but if it works properly, then it could be kinda neat.

"Show me GPU temperatures," for example. "What's the weather like tomorrow? How do I make transparent aluminum?"

Yes, indeed. Forget the RTX 50-series GPU and all its AI-powered wizardry. Forget the Core Ultra 9 285K (which won't be hard). Now you can have a pre-built desktop gaming PC that you can fully relive that Scotty scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The MEG Vision X AI is anything but quaint, though.

I have to say that while MSI's design is by far one of the better ones it has created in recent years, the sheer amount of AI-in-your-face rather puts me off. Do you really need your gaming PC's lighting, fans, and power settings controlled by AI? Surely the normal software that we already have does the job just fine. One can ignore it all, thankfully, but then what are you left with? Minus all the AI stuff, the MEG Vision X is just a fairly normal gaming PC with a touchscreen.

Still, the design is rather nice and the quality is genuinely top-notch. And I kinda like the idea of yelling at a computer to do things. Wait, I already do that. I guess the difference is that the MSI MEG Vision X AI might actually do something rather than mine all just sitting there pretending to ignore me.

No longer it seems, as the new Area-51 machines boast standard ATX motherboards, industry-standard power supplies, and even a smattering of QR codes designed to help inexperienced users upgrade.

Alienware says the Area-51 is "our most quiet, coolest running, and highest performance desktop" thanks to a focus on thermals and overall performance. Beyond the new standardised parts, the chassis has been designed to have positive pressure airflow, meaning that all fans point inwards—which Alienware says negates the need for a rear exhaust fan.

Hmm. I'd be keen to test that out for myself, as it seems like a lot to ask of positive pressure to passively eject substantial amounts of heat without the help of a rear fan.

Still, the new Area-51 is said to run up to 13% cooler and 45% quieter, while providing up to 25% more airflow overall compared to previous models.

There's room for up to a 450 mm long GPU up to four slots wide, with an included graphics retention mechanism and holder that can be positioned to accommodate various lengths of card. The top, bottom and front of the case include removable fan filters, while the AIO trays can scale to fit up to 420 mm heat exchangers.

The new chassis can support mATX motherboards as well as regular ATX models, and there's support for up to six total storage drives spread over the two 2.5-inch storage caddies, one 3.5-inch, and three available M.2 slots.

The specs sheet lists a raft of Intel Arrow Lake CPU options, from the Core Ultra 7 265 up to the Core Ultra 9 285K. These processors are paired with 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB DDR5 RAM configurations, along with Nvidia GeForce "next-gen desktop GPUs", although as to which one, we'll have to wait to find out.

As you'd expect, AlienFX lighting is once again a heavy focus, with the front "Stadium Loop" able to display a dazzling array of morphing, breathing and spectrum RGB effects. PSU options range from an 850 W Gold rated ATX12VO unit for models featuring a 240 mm AIO, all the way up to a monstrous 1500 W Platinum rated power supply for top-spec models with a 360 mm cooler.

Presumably, that's leaving plenty of overhead for a potential RTX 5090 option, too. Overall the chassis looks outwardly similar to the existing Alienware Aurora, but all that internal refinement looks like good news for those planning on buying a rig that's easy to upgrade in future.

Not least because of those QR codes dotted all over the chassis next to specific components. Scan one of these with your phone, and you'll be linked to online video reference guides that show you exactly how to perform various upgrades and maintain your system.

Quite a good idea that, I reckon. Upgrading a component can be quite intimidating for first-timers, so those of you who have eschewed a screwdriver out of fear of messing something up will likely appreciate a specific tutorial showing exactly how to replace the part sitting in front of you.

As someone who's built many a PC over the years, my first piece of advice to new builders and upgraders is simply to get fiddling inside your case (please turn off the power first, I hasten to add)—but a tutorial showing you exactly what goes where will likely go a long way towards instilling confidence in your budding abilities.

So, it looks like Alienware has been listening to its customer base and gone all-in on the upgradeability of the Area-51, although it's worth noting the new Alienware Aurora seems to have no such concessions. You can't have everything I suppose, but while the Area-51 looks built for future upgrade paths, the Aurora looks like a more standard Alienware affair. So it's not a sea-change, more a step in the right direction, it seems.

Still, buying a prebuilt gaming PC is often the first step towards creating a lifelong enthusiast, so anything that encourages users to break out the toolkit and extend the lifespan of their machines is a good thing in my book. But DIY-friendly and Alienware? I reckon these will likely fly off the shelves—if they're not priced to the moon and back.

You'll also need one with integrated graphics and, assuming you'll be using the X600 for some level of gaming, you'll want the best, namely the Radeon 780M. With those thoughts in mind, we decided to test-drive the DeskMini with the Ryzen 7 8700G (4.2 - 5.1 GHz, 8 cores, Radeon 780M graphics, 65 W TDP, 95 °C TJMax) and the Ryzen 5 8600G (4.3 - 5 GHz, 6 cores, Radeon 760M graphics, also 65 W TDP and 95 °C TJMax).

The chassis is a breeze to work with. Undo the four screws on the rear and the internal tray slides out to reveal the motherboard. Within minutes we had the CPU, the bundled cooler, RAM and M.2 storage secured, ready to do the Windows installation dance.

The specs are a curious mix of the cutting edge and the weirdly legacy. It has support for current AM5 CPUs, DDR5 up to 96 GB @ 6400MHz (we installed 32 GB @ 5600MHz), and it can take a fast, PCIe 5.0 M.2 drive plus a second PCIe 4.0 drive. And yet, round the back, I was bemused to find... a VGA port? Perfect for playing Leisure Suit Larry on your CRT monitor, but thankfully, you get DisplayPort and HDMI as well. There's no WLAN/BT card out of the box though; you get an E-Key M.2 socket to install one, but you'll need to provide your own or dongle up.

I/O options are spartan, with a single USB 3.2 type-C, a USB 3.2 type-A and an audio jack up front. Round the back, there are just two more USB 3.2 type-A ports, a 2.5G LAN port, plus the aforementioned AV slots. Without a USB hub, you may find yourself juggling devices in and out.

The kit also comes with cabling to snug a pair of 2.5” SSDs to the underside of the mobo tray, but frankly, two M.2 drive slots seems ample; I'd much rather ASRock forewent the SATA option and made space for a low-profile 120 mm fan somewhere. Because as it stands, there is no provision whatsoever for active case-cooling in the X600. Weirdly there are two fan headers, but that's a moot point; there's just no spare volume, or indeed mounting points, for a case fan.

The kit ships with a CPU cooler, but it's tiny. The fan is a mere 65 mm and it has a big job to do, both in cooling the heatsink on a 65 W CPU and exhausting the resultant hot air out of the case. It doesn't bode well for your ears either; when fans of this size get busy, they make like tiny, angry server-farms.

However, there's space enough to fit an aftermarket cooler up to 47 mm inheight instead. We tested the bundled cooler against Thermalright's AXP90-X47, a unit capable of handling higher-TDP chips and a popular choice with small form-factor builders, though we swapped the stock fan out for a Noctua NFA9-X14 to keep things civil.

Like many aftermarket coolers, the AXP90-X47 has a custom mounting system and CPU backplate, which means removing the stock AM5 heatsink-mounts from the business side of the mobo and unbolting the board from its mounting tray in order to remove the stock CPU backplate from its underbelly.

And let me tell you, that thing is not designed to be removed.

The backplate was glued on so hard, I simply couldn't pry it off without risking damage to the motherboard, either from my pry-tool skipping, or the amount of flexure the board was going through as I tried to lever the backplate up and loosen the glue. Admitting defeat, I found that I could bolt the Thermalright cooler onto the existing backplate, but thanks to a curved metal lip running around the backplate's outer edge, it was extremely fiddly to grip and tighten the four hex-nuts which tension the cooler onto the CPU.

Got there in the end with a nice tight fit but, I won't lie, it was a royal, finger-numbing pain in the ass. So caveat emptor: while ASRock states you can fit an aftermarket cooler—and this box absolutely demands one—it's not necessarily a straightforward job. Closing the case up afterward, I also found it a very squeaky fit, with the fan-frame pushed flush against the intake grill of the case panel, which is a perfect recipe for noisy air turbulence.

So with all our parts in place, let's get into it. Paired with the Radeon 760M and Radeon 780M respectively, the 8600G and 8700G offer comparable levels of gaming performance to AMD's mobile APUs in our 1080p, medium-settings, AAA game-tests. While the 8700G outmatched it's sibling and mobile peers in most cases, neither offered significantly better performance than, say, the Ryzen 7 7840HS and Radeon 780M combo running at a full 54 W, and the 8600G often fell below that.

Most of what we threw at each CPU saw 30 fps+, except for Total War: Warhammer 3's intensive campaign benchmark, which left the 8600G panting to make 25 fps, and Forza, which only saw 27 fps in contrast to the 8700G's 44 fps. With a negligible core clockspeed difference between the two chips and both having ample cores for gaming, It's clear that the Radeon 780M enjoys a tangible performance advantage over the 760M.

Both CPUs ran indies and less-demanding titles very nicely, with the 8700G predictably ahead. The 8600G made 45-55 fps in Stray, to the 8700G's 50-70 fps. In Subnautica, the difference was 45-60 fps to 55-75 fps; in Soulstone Survivors and Bioshock Remastered however, both chips performed similarly, at around 45-75 fps and 140-200+ fps respectively. While the 8700G is more costly, it's the clear choice if you're looking to build a compact 1080p gaming system in the ASRock DeskMini X600.

But should you? Because without any active cooling in the case, which equates to completely unmanaged airflow, it's hard to keep the temperature down on these chips without running the CPU fan pretty hard.

Predictably, the bundled CPU cooler performs dreadfully under load. It'll stop a CPU hitting its TJMax, but DEAR LORD does it sing. At idle it's virtually inaudible, but the second it starts spinning up, it emits a high-frequency whine that only increases in pitch with the RPM until you're at risk of defenestrating your lovely new build.

This is exacerbated by the CPU fan's speed-stepping. It's an absolute sluggard in responding to temperature change. Given multicore torture-test loads, both CPUs jump straight to 90 °C, but incredibly, the 65 mm fan takes 4-5 minutes to slowly accelerate to its highest, most irritating pitch-intensity. Upon killing the load, we then measured a twelve minute interval until the fan wound down to blessed silence, with the temperature inching slowly down all the way. The fan and cooler combo just cannot dissipate heat well, and with no case fans to shove it out the door, that's what you get.

The Thermalright AXP90-X47 shows a marked improvement, both in noise levels and heat displacement, but it still steps too slowly by default. We avoided the hassle of jumping in and out of the BIOS to remedy this, and installed the free and excellent Fan Control app to experiment with custom curves and reduce the speed-step interval to 1 second. This resulted in a near-instant RPM response to temperature change.

With a custom curve applied to the Noctua fan, we achieved a decent noise-to-cooling balance, where intensive gaming had the CPU hovering inthe 80-85 °C range with the fan capped at a palatable 55% of its max RPM, albeit with noticeable turbulence thanks to the fan's proximity to the inlet grill. We simply couldn't achieve the same results with the bundled cooler, which squeals disagreeably all throughout its rev-range.

All of which leaves the DeskMini X600 rather in limbo. You can pack in a cutting-edge CPU and RAM, but there are no active cooling capabilities to compensate. You can achieve a performant and moderately quiet (though by no means silent) build using the Ryzen 7 8700G and an aftermarket cooler, but the costs soon stack up. There's the price of the chip itself, some RAM, some WiFi provision, and we'd class an aftermarket 47 mm cooler plus a top-tier quiet fan as requirements rather than options.

Add those components to the cost of the box itself and you‘re blasting past the price of a quality, APU-armed mini-PC with broadly similar performance, a cooling solution to escort heat from the case, and quiet operation. With two M.2 storage slots and provision for a further two SATA drives, the X600 would make a neat media server, though we'd opt for a lower-TDP CPU, and you'd still want a superior cooler to eliminate the audio horror-show.

In short, if you're looking for a side-rig for 1080p gaming, this is not the droid you're looking for.

Machines which fold discrete GPUs into their design are both rarer and pricier, but they enable you to crank things up in terms of the resolutions, frame rates and graphics settings they can achieve. Pairing a 13^th-gen Intel i7 mobile CPU with a laptop-grade RTX 4070, the Zotac Zbox Magnus EN does just this, and brings the fight to Asus' ROG NUC 970 and the Minisforum AtomMan G7 Ti in terms of 1440p games performance.

The Magnus is barebones from the get-go, though some suppliers offer RAM and storage pre-installed for a fee. There are several CPU and GPU variant configurations to choose from, but Intel's penultimate mobile i7 chip, the Core i7 13700HX, features in our test unit. With eight efficiency cores and eight performance cores running at 3.7 GHz to 5 GHz on the turbo, It's a powerful chip capable of desktop levels of performance, and is also a product of Intel's last-gen philosophy: power at all costs, basically.

That's reflected in Intel's stated maximum draw of 157 W, though we suspect that Zotac have chosen to tune this at the hardware level, and wisely so given the limited volume for cooling in this box. With Cinebench 2024's render-test pushing all cores to the max, the chip settles in for the long haul at around the rather more sensible 60 W mark.

Where the chip shows its age is in RAM compatibility, tapping out at DDR5-4800. Low-latency RAM at this speed can still deliver greater throughput than higher-latency sticks at faster-rated speeds, but you'll absolutely pay for that privilege.

Like the ROG NUC 970, the Zbox Magnus sports the mobile RTX 4070 GPU, which differs from the desktop variant of the GPU. It has with 8 GB of dedicated VRAM rather than 12 GB, slightly lower clockspeeds, and a narrower, 128-bit memory bus. However, it can still pull its weight admirably at 1440p, as we'll see.

Design-wise, the case is all grills, no frills: a simple black box where every surface, save for the front fascia, features some form of intake or exhaust. The top is basically one big dust-meshed intake for the CPU and GPU cooling system. And while this means plenty of fresh air for panting processors, it also means you're intimately exposed to the full range of sounds that the Zbox's cooling emits.

From idle to full load, you're treated to a constantly modulating wind-scape as fans step up and down to counter heat, and air is sucked or pushed at varying speeds through various grills and mesh panels. Tucked under your desk or behind a TV, that's kind of fine, but we wouldn't recommend having the Magnus right near you on your desk, if you're not using a headset—it's not super-loud, but the constant variable frequency-changes start to wear thin pretty quick.

While the CPU and GPU are soldered in place, the SODIMM RAM and M.2 storage (there's space enough for two drives) are interchangeable. As is the wireless card, but as the Magnus ships with a Killer WiFi 6/Bluetooth 5.3 card, there's really no need.

If you go thrifty with the barebones option and choose to install your own M.2 drive and RAM, Zotac makes it super-easy to do so. Flip the unit on its back, undo two thumbscrews, and the bottom of the case slides off, laying bare all the slots you need to work with. No fussy mechanisms, no fiddly component-stacking, it's just the most straightforward and user-friendly design possible, and that's great.

I/O-wise, the front panel bears a type-C Thunderbolt port, a Type-A USB 3.1, SD card reader, and separate 3.5 mm headphone and mic jacks. At the rear you get dual 2.5G Killer Lan ports, an HDMI 2.1, twin DisplayPort 1.4 ports, and a further four Type-A USB 3.1s. Comprehensive to be sure, though I'd happily trade one of those five USB 3.1 slots for another Thunderbolt, or even a bog-standard Type-C USB.

Down to business then, and as expected from a machine with zesty silicon, the Magnus runs games very nicely. At 1080p, it blazes through everything you throw at it—173 fps in Total War: Warhammer 3's battle engine is crazy-smooth, and 154 fps in Cyberpunk using the Ray Tracing Ultra preset looks and feels just fab.

Moving up to 1440p and ultra settings, things are still very rosy, with everything moving at 60 fps or better. Cyberpunk with RT ultra on still nets a healthy 79 fps, Forza with full RT glides along smooth and stutter-free at 60 fps, and Warhammer 3's more demanding campaign-engine hits the same frame rate.

We also ran a bunch of other games without built-in benchmarks to get a general feel for ultra-settings 1440p performance across the board, and found similarly cheering results. Helldivers runs at a barely-variable 68-72 fps in every environment and combat situation we tried. Motive Studios' awesome Dead Space remake is a revenant meat-treat, enjoying a range of 94-125 fps in the final boss battle at 1440p/Ultra/DLSS Balanced. And A Plague Tale: Requiem's stunning Hives level looks and feels fabulous at 90-120 fps. In short, I have no doubt that the Magnus would see you right with any title at 1440p.

The machine absolutely trades blows with Asus' ROG NUC 970, and does so at a lower price (a quick squirrel around the web reveals a number of sites supplying the Magnus at appreciably under the RRP, so shop around). One of the key differences between the two machines is the choice of processor; the NUC 970's Intel Ultra 9 185H CPU is newer and more efficient than the Magnus' 13th Gen Core i7; it can employ faster DDR5 speeds, and likely adds a premium to the build-price of the machine. But the truth is, they perform at a very similar level when paired with the RTX 4070 mobile; you just don't really feel the difference when the game's afoot.

In price/performance terms, if it came down to a choice between the two machines, the Magnus would be our recommendation. But there's another factor to consider here which we've touched on already, and that's noise.

Setting the ROG NUC 970 to Silent Mode almost eliminates fan noise, for no appreciable loss of performance. With the Magnus, you're stuck with what you get—an admittedly capable cooling solution, but one that cannot be adjusted, with a noise output that's very hard to ignore. Even light tasks can set the fans off, and you can't help but notice every change in pitch and frequency. It's possible to zone out constant frequencies, but variable ones—not so much.

I enjoy much of my gaming-audio using hi-fi speakers, reserving the headset for multiplayer and nighthawk sessions. For my use-case, the Magnus is just too chatty, but your mileage may vary; If you only ever take your headset off to sleep, eat or interface with fellow earthlings, I doubt you'll be so bothered.

Like the ROG NUC 970, this machine isn't for those who envisage future CPU or GPU upgrades. It's for someone who wants solid off-the-peg gaming performance at 1440p, and for whom footprint is a key factor. If you can live with its 'lively' sound-profile, the Zotac Zbox Magnus EN is a solid performer at 1440p.

This next offering in Minisforum's AtomMan line may be viewed as the G7 PT's bigger brother. Marrying Nvidia's laptop RTX 4070 with Intel's Core i9 14900HX, The G7 Ti is a blade-thin desktop machine which is more squarely aimed at 1440p gaming. With its clean-and-sharp aluminium panelling and understated RGB flighting, it cuts a rather more serious and mature figure than the G7 PT.

Pop the side-panel off and the reason for its slim-and-tall form factor is plain to see. It's literally built around a laptop motherboard, with four wee daughter-boards cabling off to perform external IO duties. This isn't the standard modus operandi for Minisforum, which usually opts for custom APU boards and cooling in its mini-PCs.

A copper Yakisoba of heat-pipes shrouds the lower half of the mobo, which is heartening given the choice of CPU. In mobile terms, the mobile RTX 4070 is no slouch, but the Core i9 14900HX is downright monstrous; a 24-core, 5.8 GHz, desktop-level bulldozer. Together, they make for highest-performing mini-PC we've tested, outpacing both the ASUS ROG NUC and the Zotac Zbox EN—both of which pack the same GPU—across a range of synthetic and gaming benchmarks.

Like the G7 PT before it, the G7 Ti has two performance modes which alter the CPU's TDP from max 85W to max 115W, with different fan-RPM profiles configured for each. There's a button on the front of the chassis to toggle between the modes, or you can use the preinstalled hardware-management app, which also lets you customise the RGB lighting. Cranking the TDP up helps the machine blast through rendering workloads at a tangibly greater pace, though the performance gains you'll see in gaming are entirely title-dependent.

There's no doubt the G7 Ti makes for both a capable workstation and a solid 1440p gaming machine. Running Cyberpunk 2077 at the Ray Tracing Ultra preset, with DLSS and Frame Gen, sees a tidy 84 fps at 2560x1440 in 85 W mode, and 86 fps at 115 W. Homeworld 3, a more CPU-intensive title, sees bigger gains with a jump from 62 to 72 fps, but neither Forza (69 fps) nor Total War: Warhammer 3 (96 fps) saw any notable uplift for running the TDP up to 115 W.

And in all honesty, you won't want to. The G7 Ti's little turbo-prop blowers are silent at idle and maintain a bearable volume at 85 W under gaming loads, generating a consistent but largely unintrusive blow. Jump to 115 W though, and the noise becomes obnoxious. Neither mode produces any nasty variable coil-whine frequencies; it's very much the passage of air you're hearing, which is preferable. But with the CPU scarfing down 115 W in performance mode, the sheer volume emitted by the blowers at their max RPM is impossible to ignore, even with headphones on.

While I was benchmarking the machine, my wife (who works a couple of rooms away in our abode) poked her head round the door to say "It's so weird, I swear I can hear heavy rain but it's blue skies outside." Then her eyes alighted on the G7 Ti, puffing its cheeks and emitting a high-pressure TCHHHHHHH from its desktop perch, and the penny dropped.

CPU temps hover around the 90 °C mark, so my first assumption was "well, at least the cooling is keeping things in check," but HWinfo tells a different story. Whether at 85 W or 115 W, the CPU begins to throttle under load. Which means you're bouncing off the redline and not getting the full potential of the chip.

All of which leads one to conclude that this particular CPU in this particular form-factor just isn't the most sensible combination. The ultra-slim design doesn't allow for the volume of copper, or the larger and slower-spinning fans that the i9 14900HX so desperately needs to keep heat in check without throttling or setting off car alarms.

It's also not a sensible pairing with what is effectively a midrange laptop GPU. I suspect the G7 Ti would fare just as well at 1440p with a less power-hungry chip; an i5, Core Ultra, or modern Ryzen APU perhaps. And in fact, a variant of this machine—the AtomMan G7 Ti SE—is available at a slightly cheaper prince-point with the i7 14650HX. It's still a beast, but with lower turbo-boost clocks (5.2 GHz compared to the 14900HX's 5.8 GHz) and 8 fewer E-cores, it strikes me as being something approaching a saner match with the RTX 4070 mobile in a slim form-factor.

While WiFi7 and Bluetooth 5.4 are very welcome, the physical IO is not quite up to par. A single Type-C USB4 at the rear, and none up front? That's not great. Plus, the lack of a dedicated DisplayPort means that, if you want to run a DP cable to your monitor, you need to devote that single USBC socket at the rear to doing so. Which of course means no USB-C peripherals for you, plucky reader, unless you add a hub to your shopping list. The lack of any audio jack at the rear is another annoying omission, as it means trailing a 3.5mm jack round to the front if you want to plug in a set of desktop speakers.

There's also some awkwardness with the form-factor. The vertical alignment looks cool, but isn't comforting, as there's a lot of vertical weight balanced on that slim stand; it wouldn't take too much of a nudge to topple it. Plus, the cable from the external power-brick connects to the upper-portion of the rear-end, which introduces an extra leverage-point. This wouldn't be an issue if it connected nearer the base.

Laying the unit flat on your desk is out of the question, as the right-hand side-panel—what would be the ‘underside' if you were to lay it down - is all air-intake. In any case, a horizontal aspect would take up similar desktop real-estate to a tower PC; you'd be losing the one benefit of its blade-like design, which is the agreeably tiny footprint.

It all adds up to a machine that is somewhat in limbo. It's a static PC with a small desktop footprint but a large visual one, which underperforms against a desktop machine at the same price-point. Equally, there are identically-specced laptops out there that cost around the same, but offer the added benefits of a screen, keyboard, trackpad, speakers and mobility.

There's no question that It's a great performer at 1440p, even with the CPU limited to 85 W, which keeps the fans at a sedate and palatable volume. But that touches on my biggest gripe with the machine; if you want to get the best out of its Core i9 14900HX and feed it 115 W in performance mode, you're kind of punished for doing so. It quickly starts hitting the throttle and the cooling system becomes unbearably noisy.

This particular CPU in this particular form factor is overkill. And while I think Minisforum—an outfit with good form in bespoke cooling—has done its level best to tame the beast, there are way more sensible processors out there to build a slim gaming machine around, and better tier-matches for the mobile RTX 4070 GPU.

What constitutes a mini PC these days has been somewhat skewed by various models of NUC and handheld gaming PCs—but I'd still count this Fractal Terra build as a micro machine. It's about the size of a bread bin, or, for anyone under the age of 40 or without regard for gluten staleness, I want to say loosely the size of a yorkshire terrier's torso? It's 343 x 153 x 218 mm.

That's small enough to stuff next to your gaming monitor, even if you're trying your best with a small desk. It's also just about big enough to stuff with a high-performance dedicated graphics card and a powerful desktop CPU for superb gaming performance.

Surprise, surprise—that's exactly what I've done.

The parts

Total: $2,008 | £1,901

The Fractal Terra was my Mini-ITX case of choice for this build. A snazzy metal box with a real bit of a tree stuck to the front of it. There are few cases that speak to me at such a primal level—really, I'm just a sucker for a fine grain. It's also a renowned chassis and a prime example of what can be accomplished in a tight spot.

You'll see more of the Terra shortly. What's important to know about it is it's a 10.4-litre chassis, which puts it smaller in stature than the NZXT H1 at 15.6-litre, and it's surprisingly accessible thanks to two hinged, vented panels on either side of the case.

I've decided against pushing this case to its limit and settled for the fantastic Founders Edition RTX 4070 Super. We're reaching the end of the RTX 40-series generation and I'm still yet to be convinced there were many better deals to be had than the original Founders Edition cards—cool, quiet, and pretty slick. If you wanted to go bigger, I'm told you can reliably fit the Asus ProArt GeForce RTX 4080 OC Edition in this case, if your budget allows.

For the CPU and motherboard, I'm betting on an AMD/Asus combo to deliver everything I need. And what a combo it is. The Ryzen 7 9700X is an eight-core processor, powered by the Zen 5 architecture. It's a great blend of single-thread and multithreaded performance, which means even this mini PC is able to crunch through After Effects projects or brushing in Blender. The reason I opted for this over something more powerful is because the 9700X is one of the best performing CPUs money can buy with a TDP of just 65 W.

There's no space for a large CPU cooler here. I'm stuck with the distance between the socket, motherboard, and side panel—in the Terra, that's not a lot. I have measured the gap from socket to side panel at around 8 cm or 3 inches. To fit in that space, the Noctua NH-L12S comes in handy. This extremely low-profile CPU cooler rotates the traditional tower on its side, through four curved heat pipes, and an especially slim 120 mm fan is slotted in underneath. That's right, the fan sits between the cold plate and the heatsink. It's a tight squeeze, but it's sufficient to deal with the 9700X.

I've also thrown in another fan into this build, beneath the PSU. A Noctua NF-A12x25. Somehow, the cables just about stay out of its way.

Let's take a moment to appreciate the beauty that is this ROG motherboard. It's not hyperbole to say this is the best-looking motherboard I've ever laid my hands on. Granted, I do have a penchant for Mini-ITX motherboards, which puts them at something of an advantage over larger units, though the mix of stamped, almost hammered-look metal plating across its IO, SSD slots, and rear. No wonder this thing costs nearly as much as the graphics card.

No small form factor build would be complete without a suitable small power supply. Luckily, I've got the Thermaltake Toughpower SFX Platinum 750W at hand. Much like a Mini-ITX motherboard or mini PC, there's just something about a shrunken power supply that I adore. Miniature, mighty, modular, and rated to a high efficiency to keep excess heat away—the Toughpower is a perfect fit for this build.

The build

1. Ready the motherboard

As usual, I start this build by removing the motherboard from its packaging and laying it on top of the box. It's easier to connect most key components without the confines of a case to slow me down—starting with the CPU. There are no longer any pins on the rear of Ryzen chips—that's gone with AM5—though this does mean I need to pay extra attention not to jab a finger into the motherboard's socket.

With the CPU loaded into the motherboard, it's time for the two sticks of PNY XLR8 DDR5-6200 RAM. This is a slightly faster kit than the 6000 MT/s kit I'd usually recommend here. The reason for that is the memory controller performs at its best when it matches the clock speed of the memory. Above 6000 MT/s, and the memory runs faster than the upper limit of the memory controller, which means the memory controller clock (UCLK) has to be halved. The good news is, if you buy memory between 6200-6400 MT/s, with a bit of luck, you can still run the memory at a 1:1 ratio with the controller.

Lastly, I install the SSD. The NVMe slots on this Mini-ITX are stacked atop of one another, with the PCIe 5.0 slot closest to the board itself. I'm not opting for PCIe 5.0 here, however, so I stick the Solidigm P44 Pro in the top slot. This motherboard doesn't use any fiddly screws to keep the SSD tied down. Instead, a little pull tab—manufacturers, more of this please.

2. Prep the chassis

This is a simple step. The Fractal Terra comes with two winged doors that are easily opened to expose the innards or removed entirely using a small slider in the top corner. Best to remove these, the top plate, any accessories, and unleash the front panel cables now before loading anything else into it. It's when I'm messing around with the case here that I notice the Terra is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. It's a matte finish that marks easily—though I'm able to clean it just as easily, too.

2. Bolt on the CPU cooler

The Noctua NH-L12S uses a straightforward mounting system. Apply the backplate to the rear of the motherboard, put the spacers onto each of the four bolts protruding out from the CPU socket, fit the mounting bars either in a horizontal or vertical position (this bit is important), and attach each of the thumb screws. Apply thermal paste, stick the cooler on top, and tighten down the two captive screws with the provided screwdriver.

It all sounds so simple, and it is, providing you don't either mess up the orientation (which I did not do) or optimistically try to install the fan on the outside of the cooler (which I did do).

The Fractal Terra comes with adjustable rails on which the motherboard sits, and you can use these small sliding adjusters to give yourself 30 mm on the GPU side, at the expense of the motherboard side, or vice versa. Unfortunately, no matter how much room I had hoped for on the motherboard side, there's no space for a 120 mm fan atop of the NH-L12S once I have it installed. So, I have to take the whole thing off, switch the fan, and stick it back in again. Then I'm free to screw the motherboard into the chassis, connect the front panel connectors to the relevant headers, and move onto other jobs.

3. Installing the PSU

Usually I'd leave the PSU until closer to the end, but in this build there's not much more left to do, and I don't want to be pulling cables through tight spaces with the GPU already installed. The Thermaltake Toughpower SFX is a modular unit, so I can decide ahead of time which cables to install.

• 1x 12 V 2x6-pin (GPU)
• 1x 24-pin (motherboard)
• 1x 6+2-pin (CPU)

That's all I need to power this compact PC. The PSU mount is removable, so I'm able to slot it into the mount outside of the case and then slide the mount in for an easy install. However, I'd recommend installing a case fan below the PSU, if you want one, before you do this step. It's just easier to get one in there if you don't have a PSU in the way.

There's a power extension cable included in the case due to the PSU's mounting position, facing upwards, but otherwise all that's left to do is connect each of the power connectors in turn, bar the GPU.

4. Load up the graphics card

The Founders Edition RTX 4070 Super is not a particularly sizeable graphics card, though even it manages to take up a good amount of space inside the Terra. The Terra comes with a riser cable ready to go—it only needs connecting to the PCIe slot on the Mini-ITX motherboard—which means the GPU is a fairly simple installation with a pair of thumbscrews. Albeit slightly annoying to reach thumbscrews.

You could opt for a longer graphics card than I have here. The FE is just 244 mm in length, but the Terra supports up to 322 mm.

The performance

I overestimated the impact a tiny chassis would have on the performance of this PC. In my testing, I measured frame rates that are largely equal to a Velocity Micro prebuilt packing the same CPU/GPU combo in a larger, but not large, chassis.

What's more surprising is that I didn't record sky-high temperatures for either CPU or GPU. The maximum temperature I recorded while gaming was 76 °C for the CPU and 72 °C for the GPU. In more CPU-intensive system benchmarks, the CPU reached 79 °C. That is higher than the comparable Velocity Micro PC, and generally on the higher end of gaming PCs we've tested this year, but nowhere near the hottest by any metric.

The conclusion

Besides my one snag with the CPU fan, which was my own optimistic doing, I ran into no snags, faults, or frustrations with this mini PC build. That's the thing that surprised me the most, in fact. I was expecting more awkward edges, hard to reach connectors, and squished cables. Okay, there are some squished cables, but I put a whole 120 mm fan in beneath the PSU and it all fit just fine.

Credit where credit's due, the Fractal Terra made my life easy. The unfurling chassis offers almost entirely unobstructed access to three sides of this PC, and its clever internals with convenient cut-outs show there's been plenty of attention paid to the finer details. Though, I could say the same for the PSU, cooler, and motherboard—all of which helped make this build a walk in the park.

So, my takeaway from this one? Don't be afraid to scale down.

The first computers in my life were British-made Sinclair machines, comprising all the computing hardware stuffed inside a keyboard. They were very cheap, especially compared to more serious computers of that time, but they were also very easy to use. The likes of the ZX Spectrum introduced me to video gaming, programming, and messing about with electronics.

So when I saw news of the release of the Raspberry Pi 500 (via Sweclockers) and saw the specs and pictures on the main site for it, I got a burst of nostalgia. And then a flood of regret, once I remembered about all my other Raspberry Pi units just collecting dust, somewhere in a forgotten corner.

Anyway, so what exactly is the Pi 500? At face value it's a rather fetching white keyboard, with a raft of ports about its rear, but delve inside and you'll find the latest version of the Raspberry Pi. We're up to number 5 now and it's a substantial improvement over the fourth iteration, though with some caveats to that statement.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is a twin-chip affair, with the CPU and GPU in the primary die made by Broadcom and the secondary one handling input and output duties, much like the chipset on a PC motherboard. Specs-wise, it boasts a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, a 12-core VideoCore VII GPU, and 8 GB of LPDDR4X-4267 RAM.

That's paired with the RP1 I/O controller, offering Bluetooth 5.0, 1Gb Ethernet, two USB 3.0 Type-A and one USB 2.0 Type-A ports, a 40-pin GPIO (general purpose IO) header, and two micro-HDMI sockets (good for 4K, 60 Hz).

It's priced at $90/£85 for the base package (i.e. just the keyboard and a 32 GB SD card with RaspberryOS installed), and around $30/£30 more for the 'desktop kit' version, which includes a mouse, power supply unit, HDMI cable, and a beginner's guide to the Raspberry Pi. It's a bit cheeky of Raspberry to not include a power supply with the base unit, if you ask me, because the Pi 5 does need a 5 V, 5 A supply at the very least. It'll run with less current but it won't work half as well.

All the additional new capabilities and higher clock speeds do mean one thing, though, and it's that the Raspberry Pi's chips can run a bit on the hot side. Fortunately, the Pi 500 is fitted with a large slab of aluminium, for passive cooling.

So what can you do with a Pi 500, should one take your fancy? Well, as our very own Jacob Fox discovered, it'll run Doom 3 well enough to hit 60 fps at 480p low settings, but that's not really its forte—the original Doom and retro emulation are better suited to the tiny GPU.

Thanks to the much improved IO capabilities, the Pi 500 will function as a home media server very nicely, though a standard Pi 5 would serve just as well. If I'm to be honest, though, the Pi 500 is very a hobbyist thing—unless you're really keen and motivated to delve into programming and electronics, it's likely to suffer the same fate as my own Pi devices. I don't say that as a criticism, just an observation.

But don't let me put you off. The Raspberry Pi 500 looks super nice and with a certain holiday just around the corner, it could be an ideal gift for the budding coder in your family. Without my ZX Spectrum, I would never have learned about how computers really work nor developed a lifelong love of assembly. The path that ultimately led me to this very job is almost entirely down to that humble home computer.

You know, I think I may have just talked myself around to getting a certain Raspberry-powered white keyboard. Ah, here we go again.

A few days ago, Gamers Nexus released an exposé calling NZXT's gaming PC rental service NZXT Flex a "predatory, evil rental computer scam". This caused quite a stir in online PC gaming communities, and it seems NZXT's taken note, as the company has now issued an official statement about the issue.

In a blog post, NZXT outlines some actions being taken in response, as well as some clarifications about the program. In a YouTube video, NZXT founder and CEO Johnny Hou expands on this and acknowledges the mistakes the company has made, stating, "I want to acknowledge that we messed up."

The problems that Gamers Nexus seemingly identified with the Flex program essentially amounted to a picture of a service that misrepresents products, locks users into an unfair contract and has predatory pricing. For instance, this includes swapping out components for less powerful ones, using the same names for Flex PCs as more powerful non-Flex ones, and showing seemingly misleading or false benchmarks.

At least, this is insofar as the case Gamers Nexus lays out is accurate, and on this front Hou and NZXT have attempted to clarify some potential misconceptions.

Regarding these, NZXT says: "NZXT Flex customers have never experienced a pre-tax subscription price increase and will never experience one unless they decide to switch subscription tiers.

"During the regular course of business, especially during high seasonality moments, the availability of different components requires specification changes, sometimes in real-time. In fact, customers may experience a free upgrade based on changing inventory levels.

"NZXT’s Flex program is a subscription-based gaming PC alternative that does not lock customers into a long-term commitment" and "we have updated the subscriber agreement to ensure each aspect is even clearer."

In the video, Hou also states: "Let me be absolutely clear, we are not in the business of selling your data. Every Flex PC that comes back is fully wiped."

But as well as attempting to clear up some misconceptions, NZXT has recognised the seriousness and legitimacy of at least some of the concerns that were raised. Hou says, "A lot of the issues are very serious and it's really important to us that we address each and every one of them."

In addition to updating the subscriber agreement to make it clearer, the company has taken actions to improve certain things Gamers Nexus criticised. The company states it has "pulled all influencer-led Flex advertising and have instituted a more robust creative review process" because "it is not acceptable for our advertising to communicate things that are not true." It will also be "changing the names of products offered through our Flex subscription, providing a very clear distinction between the two."

More generally, Hou emphasises that the PC rental service serves a genuine purpose: "I think there's a real use case for it." For example, someone might want to try out streaming without commitment, or someone coming over from console gaming might want to try out PC gaming in general just for a month. And on this point, NZXT clarifies that the Flex program "does not lock customers into a long-term commitment."

While Hou's video acknowledging the issues does seem sincere to my ears, and while some of the clarifications do at least shed light on the company's side of the story, I can't help but feel that some big issues haven't been fully addressed, namely the expensive pricing.

But I suppose one could make the same argument against many rental services: Yes, they're more expensive in the long run, but you're paying a premium to prevent having to pay for whatever it is up-front, in full. I suppose as long as products are represented clearly and accurately, this shouldn't be a problem. Let's just hope the actions NZXT says it's taking will bring more accuracy and clarity to the service and its marketing and advertising.

Which I think is grand. I am all for that when it comes to affordable gaming PCs, I don't want to see money wasted on needless luxuries when I'm chasing down a good budget rig. And there certainly aren't any of those here. Pull that side panel off and you'll see what I mean; the CPU cooler is a no-name brand, there are no VRM heatsinks or SSD-cooling plates on the barebones motherboard, and the memory sticks are likewise bare PCBs, too.

The OEM Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card (basically a non-branded one made for system builders) is similarly simple, but beautifully so. I'm into miniature cards where they make sense, and the low-end Ada Lovelace GPU is so efficient that it doesn't need a massive dual-slot, triple-fan cooling array to keep it running to full effect.

Now, you might be getting a bit of the fear with all this talk of limited cooling options, basic CPU cooler, and a small GPU. I get it, you're worried this thing's going to overheat and get hella loud when you boot up any game more demanding than Solitaire. Bury that fear, because at this level we have components smart and efficient enough they don't overly tax the cooling options available.

In my testing neither the CPU or GPU go beyond the 76°C mark under heavy gaming loads, and, while the Intel processor will hit 95°C when all its cores are being hit at 100% processing load, that's actually entirely standard. In fact, other systems we've tested will go all the way up to a throttling 100°C, so the fact the Legion Tower 5i doesn't go that far highlights why it doesn't need an expensive chip chiller atop its CPU.

But what is this processor of which I speak? Lenovo has gone for the Core i5 14400F, a ten-core, 16-thread Raptor Lake Refresh chip, that's arguably one of the best budget CPUs around. We still recommend the Core i5 13400F as the best budget CPU but only because it's around $10 cheaper if you're buying it as an upgrade—they are otherwise the exact same processor.

It's no productivity beast, I'll be honest. Despite that effective ten-core labelling, what you're getting are actually just six Hyperthreaded Performance cores, with a further four Efficient cores for lighter workloads. But for gaming those P-cores are the important factor, and are more than capable of delivering data to the GPU in a speedy enough manner to keep the good frames rolling.

And that GPU is the budget-focused RTX 4060. It's the lowest-spec graphics card in the RTX 40-series, with a specs sheet that only serves to highlight that positioning. It's an effective enough 1080p gaming GPU, though, and comes with all the DLSS 3.5 goodness, which includes Nvidia's Frame Generation technology for some free fps in supporting games. It's that extra GeForce frosting which slightly pushes Nvidia's budget card ahead of the AMD alternative.

Alongside that well-balanced CPU/GPU combo, Lenovo has dropped in a 1 TB Samsung PCIe 4.0 SSD (and a pretty speedy one) and 16 GB of DDR5 memory. Sadly, that bare memory is running at 4400 MT/s, but as this isn't exactly designed as a workstation beast, that slow RAM isn't going to be a real hindrance.

So, how does it actually perform? Well, our benchmark suite for gaming PCs runs at 1440p to capture the performance at both ends of the market, both the high and low end machines. And while the native performance isn't too hot—you can see why they call the RTX 4060 a 1080p GPU—as soon as you start to drop in DLSS and Frame Generation you can actually start to see properly playable frame rates.

Hitting a smooth 60 fps on average in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p, supported by that 49 fps 1% Low figure, is pretty impressive—especially given that running natively without Frame Gen and DLSS you're only getting 24 fps. Still, even with the panacea of upscaling and interpolation, I wouldn't recommend this Legion Tower 5i as anything other than a 1080p gaming PC.

You're still well behind something like the RTX 4070 Super in terms of gaming performance, but you'll only find that GPU in gaming PCs which cost well over the $1,200 mark. Which is, I guess, where we need to start talking about money.

When I first received this machine for testing it was on offer for $850 at Best Buy, and had been for a number of months, but despite there being a ton of Black Friday gaming PC deals around at the moment, the cheapest this rig is on offer for is $900 at Lenovo's own store.

That is still a decent price, but there are RTX 4060 machines out there with the same spec discounted down to much less, such as the iBuyPower Scale. In general, non-silly season sales times, however, the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i remains one of the best budget gaming PCs from a known brand.

The Legion's simple setup works for me, and also means it's an easy system to upgrade down the line, too. There's a spare M.2 slot for an additional SSD to supplement the 1 TB drive already in there, and there are no clearance issues if you wanted to go for higher-spec memory. The only issue there is the OEM B660M motherboard is very basic, even down to the BIOS and that might cause some issues trying to get XMP on speedy RAM kits running. It's also only got a handful of USB sockets, and only a solitary Type-C connection on the back panel.

The other sticking point would be that 500 W PSU. You could probably stretch to an RTX 4060 Ti as an upgrade, but even that might be stretching things a little. Realistically, if you wanted a big GPU upgrade you'd need a new PSU alongside it. But, unlike something like an Alienware PC, the PSU inside the Legion Tower 5i is entirely standard, too.

I've got a real soft spot for the Legion Tower 5i, in fact for the other Legion Towers I've tested, too. They're simple gaming PCs that don't pretend to be something they're not, and even that flowing RGB lighting can be disabled via a single physical button on the rear of the machine. But Lenovo has a lot of competition in the budget market, from the likes of Newegg's ABS range, and upstarts such as Yeyian. That is a level of competition that seems to be far more aggressive than Lenovo is, or maybe more aggressive than it can be.

If you're after a rock solid build from a known brand, then the Tower 5i will be a great shout, especially as you'll be able to find it with a consistently solid discount If you're purely chasing the best performance at the lowest price, however, there are better alternatives if you're willing to shop around.

We test a lot of components at PC Gamer. We're often swapping GPUs, CPUs, SSDs and RAM between test rigs to find out whether they're worth your cash. Yet an important question to ask yourself when digging into the data is: "what's it like to actually build a PC with this stuff?" To answer that, I'm actually building a PC with this stuff.

I'm putting together a gaming PC using some of the latest components around. You'll find a parts list of what I picked and why, a build log covering the process of putting the PC together, and some reflections on what I'd do differently next time below. There will be a next time, too. You can catch all the PC builds from myself and the team in coming months, covering a range of budgets and form factors, right here on PC Gamer.

For this inaugural build, I've gone for one of the latest PC cases on the market, the Havn HS 420 VGPU, and stuffed it with the finest white components money can buy. This build is all about trying to distract you from actually playing any games on it and instead just staring wide-eyed through its panoramic window at the vertically mounted RTX 4080 Super and ludicrous CPU cooler within. It's a beauty, but it wasn't always. Much like I imagine Michelangelo had, at times, regrets about David's nude frame, so too do I have some regrets here.

On that undeservedly big-headed note, let's get on with the build.

The parts

Total: ~$3,231 | ~£3,021

If I'd have skimped out on any of the components within this case, I'd have angry PC gamers knocking at my door. You don't get a chassis with a panoramic curved glass side panel and vertical GPU mounting to stick beaten-up old junk inside it.

No, that just won't do.

Let's start with the chassis. This is Havn's HS 420 and it's about as extravagant a dual-chamber case as you'll find on the market today.

Havn is a new brand from Pro Gamers Group, which owns a few other notable brands in the PC hardware space: Ducky, Noblechairs, Aerocool, and ThunderX3, to name a few; and also major European retailers Overclockers and Caseking. The HS 420 is the brand's first product and a company representative tells me it's a completely custom design from the ground up.

There are two versions of the HS 420: the standard model for $199/£200 and the VGPU model for $269/£270. The latter offers an additional vertical GPU mounting bracket and 45 degree fan mount, and that's the option I've gone with for this build.

I first caught a glimpse of this case on a rotating plinth at Pro Gamers Group's booth at Computex 2024. Thankfully, it looks just as good in somewhat less luxurious digs, i.e. my office.

It's a great candidate for a showcase build such as this as the glass side panel extends right across the front of the case uninterrupted—this is a fully panoramic PC case with a single sheet of glass carefully curved to fit the capacious chassis. You'd think that'd make for a clumsy PC case to install or remove parts inside but it all peels away with ease.

A handful of screws sit under the magnetic dust cover on the top and each panel can then be lifted off without any extra tools, exposing the entire inner frame for easy access. The rear and top panels also feature this excellent striped design, which is more than simple aesthetics, as each strip is cut-out of the panel to give this machine a little more room to breathe.

Stare inside this machine and you'll find Gigabyte's RTX 4080 Super 16GB Aero OC staring right back. Held aloft by a vertical GPU mounting bracket included with the HS 420's VGPU version, this overclocked Aero graphics card's fans sit unconventionally with fans facing the outside world. It's an all-white design to match the Havn case and other components I've opted for here, and it looks really tidy.

The RTX 4080 Super sits as the apologetic follow-up to the far less popular RTX 4080—it's fractionally faster and more affordable than the standard model. This Gigabyte design houses three capable fans, one of which spins in a different direction to the other two to reduce turbulence, and which will stop entirely when temperatures are below ~60° and during light load.

While the fans will whirr to life with a modern game running, generally this choice of GPU led to fantastically low temperatures and noise levels.

With a price of $1,150 / £1,026 / $1,846 AUD, the GPU is far from the cheapest option around. If you want to save pennies, check out our Black Friday graphics card deals page. That said, the model I've chosen here is one of very few all-white GPUs on the market, and it performs well. For that reason, it feels overpriced to me—not any more than the RTX 4080 Super does in general, anyways.

My choice of CPU is the unequivocally speedy Intel Core i9 14900K. Now, this chip has a shaky history with instability but it is one of the fastest gaming processors available today, even in light of the recent release of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K.

I picked this 14th Gen chip for a couple of reasons: 1) I could use the Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Pro X with it—a capable LGA 1700 motherboard that looks very dashing in its white colourway; 2) Intel's latest Arrow Lake chips weren't widely available at the point I was building this system; and 3) I didn't have an AMD 3D V-Cache chip to hand at the time. In an ideal world, I'd have the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in this build within Gigabyte's X670E Aorus Pro X. This chip impressed in testing last year and I don't have to worry about skyrocketing CPU temperatures and high power demands. Those are two areas where the Intel chip slips up. But it is very fast.

To combat the Core i9's proclivity to chug watts like cheap beer, I picked the Hyte Thicc Q60 all-in-one liquid cooler. This comes with a 240 mm radiator and a high absurdity factor for the inclusion of an Android-powered screen. Yep, that's practically a mobile phone on top of the cold plate, capable of displaying widgets programmed via the Hyte Nexus application, including album art or key temperature readouts.

The Hyte Q60 was a mistake. I can admit that in hindsight. I'll detail this further in the build guide below, but if you're considering the Havn HS 420 for your own PC build, I'd opt for a full 360 mm radiator and a cold plate without an enormous screen attached. That should be easy, there are next to no other coolers with such enormous screens attached.

The Hyte Q60 does have one major benefit. It offers an easy way to connect system fans and RGB LED strips over proprietary magnetic connectors and USB Type-C. In fact, all except a pair of Noctua NF-P12 redux-1700 fans in this build were hooked up via a single cable run from the radiator and around the perimeter of the case. That's three Thicc FP12 fans and three LS12 light strips using the control hub inside the all-in-one liquid cooler, which is a good way to save on messy cables.

I had to adjust my memory configuration due to the Hyte cooler: just two out of four sticks of the V-Color Manta XPrism 32 GB DDR5-6200 kit would fit alongside its screen. That won't have any impact on the performance of this PC, however. The two DIMMs I was unable to install were only dummy sticks for uniform RGB effects—the capacity and speed remain the same.

The 6200 MT/s RAM kit hits a sweet spot for speed and latency with Intel's 14th Gen platform. You can push for higher speeds but usually at a cost to latency or, well, actual cost. This Manta kit hits a CAS latency of 36, which is a healthy middle ground for available DDR5 kits.

For storage, I've opted for a single PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD for this machine: Crucial's T700. Rated to 12,400 MB/s sequential reads and 11,800 MB/s sequential writes, it's no slouch. A PCIe 5.0 drive is overkill for most PC gamers right now and I'd absolutely recommend cutting this for a cheaper PCIe 4.0 drive to try to cut down costs with this build, but it means I don't have to think about upgrading the boot drive anytime soon.

Lastly, the PSU. First, let me say I had hoped to use something different here, a more reasonable model with white cabling. It wasn't available and I plucked this PSU out of my test bench to replace it. It's not a sensible pick for this machine for two reasons: 1) it has a screen plastered on one side of it that won't be in any way visible from inside the Havn's second, rear chamber; and 2) it has more wattage than even this powerful PC requires at 1,200 watts. That's huge and much better suited to an RTX 4090.

After receiving the last few parts in the mail, I was finally ready to assemble the PC. Looking forward to my colourful combination of cooler, RAM and GPU with wide eyed optimism. Of course, none of that went to plan, but that's just the way it is with PC building sometimes.

The build

Step one: Remove the HAVN HS 420 VGPU from its cardboard container with incredible caution.

This panoramic glass case is one clumsy hand hold away from shattering into a thousand tiny pieces. Thankfully, it remains unshattered to this day, though it has come closer than I'd care to admit. I began this build by peeling off the tape and stickers adorning the HS 420 out of the box, pulling away every panel, removing the included accessories box, and preparing my build area.

Step two: Ready the motherboard.

Placing the motherboard on top of the box it arrives in, I installed the memory, CPU, and SSD. This old trick saves time and effort later on in the process, though even more so for a build such as this. There's not going to be easy access to this motherboard's PCI slots, NVMe slots or internal headers once I install the VGPU bracket and graphics card, so best to get everything done right early in the build.

I installed both functioning DIMMs of the V-Color Manta memory into this motherboard alongside two dummy DIMMs. These are sticks fitted only with RGB lighting and intended solely to make memory look satisfyingly symmetrical. That's a pretty desirable trait in a windowed case such as this. However, I don't know it yet, but I will end up removing these DIMMs before the build is completed. They're not compatible with the cooler, which is in turn not compatible with the VGPU mounting. It's a whole thing.

The Intel Core i9 14900K slips into place snugly. I've not bothered adding any washers to the Independent Loading Mechanism (ILM) for this build, though if you're using brand new parts I'd recommend it to prevent any bending that may lead to higher temps.

The Crucial T700 includes a chunky heatsink attachment. For this build, that has to go. A handful of screws detach the SSD from its housing and I only need to scrape a small amount of thermal padding away to reveal the naked NAND chips. One of the smaller features I've come to appreciate on the Gigabyte Aorus board is the tool-less access to the top NVMe slot. There are no awkward screws involved in the process whatsoever, actually, as both heatsink and SSD are held in place with easy latches.

With everything in place, the motherboard is screwed down into the HS 420. The case supports motherboards up to E-ATX but it's best suited to ATX or smaller to make good use of the included cable channels.

Step three: Configure the cooling.

It's a smart move to plan out your cooling ahead of time with the HS 420. This isn't your average chassis and it relies on a bottom-to-top airflow, unlike most others that are front-to-back.

Don't be like me. I opted for three 120 mm Thicc FP12 fans in the tilted mounting bracket in the bottom of the case—this is included in the VGPU version of the case and the standard version mounts the fans directly facing upwards—but I'm stuck having to zip-tie these in place for a secure fit. That's because the VGPU bracket only supports three 140 mm fans. These Thicc fans magnetically connect to one another anyways, which saved the day, but don't make the same mistake as I did.

Don't install the fans backwards and only notice once you've started to install the GPU bracket, either. Definitely don't do that.

I installed the Hyte Thicc Q60 CPU cooler into the top of the case. This job is made easy by the removable cooling bracket accessed on the HS 420, which leaves plenty of room between the cooler's edge and the motherboard. There's even plenty of space for the extra thick 240 mm radiator with two FP12 fans pre-installed. I switched these over to a push configuration to complete the chimney for this build.

I initially installed the Q60's pump to the Core i9 14900K in a vertical position, as Hyte intended, though once I installed the VGPU bracket and graphics card, I had to admit defeat and rotate it sideways. That's a bit of a shame, as Hyte is yet to offer a way to run the screen in horizontal mode. Hyte told me that may be a feature it includes in its Nexus software at some point—at the very least the ability to flip the screen's orientation 180 degrees—though it's not available right now. As such, I'd recommend a different cooler than this—a basic 360 mm model would be a much better pick.

I generally found the Hyte cooling set-up extremely useful for this build. In essence, it allowed me to connect the Hyte Thicc Q60 CPU cooler to the FP12 fans in the rear with only a single cable run—a braided, magnetically attached USB Type-C. Then, from the final fan in the three-fan chain, I ran another length of cable to the LS10 RGB lighting strips. That's CPU cooling, case cooling, and lighting connected and synced via a single cable run.

Even without this sort of simplicity, the HS 420 includes two (yes, two) fan controller hubs for easy syncing of fan speeds.

To complete my cooling configuration, I have two Noctua NF-P12 redux-1700 fans. These are fitted into the included fan brackets, which are themselves removable from the case for easy installation. One sucks cool air into the case closer to the bottom, beneath the GPU intake, and the other expels hot air out just beyond the VRM and CPU. These are both hooked up into one of the fan controllers, which is duly connected to my motherboard's CPU fan header.

Step four: Connect those cables.

I unravelled the front panel connectors neatly included in the rear of the HS 420 and connected them to the motherboard's USB, audio and front panel connectors. It's important to do this now, as otherwise I'd have a very hard time trying to connect these once the GPU is in place. Form over function at its finest. But hey, the GPU looks fantastic when mounted this way.

I turned my attention to the rear of the HS 420 to install the PSU, Gigabyte's Aorus P1200W. I needed this PSU's wattage for this machine—the alternatives I had available to me were a little on the small side—but I have to admit the PSU's unique selling point, a full-colour screen, is entirely wasted. The HS 420's dual-chamber design means you can't see the PSU at all.

Thankfully, the PSU is easily loaded into the trunk on the HS 420, and there's ample room for cables.

I only need to run the motherboard, CPU, and PCIe cables for this build. Though a spare SATA is handy to have ready for any later expansion. I also needed a spare PCIe 6-pin connection for the Hyte cooler to connect to.

The wide cable management channels that run from the bottom to the top of the case, around the motherboard, and through the top and rear panels are simply superb. I soundly stuff each one with each of the cables as I go, strapping them in place, and taking them where they need to go. I was not neat about it, but that doesn't really matter, as they all fit snugly in the generous cable management system.

Step five: Mount the GPU.

The highlight of the build has to be the vertically mounted graphics card. An RTX 4080 Super with a fresh white paint job will occupy most of my eyeline once installed, but I had to make sure not to mess it up before I got there.

First, I need to install the vertical mounting bracket. This is easily done, as I had to remove it following the same steps but backwards in the beginning to make way for the motherboard. I started by connecting the PCIe 5.0 riser cable, as it's a little more fiddly to attach once the rest is installed. Then I slid the bracket into place. This is held on with a couple of screws, though this bracket is adjustable to different depths, and requires a couple of thumbscrews as well. With this securely tightened into place, it was a surprisingly simple job to mount the extremely large Gigabyte Aero graphics into place.

Except for the screen mounted on top of the cold plate on the CPU. That was an issue. I ended up having to spin the cooler to accommodate the long screen, which meant the arm holding the screen in place sat overtop the RAM. That then meant I had to ditch the closest DIMM to the CPU socket, one of my two dummy DIMMs, and I wasn't going to keep the other around in that case.

So the dummy DIMMs were gone, and the screen on the cooler was the wrong way around, but at least the graphics card was sitting pretty.

With my CPU cooler reoriented, my only other concern was that the graphics card brushes up against a piece of glass used to direct air away from the backside of the GPU and across the intake fans. I was mostly concerned about vibration creating excessive noise, though in my testing I didn't come across anything noticeable. Still, I did test thermals with both the glass included and removed, and both times temperatures stayed near-enough the same. So I wouldn't worry about ditching it altogether.

Step six: Reassemble.

One final check over and I'm ready to reassemble the side panels. That means checking each cable, connection, and fan orientation. That last bit is extremely important if, like me, you realise you put the entire bottom row of fans in the wrong way around. Luckily, magnetically attached fans with only a handful of screws in them make for an easy switch.

Then, on with the dust filters and panels. The HS 420 comes with a large dust filter for the underside intake, though I was surprised to see a compact single-fan dust filter included for the rear lower intake, too.

One addition I made at the last minute with this build was a little bit of black electrical tape along the lower edge of the curved panel. Some might disagree with this sorta thing, but I feel the black tape is a neat way to cover up the RGB LED strips I've run along the bottom of the case. If these light strips were diffused, maybe I'd not bother with the tape, but seeing as the LS10 is bare LEDs, I prefer to cover up the strips themselves.

Step seven: Plug it in and press the button.

With every panel now back on the chassis, I hit the power switch on the PSU to give this PC a test run.

So… did it post right away?

The performance

This PC posted right away. Phew. It booted into the BIOS screen where I promptly installed the latest version to stave off any concerns of instability with this 14900K.

With Windows 11 installed and fully updated, it's time to play some games and get an idea of this PC's performance.

The RTX 4080 Super delivers superb frame rates in combination with the Core i9 14900K. That's hardly surprising but it is incredibly satisfying to game on nonetheless.

I carry out all gaming tests at 1440p, which offers a happy medium of frame rates upwards of 100 fps in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition. With DLSS and Frame Generation enabled, I am able to hit over 100 fps in Cyberpunk 2077, too.

The most impressive feat is that throughout my testing, the GPU keeps extremely cool. During a pretty lengthy three run test of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, which I use to measure thermals while gaming, I saw the GPU temperature peak at 60°C only, with an average of 57°C. This seems pretty spectacular, so I've dug into the data collected using Nvidia's Frameview tool in the other games tested to find out more.

Yep, the GPU never exceeded 60°C in any other game. In fact, there are Baldur's Gate 3 runs where the average temperature is in the mid-forties. That's a real win for the cooling solution both on this card and inside the Havn HS 420.

It should come as no surprise that an overkill rig such as this is able to shred through Cinebench R24, 3DMark, and various productivity and encoding benchmarks with ease. Though I am a little surprised to see high CPU temperatures from the Thicc Q60 liquid cooler. The Core i9 14900K is often too hot to handle with intensive workloads, as evidenced here.

I'd wanted to keep my chip from hitting 100°C at all costs, but unfortunately it isn't to be. Another reason why a bigger CPU cooler might be a smart decision.

I can report healthy VRM and SSD temperatures, even from that PCIe 5.0 SSD. These are notoriously hot drives and I had thought this might prove an issue after removing the heatsink included by Crucial and relying on the Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Pro X's instead. However, the motherboard keeps the drive's temperatures well and truly in check, even throughout the 3DMark Storage benchmark.

The conclusion

I won't wax lyrical about this build's top performance too long—that's a little bit too much like patting myself on the back for a job well done. And evidently, some things didn't go quite as planned. Though I will wrap up with a couple of reflections on what went right, what went wrong, and where I'd do things differently next time.

The case was a huge success. I don't regret for a second opting for the vertical GPU mount, even though it makes changing out an SSD or plugging in an internal USB header an absolute nightmare. It's all worth it for the overall finish of the build, which I still haven't got sick of staring at as of yet. Sadly, I have to take it all apart before I will.

Though I do wish I'd been able to get the correct size fans for the mount included with the VGPU. Similarly, I should have been more aware of the size constraints for the CPU cooler, screen, and RAM. I was blissfully unaware of the clearance issues until I was face to face with them, which led to a couple unfortunate misses, such as being unable to use the screen to its fullest potential or sticking a couple extra DIMMs in the machine just for extra style points.

Though I cannot fault it for overall style and performance, there are ways I could have levelled it up further, such as with white sleeved power cables or a PSU that supports a native 12x6 power connector. Also not using a PSU with a very expensive and unnecessary additional screen when you know it's going to be hidden in the back of the case would be a start.

Honestly, I got lucky a few times with this build, a few less fantastical parts and a few more reasonable parts would've saved me a lot of hassle. But it all actually worked out, this time. Perhaps the moral of the story is to not get too carried away with ideas—I foolishly wanted a screen and a vertically-mounted GPU within one mid-tower PC case—or just to roll with the punches when it doesn't all go quite right. Either way, this remains one of the loveliest gaming PCs I've ever built, and I'm glad I did.

Now, to take it all apart and start again fresh next month.

A garbage truck driver going by the handle 'Siezio' shared an unexpected treasure hoard on Reddit, revealing they'd salvaged the remains of a once high-end gaming PC from the trash (via TechSpot). Alongside a discarded GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card, the sanitation specialist also found an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X and a water-damaged PSU.

It gets wilder. While Siezio wisely decided the PSU was a lost cause, they cleaned the other parts with isopropyl alcohol before leaving them to dry thoroughly over two days. Having picked up a replacement PSU and some storage in the meantime, Siezio then attempted to power up the system—and it works.

No benchmarking of the rig appears to be immediately forthcoming, as Siezio has since deleted their post, potentially because the post has gone viral and maybe picking through the trash could be frowned upon by their employers. Before that though, they did share that it isn't uncommon to see old hardware during their trash collection shifts, though often these systems would be real museum pieces or otherwise damaged beyond hope of restoration. Stumbling upon serious hardware that's only about five years old in their line of work is a lightning strike find.

We rated the Founders Edition of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti when it launched a little over four years ago—indeed we've just loaned our original review sample to a colleague to act as a makeweight GPU until the RTX 50-series launches. To see what was a pricey, $1,200 high-end bit of kit upon launch thrown out like old socks makes my head spin, to say nothing of how we once wrote that the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X would offer a 'taste of the future.' The forward march of time truly is merciless.

At the very least, those bits of silicon seem to have found a good home, but there's a thought I keep getting caught on and that's namely the subject of e-waste. I won't begrudge anyone an upgrade, but this kit was hardly elderly and—as Siezio's post demonstrated—was still perfectly serviceable. Assuming nothing tragic has happened to the hardware's original owner, I can't help but wonder about the circumstances surrounding this tech's trashing.

Chromebook churn represents a worrying trend of disposability in tech, and the fact the UK's e-waste recycling efforts are slowing down rather than amping up really isn't helping my climate catastrophe flavoured existential dread. I can appreciate that even popping down to one's local CEX (British trade-in tech/gaming store) or similar second-hand seller can be An Ordeal, but it's still a better option than simply punting ancient hardware into the bin. That said, the burden of responsibility cannot solely rest with the consumer.

Simply greenwashing products will not save our Earth (a fact EU parliament is growing wise to). Manufacturers need to address the long, end-of-life tail of a product's existence once it passes out of users' hands and, worst case scenario, into landfill. I'm not sure water soluble circuit boards will save us—but it's a start.

There are plenty of stellar options around these days, too, whether you're getting the absolute best gaming keyboard money can buy or a budget one to save cash for the rest of your build. There are even plenty of cheap but solidly built mechanical keyboards these days. Especially right now, with Black Friday keyboard deals popping up left, right, and centre.

Unfortunately, that there are so many great options out there can be a curse as much as a blessing, because it can be hard to decide what's important and what's not. I've been in the game for a while now, though, so I know the most common pitfalls people fall into when trying to decide which gaming keyboard to buy, and I've put this together to help you avoid them.

Keep the following tips in mind and you'll have a better chance of deciding which keyboard to go for:

1. Good mechanical keyboards are cheaper than you think
2. You don't need Bluetooth, but 2.4 GHz wireless is great
3. Go for a Hall effect keyboard for competitive FPS gaming
4. Don't give up keys you use just to have a small keyboard
5. Don't underestimate typing sound and feel

1. Cheap mechs

1. Good mechanical keyboards are cheaper than you think

Back in the day, getting a decent mechanical keyboard meant really splashing out, and the cheaper ones were so trash that you were probably better opting for a membrane keyboard. Thankfully that's not the case anymore.

These days you can pick up a good mechanical keyboard for pretty cheap. Yes, there are still expensive options out there, and these are well worth it if you can afford it. But the past decade of mechanical keyboards has been a rising tide to raise all boats. High-end keyboards have gotten even higher-end, and plenty of cheap ones have risen in quality to fill that gap.

Case and point is the Mountain Everest 60. You can frequently pick one of these up for about $50, and it's a phenomenal little keyboard. It's dampened and lubed to the brim for typing sound and feel, and you can slap on some magnetic modular components down the line, too, such as a numpad. We consider it the best budget gaming keyboard for a reason.

Of course, this doesn't mean every cheap mechanical keyboard is amazing—you're sure to stumble across the odd rattly one that brings you right back to 2007. Just know that there are some fantastic mechanical keyboards out there, these days, for prices that shouldn't break the bank. Just make sure to check out some keyboard guides and reviews before parting with any money.

2. Wireless

2. You don't need Bluetooth, but 2.4 GHz wireless is great

Wireless keyboards are great, and although they're not ubiquitous they're much more popular than they used to be. But not all wireless tech is built equal, and this can be an especially important caveat for gaming.

Although it's not quite as common as it used to be, some wireless keyboards only have the option for Bluetooth and lack a dedicated USB 2.4 GHz connection. Some Keychron K-series keyboards—the Keychron K2 V2, for instance—don't have 2.4 G as an option, only Bluetooth wireless or USB-C wired.

Bluetooth's great because most systems have a receiver built in, so it means you can use a Bluetooth keyboard with most anything. But it's not so great compared to 2.4 GHz, which yes, does require a separate USB receiver to work, but is much faster.

What "faster" means in this context is less latency between when you press a key and when your computer or device receives that input and acts on it. This can be especially important for gaming, where milliseconds can mean the difference between dodging or dying to an attack. Unless you only play super-casual games that require barely any reaction time, if you're going for a wireless keyboard, ensure it allows connecting over 2.4 GHz.

3. Hall effect

3. Go for a Hall effect keyboard for competitive FPS gaming

You might have heard the words "Hall effect" mentioned if you've been keeping your eye on some of the best gaming controllers over the past few years, because the technology is now being used for some analogue controllers to eliminate joystick drift.

You're less likely to have heard the tech mentioned in regards to gaming keyboards, though. That's because companies like to market Hall effect keyboards around a million-and-one different names for the same handful of things Hall effect can offer: rapid trigger, rapid tap, snap tap, and rappy tappy (no, I'm not making these up). The basic tech that allows for all these features is the same, though, and it's Hall effect.

Hall effect tech is what allows the keys on some gaming keyboards to have pinpoint-accurate and adjustable actuation and reset points, which is great for competitive FPS gaming.

These keyboards use magnets to measure when a key is pressed rather than physical contacts, and this magnetic method allows for accurate tracking of the switch the entire way down and up. This means you can set the keyboard to register a keypress as high or as low as you want, and you can set different keys to have different actuation points.

You can even set your keys to reset and allow for re-pressing the key as soon as you start lifting the key up again. This means wherever you lift it you can press it down again, which feels incredibly responsive and why it's called "rapid trigger". It can even be used for easy counter-strafing in some games by using SOCD.

Hall effect keyboards also have the benefit of being able to offer a user the ability to run slower by holding down the key only part way (in games that support it). There are other keyboard types that allow for analogue functions but most tend to use Hall effect tech now.

One downside, however, is that there aren't too many Hall effect keyboards just yet, nor many Hall effect switches. Which means you won't have much luck experimenting with different switches—right now, you simply get what you're given.

It also means you can't, for instance, take your pick out of a range of diverse enthusiast keyboards like you can with traditional mechanical keyboards. But at least some Hall effect keyboards feel very nice to type on, so you might not be missing out on too much.

4. Small sacrifices

4. Don't give up keys you use just to have a small keyboard

Look, I get it, small keyboards are cool, and practical, too. At least, that's the theory. But just make sure a small board will be practical for your own specific use case before you commit to lopping off a portion of its keys.

Keyboards come in a range of sizes, and over the years smaller form factors have become more popular. You still have full-sized keyboards, of course which include all function keys, arrow keys, number pad, and so on. But you also have smaller ones. Here's a rundown of the most popular ones:

• 100%: All keys (full-sized)
• 80%: No numpad (tenkeyless / TKL)
• 75%: No numpad, smushed up home and arrow keys
• 65%: No numpad, no function keys, smushed up home and arrow keys
• 60%: No numpad, no function keys, no arrow keys, no home keys

Personally, I use a TKL (80%) keyboard, meaning it removes the numpad. I must tell you, though: I do, perhaps surprisingly, miss my numpad. Before I ditched the numpad, when I learnt to touch type on one properly, I ended up using it quite a lot, whether I was entering spreadsheet info, card details, or any number more than two digits long. It's just much easier to enter numbers without looking down at the keyboard when using a number pad than it is when using the top row of keys.

If you do want a TKL keyboard (or smaller) but think you might miss the number pad, however, not all is lost. This is because—and this is advice I'm also telling myself—you can pick up third-party standalone numpads pretty much anywhere, including on Amazon. Some are pretty cheap, and there are even some rather dashing mechanical ones.

But cheap or not, it's an extra cost, not to mention another thing to plug in and store when you're not using (and if you're not storing it, why opt for TKL in the first place?).

You should think even more carefully about getting a keyboard that eliminates more keys than the zero-through-nines, too. If you're going extra-small, think long and hard about whether you really don't need those function keys, for instance. Maybe you use the F5 refresh or media controls more than you realise.

I'm not saying don't go for a small keyboard, I'm just saying to consider which keys you actually use before you get rid of them for good.

5. Sound and feel

5. Don't underestimate typing sound and feel

If you're in the market for a gaming keyboard, you're obviously going to be interested in how it is for gaming. But unless you use your PC like a console, you'd be remiss not to also consider how it is for typing.

Whether you're tapping away all day like me or typing the odd URL and password, you might be surprised just how important that sweet thickity thockety clickity clack is for day-to-day enjoyment of your keyboard. Especially if you're prone to the odd bout of in-game team chat "encouragement".

Whether you've a penchant for the luscious, creamy thock of a heavily dampened board or the more gentle tip-tip of a stiff plate and hollowed body, those sounds can make or break the new keyboard thrill, in my experience. And it isn't all about sound, either: feel is arguably what matters above all else.

What makes for a great typing feel can differ from person to person, but you'll definitely want keys that don't wobble—including the stabilised keys such as the space bar and enter key—and that aren't scratchy, meaning they're lubed well. You might also want a keyboard with a little flex thanks to a bouncy mount. Switch choice matters, too, though that's more of a subjective choice.

Unfortunately there's no way to judge from a spec sheet alone whether a keyboard's going to feel great to type on. Without having tried similar keyboards yourself, the best way to know is to read and watch reviews.

Other aspects of keyboards are without a doubt important for gaming—latency, software, and heck, even RGB lighting if you're into all that. Just don't forget about typing sound and feel, because keyboards are for more than just WASD.

There's always a certain degree of concern when importing a gaming PC from the US into the UK. That's a long way to go and gaming PCs are not good travellers. There's a risk that the gaming PC boxed up on one side of the pond is an expensive bag of bits jingling around in a metal box when opened on the other—as our Dave recently found out with an HP gaming PC. Thankfully, the iBuyPower arrived in one piece—or rather two, to be exact.

It showed up at my door in a fairly large cardboard box, which contained the chassis box including the PC and a separate box for the graphics card. That's an important step for any gaming PC in transit: even the lightest modern graphics cards are pretty heavy by historical standards and PCIe slots will happily crunch a PCB left in there.

This means it's up to the customer to install the GPU themselves, which might seem a little daunting if you've bought a pre-built gaming PC to avoid building one yourself—but honestly, it's a pretty simple process. Made even easier by the unavoidable sheet of instructions stuffed inside the PC's tempered glass side panel.

It's a somewhat unconventional graphics card installation in the Hyte case used for this PC—it comes with a vertical GPU mount. That means there's a riser cable and an unusual bracket stuffed in front of the motherboard. The steps to install the card remain the same, however.

Unscrew PCIe slot screws, plug card into PCIe slot, resecure screws, connect power cable, done. My only weariness for the process is the fact that there's potential for someone not that familiar with the melting 12VHPWR connector issue to not secure this GPU cable into the socket correctly.

With the GPU installed, I hit the power button and this PC whizzed to life first time. I headed straight to the BIOS to find it was set-up just how I like it. The generously-sized XPG Lancer Blade 32 GB DDR5 kit is rated to 5,600 MT/s, which is only possible with EXPO settings enabled.

This was already taken care of in the BIOS for me. As was Re-Size Bar support, which allows for more effective communication between CPU and GPU memory.

With everything ready to go, I set about booting into Windows. The initial start-up process has become something of a chore for someone who tests a lot of PCs—I swear they add another thing to say no to every single year—and I set about turning down Microsoft's many wasted offers and attempts to use my data as fast as possible. Next, it's on to testing.

Let's talk performance, then. I have a handful of gaming PCs to hand, including a mini PC of my own creation with an RTX 4070 Super inside it, which makes for an interesting comparison.

From the gaming tests, it's clear we're getting the expected level of performance out of this iBuyPower machine. The desktop tower is often trading blows with the comparative mini PC in games, and it trounces the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i we previously tested with an RTX 4060 inside it. Everything is where you'd expect it to be.

The system benchmarks, which namely push the CPU and SSD performance, are also more or less what we'd expect. They show the 7700X sitting below the 9700X, which makes complete sense, but not by much. The newer 9900X is a moderate improvement on the chip it replaces—AMD saved up the biggest performance uplift for its 3D V-Cache CPUs, namely the 7800X3D and 9800X3D. But those chips come with a cost, and I feel the 7700X is still a savvy pick for value for money.

The iBuyPower does struggle a little more when it comes to cooling. I'm referring mainly to the PNY-made RTX 4070 Super. This is a pretty basic budget model, with two fans and a thin heatsink, which might explain why it ran quite a bit hotter than the Founders Edition in the mini PC of my own design—you really were lucky to get one of those FE models for MSRP. Though the Hyte case on the iBuyPower doesn't offer the most direct airflow to the graphics card—in fact, it almost misses it on purpose—which might also explain why it's a bit on the hotter side.

Still, a maximum GPU temperature of 78°C while gaming is pretty good going. The CPU temperatures are good, too. Though the machine is loud for keeping temperatures in check. I would usually look to knock the fan speeds down a bit in the BIOS to keep the noise to a minimum, but I don't want to increase the idle temperatures any further here. They're already some of the highest we've tested, and up there with the mini PC.

The liquid cooler included for the CPU is a pretty basic model, though it comes with RGB lighting around the pump. Combined with the RAM and lighting across the three fans, I have to admit it's a good-looking machine. The RGB elements are all connected via a single controller on the rear of the motherboard tray, too.

The Hyte case is a highlight. We often see cheap gaming PCs ditching the known brands in favour of cases made with cheaper materials. While it's no pastel pink Y70 and far less refined, this case looks the part of a mid-range gaming PC. Importantly, it's easy to take apart—the panels simply pop off with a light pull.

Cable management is pretty good here. It's much neater than I'd leave it on my own build, anyways. Each cable run is zip-tied down, which means you need to manage the cables all over again should you make any adjustments later down the line. The PSU is non-modular but the spare cables are neatly tucked away under the large shroud—plus a few spare SATA power connectors are easily accessible should you want to swap an older SATA drive in from an old machine.

The PSU is from High Power, a Taiwanese company with manufacturing in Vietnam. That's where this PSU, the HP1-J750GD-F12S, was made. It mostly makes PSUs under other brand names as an OEM manufacturer, hence why it's not that well known in its own right.

However, I was able to dig out some testing by a trusted source, Cybenetics, for another HP1 PSU, which all looks good and doesn't ring any alarm bells. Similarly, High Power manufactures PSUs for Fractal Design and other known brands—that's not to say every unit it pumps out is flawless, but I'm not as worried as I would be if it were a complete no-name brand.

You might want to consider an SSD upgrade pretty sharpish, actually. The 1 TB WD Blue SN580 is a reasonably snappy PCIe 4.0 SSD at 4,150 MB/s, though you could get close to double that from a top-end PCIe 4.0 drive.

I'm not so worried about the speed—clearly, that's not an issue from our SSD benchmarks when it comes to gaming—but 1 TB will get gobbled up fast. The MSI Pro B650-VC WiFi motherboard offers a spare PCIe 4.0 NVMe slot should you need it for an expansion down the line. There's no PCIe 5.0 connectivity on this motherboard, however.

All things considered, the RDY Y40 Valorant VCTA R003 is a very well-rounded gaming PC. It's priced at $1,649, which includes all the aforementioned parts plus a 3-year warranty (3 years labour, 2 years parts) and a gaming keyboard and mouse. Neither 'Chimera' peripheral is winning any awards from me but it's a handy money-saver if you're starting from scratch and want to spend every penny saved on the PC itself.

You'd probably be able to save a couple hundred bucks on a similar gaming PC in the sales if you're savvy. Though I'll bat for iBuyPower's machine here. It uses good parts, in a good chassis, and it's been carefully assembled. If I had ordered it myself, I'd be happy with what turned up for the money. And if you find it on sale, even better.

In fact, I've been there enough to know that actually, it doesn't have to be as daunting as it might at first seem. And I've helped others who have been there enough to know what the most common pitfalls are and what to focus on to get cracking and make a good gaming PC purchasing decision.

Once you approach it systematically by narrowing down your choices bit by bit, it becomes a rather straightforward process. Which is great, because gone are the days of incredibly overpriced builds—the barrier for entering the PC gaming market has never been lower. There are plenty of wonderful gaming PCs at pretty reasonable prices these days. Especially given it's holiday season and there are already some cracking Black Friday gaming PC deals popping up.

If you keep the following tips in mind I think you'll have a much easier time figuring out which PC to go for:

1. Start by choosing a graphics card
2. 16 GB of RAM is fine on a budget, but try to get DDR5
3. Make sure it has an NVMe SSD with 1 TB capacity or more
4. Consider your CPU's general performance and socket upgradeability
5. Remember you can always upgrade later

1. GPU first

1. Start by choosing a graphics card

A gaming PC isn't so much a single product as it is a collection of components, each with its own merits to consider. While this can initially make it a little overwhelming to decide on a PC, all it really means is that you have to narrow down what you want step by step. And the best way to do that is to start with the GPU.

After you've figured out your budget and eliminated options outside of it, start thinking about what graphics card you want in your gaming PC. Provided all the other components are at least passable, a good graphics card will have the most impact on your gaming performance.

We have some new graphics cards approaching in the form of the Nvidia 50-series, codenamed Blackwell, but for now, the RTX 40-series is where it's at for Team Green, and if you opt for an AMD card you should be going for an RX 7000-series one.

You can check out our GPU hierarchy chart to get a quick feel for how all the different graphics cards stack up against each other, and of course, you can check out the full run-down of the best graphics cards, but here's a super basic breakdown.

The RTX 4090 is the best of the best but super expensive. The RTX 4080 Super is the best high-end graphics card that isn't ridiculously expensive, alongside the AMD RX 7900 XTX. These graphics cards are great if you have a 4K monitor and want to make the most of it, or a 1440p one with a high refresh rate.

Below this, we're in mainstream high-end territory, with cards like the RTX 4070 Super and RX 7800 XT. These should be capable of playing modern AAA games at 1440p on max settings, though not at high refresh rates without dropping below max. They're your ideal pick for 1440p monitors with a 165 Hz refresh rate, for example, or for some 4K gaming in all but the most demanding games.

Finally, you get to entry-level territory with the RTX 4060, 4060 Ti, and RX 7600. These should get you by in 1080p and should be capable of handling games at 1440p on medium or medium-high settings. Then there are integrated APU builds for those on a super strict budget, which are more of a stepping-off point for a later GPU upgrade.

If you figure out what kind of performance you'll be happy with, you can pick the graphics card that'll net you that level of performance, filter out all PCs that have graphics cards you don't want, and go from there. Starting by doing this is a great way to narrow down your options.

2. RAM

2. 16 GB of RAM is fine on a budget, but try to get DDR5

It seems like only yesterday that 16 GB of RAM was the gold standard for gaming PCs, but that's no longer true. Today, 32 GB is the gold standard. This, however, has led some to assume that gaming PCs with 16 GB of RAM should be avoided entirely. But this isn't true, either.

16 GB of RAM will bottleneck you in some games, especially if you have a lot going on in the background. But if you close most of your background apps, 16 GB should get you by in most games, and for some games it'll be fine with background apps open, too. It won't be the best RAM in the world, but it'll get you by.

The main reason to opt for 32 GB of RAM is for the peace of mind to know that you could play pretty much anything, at any settings, without memory capacity being a bottleneck. But if you're on a budget, you're probably not expecting to be able to play any game at any settings, so only having 16 GB of RAM shouldn't be catastrophic.

This is because, provided you're not changing RAM generation, RAM is super easy to upgrade and not massively expensive, either. That generational proviso is important, though. If you get a gaming PC with DDR4 memory, your motherboard won't support DDR5 so you won't be able to upgrade to it.

If you're going for something that you might want to upgrade, then, I'd ensure you get a gaming PC that has DDR5 memory. It's not ridiculously faster for gaming, but it's not insignificantly so, either, and it has much more longevity than DDR4.

Of course, if you have the option, a nice, fast DDR5 kit is ideal. 6,000 MT/s is great, but 5,600 MT/s is fine, too.

3. NVMe SSDs

3. Make sure it has an NVMe SSD with 1 TB capacity or more

Most PCs these days come with an NVMe SSD for their storage, but occasionally you'll come across one with an old-school hard drive or SATA SSD, and these you should avoid. They're great for extra mass storage, but not as main system drives.

A few years ago, NVMe drives were nice-to-haves but far from ubiquitous. Plenty of people still rocked SATA SSDs as a primary storage device, and this was fine, even when PCIe NVMe drives started hitting the market. That's primarily because, at the time, NVMe drives were so much more expensive.

These days, however, NVMe drives are as cheap as SATA drives were back then, and they're the de-facto pick. In fact, unless you're cash-happy, it'll almost certainly be a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive that you want, not a 5.0 one. PCIe 5.0 drives right now still aren't really worth the cost for gaming, so don't go paying extra for a gaming PC just because it has a PCIe 5.0 drive.

Also don't underestimate SSD capacity. Yes, you can upgrade it down the line, but you risk running out of space well before you'd like if you only have 512 GB of storage, for instance. Unless you're on a super-strict budget, given game and application install sizes these days, 1 TB capacity is a minimum, and 2 TB or more is ideal.

4. CPUs and sockets

4. Consider your CPU's general performance and socket upgradeability

When you're buying a gaming PC, of course, you're going to care about its gaming performance. But it can be easy to forget all the other things you might use your PC for, things that might require a more powerful CPU.

Budget CPUs such as the Intel Core i5 13400 and the six-core AMD Ryzen 5 7600, although not the best CPUs on the market, are perfectly fine for gaming. However, you might be kicking yourself for not getting better if, for example, you end up doing CPU-intensive work such as encoding further down the line.

Similarly, if budget's no concern and you want something ultra-high-end, you might go for an X3D chip such as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D or 9800X3D, because these will offer the best gaming performance without a doubt. But if you want the absolute best productivity performance, you might be best sacrificing a little gaming performance and going for a high-end Core i9 or Ryzen 9. There are no hard rules, just don't forget to consider performance in areas other than gaming.

Don't forget to think about the CPU and motherboard socket, either. When you're building your own gaming PC you have to consider the motherboard socket to ensure it's compatible with your CPU, but when you're buying a pre-built gaming PC, you don't have to consider compatibility at all. In fact, sockets often aren't even listed in a PC's specifications.

So, if you don't have to worry about compatibility with a pre-built, why care about the socket? The answer is upgradeability. While a gaming PC's socket obviously supports the CPU sitting in it right now, it might not support the CPU you choose to upgrade to down the line.

Right now, what this mostly means is that you should take care when considering a gaming PC with an Intel 13th or 14th Gen CPU, because these are the last generations that fit the LGA 1700 socket, meaning you'll need a new motherboard to upgrade to a new CPU whenever you decide to upgrade, and Intel motherboards can be expensive. AMD 7000-series CPUs, on the other hand, fit the AM5 socket, and this is compatible with a 9000-series upgrade and will be compatible with the generation after that, too.

5. Upgradability

5. Remember you can always upgrade later

There's a lot to think about when it comes to gaming PCs because they're essentially a collection of modular parts. But while this might make things seem a little overwhelming at first—something this guide has hopefully helped with—it's also a massive boon. That's because it means pretty much everything is upgradeable.

What this means practically, if you're buying your first PC, is that you shouldn't worry too much about getting something wrong and being stuck with it forever. There's so much you can upgrade in your computer, from its graphics card to its CPU, memory, motherboard, storage, and plenty more.

There are a few things you need to keep in mind to ensure it'll be easily upgradeable, but I think we've covered those, here.

You want to ensure you get a PC that supports DDR5 memory if you want to be able to upgrade that without switching motherboards. And ditto the socket: AM5's the way to go if you want upgradeability, which means an AMD 7000-series or 9000-series chip.

Intel's 13th and 14th Gen chips use LGA 1700 and so are incompatible with the latest Intel generation, and it's unlikely that the next Intel generation will use the same socket as the current Core Ultra 200S generation.

Apart from those caveats, though, have at it. You're not committing yourself to a never-changing rig. Most people who buy a gaming PC will probably end up upgrading some component or other before long. If you do so and you catch the PC building bug, you might even be in for a ship of Theseus scenario, perpetually rebuilding your gaming PC into eternity. There'll always be a "later", so don't stress it too much.

Yeyian Tanto | Intel Core i5 13400F | RTX 4070 Super | 16 GB DDR5-5600 | 1 TB SSD | $1,599.99 $1,199.99 at Newegg (save $400)
Yeyian has a stellar deal on an RTX 4070 Super machine here. We've seen slightly cheaper versions on sale, but this one at least does have proper DDR5 memory, making the motherboard at least nominally upgradeable to a more modern spec. It does make a bit of an odd combo with the Core i5 here, though for straightforward gaming performance it shouldn't prove any issue and deliver high frame rates.View Deal

November's a difficult time for us PC gamers looking out for our next purchases. We don't want to jump the gun when there could be better deals at the end of the month when Black Friday begins, but we also don't want to risk passing up great offers. I know I'd be facing such a dilemma looking at this build if I were in the market for a new gaming PC right now.

To be clear, we did see an RTX 4070 Super PC go for $100 cheaper than this during October Prime Day. But that was such a good price and such a rarity that it genuinely did flabbergast me. It might return for that price during Black Friday, sure, but there's no way of knowing. And right now, this Yeyian Tanto build for $1,200 at Newegg is pretty damn good.

It's still in a price bracket where most gaming PCs have an RTX 4060 Ti graphics card in them—not even an RTX 4070. And even forgetting about great discounts for a moment, the RTX 4070 Super is arguably the only truly high-end current-gen graphics card that's actually affordable for more than a handful of people.

Throw that inside a fully built rig and slap a discount on that puts it not too far north of $1,000? Yeah, I don't know whether I'd wait for Black Friday.

But that isn't to say there are no downsides to the Tanto. For one, it's only got 16 GB of RAM, and it's not the fastest DDR5 memory on the market. Second, you're looking decidedly at a gaming PC here and little else, because the Core i5 13400F isn't going to get you very far in heavy productivity tasks. Though of course for everyday use it'll be great, and in fact we rate it as the best budget CPU for gaming—it's just that it is a budget chip.

For gaming, though, these sacrifices are well worth it for the discounted cost, as the GPU is what really matters. An RTX 4070 Super gaming PC for $1,200 rings nicely to my ears. There's not much more to it than that.

If this 4070 Super build doesn't hit right for you, though, be sure to check out some more of the best Black Friday gaming PC deals. We'll be keeping this page updated with some of the best gaming PC discounts in the lead-up to Black Friday and beyond.

Unfortunately, there were no official Raspberry Pi PCIe SSD solutions upon release, and while the company eventually released its own M.2 HAT+ (HAT meaning Hardware Attached on Top, and not, like, an actual hat) to allow for SSD connectivity, you still had to go third-party for the SSD. Now, however, Raspberry Pi Ltd has announced (via Tom's Hardware) official SSDs and SSD kits that combine these with the M.2 HAT+.

Earlier in the year when I decided to speed up my Raspberry Pi 5, I opted to use the Pimoroni's NVMe Base to connect a Crucial P3. To connect an SSD you have to use a HAT like the Pimoroni Base—or the official Raspberry Pi one—because the Pi 5 doesn't have an M.2 connector built into the board. It has a PCIe connector that you can use a ribbon cable to connect a HAT to; this way lots of different PCIe devices can be used.

In my review of the Raspberry Pi 5, I pointed out that it's the first Raspberry Pi to be really viable as a desktop PC. Its performance gains over the Pi 4—especially when combined with an active cooler—make it able to handle most everyday desktop use cases.

I even tried gaming on it and was surprised to find it able to run Doom 3 at somewhat playable framerates, admittedly at a very low res. Nothing spectacular compared to, you know, actual gaming PCs and handhelds, but pretty damn impressive for a tiny SBC.

The only problem was, I was running it off a MicroSD. Even fast MicroSDs aren't going to offer stellar load times, and they certainly aren't going to offer data stability. What I needed was an SSD, which is why I went down the Pimoroni + Crucial P3 route.

But that was expensive (for a Raspberry Pi) and involved ensuring I picked exactly the right SSD, because not all gel well with the Pi. Despite now being very happy with the Pimoroni + Crucial combo, if I'd have had access to an official HAT and SSD solution like the kits Raspberry Pi is now offering, I'd have gone for that in a heartbeat.

Note that the new Raspberry Pi SSDs are PCIe 3.0 compatible, too, even though the Pi 5 only officially supports PCIe 2.0. You can unlock 3.0 speeds, however, by edding the Pi's config file and adding "dtparam=pciex1_gen=3" to the bottom. It's a simple way to overclock your Pi 5 + SSD setup.

Raspberry Pi says, "The entry-level 256GB drive is priced at $30 on its own, or $40 as a kit; its 512GB big brother is priced at $45 on its own, or $55 as a kit. Both densities offer minimum 4KB random read and write performance of 40k IOPS and 70k IOPS respectively."

While adding such an SSD to your Raspberry Pi 5 has plenty of other uses, gaming is certainly one of them. Hell, Jeff Geerling recently hooked up an external GPU to one for 4K gaming.

However, if not using it for running Steam on the Raspberry Pi Linux OS, I, for one, would be inclined to use the SSD to house a retro gaming OS such as Retropie or Recalbox. Whichever gaming solution you opt for, there's now an officially licensed way to upgrade your Raspberry Pi 5 to make getting there that much better.

The Geekom A7 R9 lives up to the mini PC moniker, with a compact aluminum chassis that measures in at just 112 x 112 x 37 mm (4.4 x 4.4 x 1.5 inch), yet squeezes in a powerful AMD Ryzen R9 7940HS CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a comfy 2TB NVMe SSD with Windows 11 pre-installed. The system includes Radeon 780M graphics that can drive up to four displays at 4K resolution, or a single display at 8K. It’s also a competent casual gaming machine, and has loads of other features like Wi-Fi 6E, Gigabit Ethernet, an SD card reader and USB ports galore.

Want to know more? Check out the Geekom A7 mini PC review from our colleagues at TechRadar (spoiler: they loved it, awarding it a Highly Recommended badge), or take a deep dive into the hardware over at Anandtech.

The deal above are available until October 31, but Geekom is also getting in ahead of the Black Friday sales and has discounted a wide range of other mini PCs by up to 40%. Find out more at the official Geekom site for your region:

• Geekom US
• Geekom UK
• Geekom AU

Geekom is a PC Gamer preferred partner (What does this mean?)

Medusa

As a lover of mythology this Medusa build by Aftershock PC Australia, immediately grabbed my attention. Its expressive stone-look depiction of Perseus' triumph over the Gorgon is said to be a commentary on AI's inability to grasp the importance of these stories in human culture. I'm not too sure about whether it hits that mark, but it does look really freaking neat.

The imagery isn't the only beastly bit of this build, this PC has the specs to match. The Bykski Granzon B-CE-X Open Frame Chassis packs a Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC 24GB card paired with AMD's excellent Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU. With 3 TB of SSD storage and 32 GB of DDR5 ram, Medusa and Perseus should be the only thing freezing up on this machine. That, of course, is only if you have the cold hard $16,995 AUD (gosh that's an extra digit than I'm used to seeing) to throw down for this legendary rig.

That's the sale price, too. It's usually $18,000.

Alien

First things first. You don't need to worry about the price tag on this one because it was only available to win during the show. This Xenomorph sculpt is to coincide with the release of the new Alien: Romulus movie, as if we needed an excuse for something this cool to exist.

Unsurprisingly, specs wise these PCs are pretty similar. Once again, we see a Bykski Granzon B-CE-X Open Frame Chassis but this time with a Xenomorph alien bursting its way out of the build. Much like Medusa, this ultimate killing machine houses an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D with the Gigabyte RTX 4090 Aorus Master GPU.

Shark

Cooler Master also had some of its more adventurous builds on display, and that included the Shark X. We've covered this killer fish case back at Computex and still hold that it's wicked. This build is the brainchild of Inony from Thailand, back in the 2019 Cooler Master World Mod Series, and now it's available to preorder for $7,000 USD. That's a bit hefty for the Intel Core i7 14700F and Geforce RTX 4070 Ti Super 16G under the fin, but this great white is definitely more about the case.

While photographing this full ARGB monster, I had several people ask me what it was and then not fully believe me when I told them it was a PC until I started pointing out components. I've never seen a Mini-ITX build that managed to be so secret by simply not being discrete at all.

Shoe

Once they got over that, I'd point to the Sneaker X, another wicked case that looks like a bright red shoe a small transformer might wear. This case has been around a bit longer, and is even coming out in new colours, but still managed to turn a lot of heads. You can get this Intel i7 13700K, Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti 12GB for $2,200 USD off the Cooler Master site, but you can also find the case around for cheaper if you've got your own guts.

The rest

While these were some of the most out of pocket builds I found on the floor, there were also plenty of more traditional but very cool gaming PCs. Themed rigs were huge with some taking inspiration from games and fandoms like COD, Monster Hunter, Transformers, and even bubble tea. Others may have been less flashy, rocking a more sensible case with matching RGB lit colour scheme, but often packed seriously powerful hardware. This included PCs running Intel's next gen Arrow Lake chips, and a lot of fully decked out flight and racing sims.

Feel free to peruse this gallery of wild hardware I saw on the show floor, while I eagerly await next years' lineup—probably a bunch more cases inspired by anything and everything other than a PC case.

Enter the Beelink SER9 mini PC, sporting the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370: AMD's top-shelf Strix Point APU. Yep, new chip generation, baffling new chip designation… it's almost like AMD is in competition with Intel not simply for market-share, but to see who can troll consumers the hardest.

At any road, you may be assured that the HX 370 is a step up in performance from AMD's Zen 4 Ryzen 8000-series APUs, and outperforms Intel's Meteor Lake headliner, the Core Ultra 9 185H.

Strix Point also marks an architectural gearshift for AMD. Rather than fielding a bunch of identical cores like previous Ryzen CPUs, it's a dual-cluster design of four Zen 5 cores which run up to 5.1GHz, and eight Zen 5c (compact) cores, which are smaller, more power-efficient, generate less heat, have half the L3 cache, and max out at 3.3GHz. Intel led the way on the big/little philosophy with its 12th Gen CPUs, but this is new ground for AMD.

There's also a heavier focus on AI—the clue's in the name—so the AI 9 HX 370 also sports an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of delivering 50 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, the defining metric for NPUs. Beelink claims this rises to 80 TOPS if the CPU and iGPU cores get in on the action, which far exceeds the 40 TOPS threshold required to qualify for Microsoft's Copilot-branded PC initiative. The SER9 isn't Copilot branded, but there's plenty of poke there to manage useful AI tasks such as voice recognition, smart noise-suppression in calls and such.

Beelink suggests the SER9 is also suitable for text-prompt art-gen models such as stable diffusion; it'll never be as quick as setting a hench GPU loose on the task, but it's a nice-to-have all the same. AI still has bags of untapped potential, but my interest won't be intensively piqued until NPC behaviour and dialogue in games starts getting the Neural Processing treatment.

The SER9 can run the HX 370 in balanced (54W) or performance (65W) modes, and happily I found that switching to the latter makes zero difference to its noise output—it cools the APU effectively and remains extremely quiet even at full tilt. In fact, the only thing that kicked the cooling-fan into overdrive was Forza Motorsport's shader-compiling process, which that particular title seems to want to do every time I blink.

Benchmarking highlights a solid performance uplift over the previous top iGPU, AMD's Radeon 780M. Which is no surprise, as the 890M features 25% more Compute Units, Shader Units and RT cores than the 780M, among other improvements. This makes it capable of knocking out 5.9 TFLOPS to the 780M's 4.3 TFLOPS. So: bigger, better, faster, more, basically.

Gains vary per game, but let's start with the chart-topper. The Radeon 780M in a Ryzen 9 7940HS running at 65W TDP averages around 50 fps in Cyberpunk, at 1080p, medium settings, Frame Gen and FSR set to balanced, which is none too shabby. The 890M in the SER 9 boosts that to a gangbusting 88 fps average at the same settings, with 1% lows remaining above 60 fps. I think that's simply incredible for an iGPU.

Not every game is going to see such a dramatic improvement, but it's still gains all round for the 890M at 1080p and medium settings, when set against the 780M. Warhammer III sees performance hikes of 26% in campaign and 25% in battle, reaching 38 fps and 53 fps respectively. Forza Motorsport sees a 14% uplift to 53 fps, though Homeworld 3's built-in benchmark, which always benefits from greater CPU grunt, only sees a boost of 1 fps, so no change there. The 780M was always happy with indie titles, and the 890M even more so; I threw Stray and Subnautica its way and it returned averages of 68 fps and 82 fps respectively. So it's all good news. In a nutshell, the Radeon 890M is the new king of the iGPU hill.

So how about the rest of the SER9 package? RAM-wise it packs 32 GB of LPDDR5-7500, and it's quick off the mark. Benchmarked against 32 GB of 5600MHz desktop DDR5 using MaxxMem, it has only 6% higher read-speeds, but outperforms the desktop RAM with 22% faster copy speeds and a massive 77% uptick in write speeds. Given the Radeon 890M ringfences a block of this to use as VRAM, it's undoubtedly a contributor to the system's gaming performance.

The downside is that it's soldered onto the motherboard Macbook-style, and Beelink only sells a 32 GB configuration of the SER9. If you're happy with 32 GB for life—which I imagine is true for most people—then great. But if your use-case demands 64GB or more then you're outta luck, as the RAM cannot be replaced or increased.

IO-wise, you get a 10 Gbps USB-C and a single Type-A up front, plus a 40 Gbps USB4 and another three Type-A ports round the back. There's a choice of DisplayPort 1.4 or HDMI 2.1, networking is handled by a WiFi 6 / Bluetooth 5.2 M.2 card or 2.5G LAN, and you also get a quad-microphone array, front and rear audio jacks, and a tiny pair of rudimentary built-in speakers. Release the screws on the underside to pop it open and you'll find a steel-mesh dust filter, plus a heavy-duty SSD cooler-block covering both M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots. So while the memory isn't upgradeable, you can at least bump up the storage with an extra M.2 drive.

In summary, It's a tidy, super-compact, all-aluminium affair, and whisper-quiet under load. It's pretty well-appointed in IO, and is hands-down the best mini-PC we've tested for 1080p gaming, short of a machine with a discrete GPU such as Minisforum's G7 PT. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Radeon 890M are a killer combo, which you pay for at the checkout; at $999/£761, it's not a cheap mini-PC. But if you want the best possible pixel-pusher in the tiniest form-factor available, the SER9 is the one to beat.

I keep glancing at it from different angles, trying to get a handle on its form. It presents a mass of shapes; a sort of grey, brutalist edifice of steps, blocks and ledges. If you plonked it down in the centre of East Berlin circa1955 and hung a ‘STASI HEADQUARTERS' sign on the front, passers-by wouldn't bat an eyelid.

The east-wing of this little military-industrial complex is the Beelink GTi 12 itself, a mini-PC driven by Intel's i9-12900H. It's an Alder Lake APU; a few generations old now, but still solid, delivering 5 GHz turbo speeds at a max draw of 65 W across six performance cores and eight efficiency cores. Set against Intel's 13^th and 14^th-gen ride-or-die watt-gobblers, it's a sensible and dependable choice of chip for a mini-PC.

It comes with the Iris Xe iGPU (Eww, gross I know, but don't worry you won't be using it), 32 GB of 4800 MHz DDR5 (the 12900H's RAM-speed ceiling), and a demonstrably swift 1 TB M.2 SSD.

Its chassis is on the larger side as these things go, but the internal space has been utilised well, particularly in the cooling department. Pushing all cores to the max with Prime95 it remains whisper-quiet, quaffing a reasonable 65 W and sitting snug at 76 °C. Pop the lid and you'll also find a pair of tiny speakers; hardly hi-fi, but they're able and clear enough for system sounds, video calls, and the odd YouTube delidding tutorial. There's also an internal PSU, which adds girth but negates the need for the usual external power-brick.

What really sets the GTi 12 apart from other mini-PCs is hidden beneath a little silicone flap on its underbelly: a full-length, eight-lane PCI Express 4.0 slot. Physically identical to the one you see in any desktop PC, but with eight PCIe lanes rather than 16.

This slot enables the GTi 12 to park neatly onto the EX's Docking Station's side-mounted x8 PCIe terminal, forging a direct connection to the dock's full-length GPU slot. That interface will take any single or dual-slot graphics card, granting it double the PCIe 4.0 bandwidth of a Thunderbolt or OCuLink dock. The GPU is powered by a silent, super-compact 600 W PSU inside the dock, using the twin 8-pin power cables included in the kit. The GTi 12 still relies on its own internal PSU while docked, so both units need plugging into the wall.

Opening the dock reveals an M.2 SSD mount for storage expansion, which can be swapped out for the optional M.2 wireless-card mount in the kit's accessories. The outer edge of the dock sports two screw-in WiFi antenna ports for better signal reception, so if you feel the GTi 12's internal aerial isn't cutting the mustard in your WiFi situation, you can remove its wireless card, stick it in the dock, and screw in a couple of antennae for a reception buff. These aren't included but they're two-a-penny online.

600 watts of dedicated GPU power then. That's ample juice for a fatty boombatty, though the dock physically limits you to a two-slot card. Obviously I felt compelled to tinker, and Beelink's website plainly states that a 4090 is compatible, so I unbolted the three-slot backplate from our Founder's Edition RTX 4090 and plugged it in. NVIDIA urges customers to use a three-into-one 12vHPWR converter for this GPU, but with only two PCIe power-sockets available from the PSU, I tried a two-into-one 12vHPWR converter. Alas, no dice: it wouldn't power the on, though I understand others have had better luck using OEM RTX 4090s in the EX dock. It's all academic anyhow; with no backplate to secure the GPU to the dock's vertical standoff, the only thing holding FIVE FRICKING KILOGRAMS of RTX 4090 in place is the PCB of its PCIe interface. Cue clenching panic and hasty removal.

I swapped in a dual-slot RTX 4070 Ti and up it perked, all guns blazing. Benchmarking the GTi 12 with this GPU against a Ryzen 9 7900 desktop system with the same card, it's immediately apparent that the eight-lane PCIe 4.0 interface grants ample data-bandwidth for the RTX 4070 Ti to work at full tilt. It achieves near-parity performance with our PCIe 16-lane desktop machine, lagging by only a few frames per second, and that's likely down to the performance differential between the i9-12900H and the faster, newer, higher-TDP, more core-laden Ryzen 9.

Whether the EX Dock's x8 slot has enough bandwidth to allow, say, a dual-slot RTX 4080 Super to work to its full potential cannot be confirmed without testing—I didn't have one on hand—but I suspect it'd be fine. I've seen a 4090 benchmarked in a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot—the same overall bandwidth as a PCIe 4.0 X8 slot—and the drop in performance versus an x16 PCIe 4.0 slot was only around 3%. So I suspect a 4080 would thrive over eight PCIe 4.0 lanes. What I can state with assurance is that the 4070 Ti transforms the humble GTi 12 into a 1440p gaming powerhouse.

For this price, you'd be very hard-pressed to find an off-the-peg machine with anything better than a middling Core i5 and an RTX 4060 Ti, and certainly nothing this compact and quiet. As for where it sits in the mini-PC performance pantheon, arming the GTi 12 with a 4070 Ti delivers massively better 1440p gaming performance than the Asus ROG NUC—one of the most expensive and performant mini-PCs we've tested—for a significantly smaller tax on your personal treasury.

And suddenly, the answer to my original question—who is this hardware package really aimed at?—becomes crystal clear: anyone who wants a fast 1440p gaming PC on a budget. It's really that simple. We can talk about the portability of mini-PCs for work or study purposes, but that seems like a slim use-case to me when laptops offer way more convenience. It's an option certainly, but really this thing excels at being a gaming desktop.

So what are the downsides? The aesthetics, conceivably; while I rather delight in its batshit Bauhaus blockiness—form following function and all that—but your mileage may well vary. As far as eGPU-style setups go, it's by far the tidiest one out there, but there's still some cabling on show. I'd hit up a custom cable maker to cut me a short, dual-PCIe-to-12vHPWR cable in grey, and opt for a colour-coordinating Founders Edition card; that'd look bang-tidy. Plus, while the GTi 12 and the dock's PSU are blissfully quiet, an uncaged GPU may not sound so affable. That's an easy fix with MSI afterburner, to be fair—undervolting and custom fan-curves for the win—but worth bearing in mind.

Beyond extra storage, upgradability of the mini-PC is off the table. The bundle can be configured with one of Beelink's GTi 14 Ultra units instead, which sport Intel's newer Core Ultra 7 155H or Core Ultra 9 185H CPUs and DDR5-5600, but these will nudge the cost north by up to a couple of hundred bucks. I'm not convinced either will grant a really meaningful fps uplift over the GTi 12's Core i9 12900H when paired with same GPU.

Will Beelink continue to launch PCIe slot-bearing GTi units, enabling you to replace the GTi 12 with something significantly more powerful in the future? Who can say. Not I, certainly. But what I can say, for the here and now, is that £551/$738 is awesome value for the basis of a great 1440p games machine. And that makes the GTi 12 and EX Dock bundle incredibly easy to recommend.

If you like the idea of a small form-factor PC but balk at the build, then observe the Zbox Magnus One from Zotac. With its roster of performant desktop parts, it's essentially an off-the-peg SFF PC. Regarding the form factor, it ticks two of my three boxes: it looks great, and it runs games fantastically in a compact, sub-10-liter chassis. The third is quiet operation, which is where the Magnus One stumbles, but we'll come to that in due course.

There's a lean simplicity to the Magnus One's case design which I find very attractive, achieved through the use of honeycomb panels and a minimalist front fascia. It comes in black or white, and I have to say the white sample I had in for testing was most handsome; it'd make a fine centrepiece for an uncluttered desktop with matching white peripherals. 

Plus, those honeycomb panels are lined with dust-catching steel mesh too so keeping it spotless over time should involve little more than popping the panels off and blasting out the accumulated dander. 

Accessing the innards is a cinch. Two silicone-clad thumbscrews at the rear release the top panel, along with its two attached 92 mm case-fans and the connected rear fascia. This frees the whole arrangement to slide off as one unit, then it's just a case of popping the side panels up and out. Thus de-robed, the Magnus One's components are laid bare for additions and upgrades, with the sole exception of the flex-style PSU, which dwells in the basement and requires some more intricate lockpicking to access.

And what a solid array of components it is. On the right-hand side of the sandwich-style internal structure is the motherboard, with a full-fat desktop i7 13700 conducting the orchestra. With eight Performance cores, eight Efficient cores and a max turbo-speed of 5.2 GHz, it's an excellent gaming CPU. On the other side of the central divide is a dual-slot, vertically-mounted RTX 4070—a Zotac model, naturally—with 12 GB of GDDR6X RAM. Together, these core compute components promise punchy performance at 1440p (2560X1440) and, at a stretch, 1440p Ultrawide (3440x1440). It's a capable GPU, but not one that is apt to drive a 4K panel, so fair warning.

The unit ships barebones so you'll need to bring your own RAM and storage (or purchase the Magnus One from a retailer with a configurator and have them preinstalled) but that's fine by us; going barebones and bargain-hunting for your own extras is always the better option, and I love that Zotac supports this. The motherboard will take up to 64 GB of DDR5-5600 in SODIMM form-factor, and two M.2 PCIe Gen 4x4 SSDs plus a SATA drive as well. There's also a preinstalled Killer wireless M.2 card in the mix, which nets you WiFi 6 speeds plus Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity. All in all, a rock-solid spec-sheet.

The external IO pulls its weight too. Upfront you get a card reader, 3.5 mm combined audio jack, a Type-A USB 3.1 port and a Type-C Thunderbolt 4 port. Round the back, we find two USB 3.0 and four USB 3.1 ports, 1G and 2.5G LAN ports, another Thunderbolt socket, plus DP 1.4 and HDMI 2.1. Though really, you won't be needing these last two as the included RTX 4070's HDMI 2.1a or DP 1.4a ports are where you'll be connecting that high refresh-rate monitor.

We tested the Magnus One at 1080p and 1440p, the latter resolution being the ideal hunting-ground for midrange GPUs such as the RTX 4070. At 2560x1440, with ultra settings, DLSS, Frame Gen and Ray Tracing in those games which offer it, this machine performs exactly as you might expect given the strong CPU/GPU double-act.

Total War: Warhammer 3 is slick as you like, seeing 91 fps in battle and 89 fps in campaign, while Forza comfortably breaks the 100 fps mark with full ray tracing. As does Cyberpunk, making 109 fps , though if you're not bothered about ray-tracing, turning it off bumps the score up to 142 fps. 

In other graphically-intensive titles without built-in benchmarks, we eyeballed some stellar frame rate ranges at 1440p/ultra settings, with DLSS set to balanced and Frame Gen on where applicable. Helldivers 2 gets a rock-solid 91-97 fps, Dead Space makes between 130-160 fps in the final boss battle, and A Plague Tale: Requiem's visually delightful (and conceptually harrowing) Hives level sees the Magnus One sitting pretty in a buttery-smooth 140-160 fps range.

So, it's great news on the performance front. But there's a price to be paid under gaming workloads, and it's your ears which foot the bill. There's no getting around it: The Zotac Magnus One's various cooling components generate quite a lot of noise.

The primary offender is the CPU cooler. It's a low-profile unit, and rather than the usual cooling-block-with-top-mounted-fan arrangement, the fan is sunk within the cylindrical body of the cooling-fin array. While this saves on vertical space, it generates a great deal of audible turbulence, and every RPM-change can be divined as the fan steps constantly up and down in response to CPU heat levels. It's pretty lairy, to the point where I'd want the machine under my desk rather than on it, and that would be a travesty as front-and-centre is where the svelte Magnus One deserves to be. 

The case fans are next in line. They're pretty basic 92 mm models, and again very audible, being flush against the top panel of the case. The GPU fans are perhaps the least offensive, though they still noticeably add to the audio mix under load.

In an attempt to ameliorate the din, I installed Fan Control to tinker with custom fan curves and find a temperature-versus-noise sweet spot, but the app only detects the GPU fans, not the CPU or case fans. So, no dice. A scoot round the BIOS then revealed fan-stepping controls for both, and I found that capping the CPU and case fans at 50% of their max RPM made a big difference to the machine's audible volume, though they left the i7 13700 hovering around 91 °C under gaming loads. Still far from silent, and warmer than I'd ideally like for such a monster of a chip, but certainly less distracting. 

I'm a stickler for quiet computing, so out of the box, I find the Magnus One a bit intrusive. Alongside performance and cooling, I do wish more PC manufacturers would make noise-reduction a third pillar of their technical design philosophy. These three variables exist in elastic tension with one another, but with the right component choices, a good balance in all three is achievable. In a perfect world, the Magnus One's public behaviour would match its elegant looks. But I strongly suspect that with an inexpensive CPU cooler upgrade, plus some adventures in undervolting and fan-curve tweaking, you could tutor the beast to behave in polite society.

The CPU cooler is 40 mm in height, and there's a further 8 mm to play with until you hit the side panel. This grants space enough to install one of the better low-profile coolers on the market, such as ID Cooling's IS-47 XT (47 mm), Noctua's NH-L9I (37 mm) or the Be Quiet! Pure Rock LP (46 mm). We didn't have these on hand to test unfortunately, but replacing the stock cooler would absolutely be my first port of call, followed in short order by swapping out the two top-mounted case fans for a pair of quiet Noctua NF-A9s or similar.

Undervolting should also be a serious consideration with the Magnus One. The i7 13700 in our test unit peaked—if not for long—at 145 W as we kicked off the Cinebench24 multicore render test, and that kind of wattage places a terrible heat-burden on low-profile coolers, most of which are rated for lower TDPs. Like it or not, there are some compromises you simply must make in SFF systems, and one of the primary ones is in your choice of CPU.

In my humble opinion, there are more suitable processors for small form-factor builds than the 13th-gen desktop i7, with much lower max TDP ratings. For the Fractal Terra, I plumped for the 12-core, 24-thread, 5.4GHz AMD Ryzen 9 7900, which taps out at just 88 W. Using a low-profile cooler, with the fan-curve rigged for silent running, it's actually pretty easy to keep this chip in the 70 °C range under gaming loads with nary a peep from of the cooler.

Likewise, most GPUs benefit from a tiny undervolt using MSI Afterburner. For a minimal performance reduction—and possibly a gain, depending on the card—the reduced heat generation means you can tweak the fan curve in MSI Afterburner to run at a lower RPM under full load and eliminate a good deal of noise. I daresay the RTX 4070 in the Magnus One is a prime candidate for this procedure.

Of course, we all have differing tolerance levels for noise. If you're a full-time headset user, you may not be quite so bothered, and playing with fan settings in the BIOS can certainly improve matters. Otherwise, there's no denying that the Magnus One is an aesthetically appealing machine that will get you ATX-grade frame rates at 1440p, and does so in a physical volume which can only be matched by a complicated, ground-up SFF build.

The Cooler Master Shark X is a $7,000 PC that (you will never believe this) looks like a shark. It is currently available to order from the Cooler Master website and will be shipping out later this year. With a brilliant white design, the shark is positioned upward, as if swimming to the top of the sea—coming in at a might 89.4 cm tall.  

If you're curious what kind of performance you can expect out of a machine like this, the Shark X comes with an Intel Core i7 14700F CPU, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super GPU, 64 GB of DDR5 RAM, and 2 TB of M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage. This all to say it's a very capable gaming rig that should also function as a productivity device very well too. 

However, as you might expect, you are paying a few thousand dollars extra for the shark element of this rig, as this similarly specced machine at $2,500 shows (and hey this one's on sale too!). Notably, though, this comparable machine has less RAM, but its chip is a little better and comes with significantly more storage. If you've clicked in to see the shark computer, you have to accept that paying much more for the rig just comes with the territory for these kinds of builds. They are a work of art, as much as they are a machine. And this work of art supports a good cause. 

The Shark X is part of a "Blue Initiative Program", where packaging is made from recycled seashell foam and the machine utilizes "eco-friendly materials". Though the webpage doesn't say exactly how it does this, it says this initiative will "actively support and collaborate with dedicated organizations", by supporting "research, conservation projects and initiatives". 

Strangely, when talking about where this design comes from, the Cooler Master website says it was designed by Inony from Thailand, but then says it was "Inspired by the remarkable evolution of artificial intelligence
as it reaches its peak". I don't know if I got much more out of this than "sharks are pretty cool" but inspiration can come from anywhere, I guess. 

The next step up is augmenting the iGPU with a discrete laptop GPU, and you'll find two such machines in this guide. 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 overall. On the cheaper side, however, the Minisforum Venus UM970 Pro gets the nod as the best budget mini PC thanks to its combination of a fantastic APU and very competitive pricing.

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-shelf 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 your PC 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 Asus ROG NUC 970.

Processing duties are handled by the Ryzen 9 7945HX. Running at a default TDP of just 65 W and featuring 16 cores, 32 threads and a turbo-clock speed of 5.4 GHz, it's a bit of a monster. 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 more in productivity tasks, less so in gaming.

You might think this compelling combo of components would make the G7 PT screechingly 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, 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 its heart 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 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.

There's a range of price options available, 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 1 TB 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 overall though, as 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 best budget 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 expect it to be anything close to cheap. Still, we 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 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 4,608 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 and pushing the ROG NUC's capabilities into genuine 1440p territory.

It also handles ray tracing well, and as an RTX 40-series RTX GPU, it benefits from DLSS 3 and Frame generation 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 MSRP. 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 11.1 x 11.7 x 3.8 cm, and housed in a cool, light-blue aluminium chassis, it's crisp and visually appealing. It also 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 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.

Still, 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!” That makes it the best-looking mini PC, by virtue of...well, just look at it!

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 the 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 main 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 are 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.

The best iGPU mini PC

If small, svelte, and equipped with a powerful iGPU are your goals for a mini PC, you'll want to check out what Beelink has done with the SER9. It makes use of a brand spanking new Strix Point APU, and it's a bit of a barnstormer in this configuration.

The APU in question is the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. With 12 cores total (four running at up to 5.1 GHz, and eight compact cores running at 3.3 GHz for efficiency), it's a powerful processor in its own right. But it's the iGPU we're really interested in here, and the Radeon 890M handily beats the previous top iGPU, the Radeon 780M, by a considerable margin.

It really should do, to be honest. It's got 25% more Compute Units, RT Cores and Shader Units compared to its ageing sibling, meaning that as iGPUs go, it's a truly top performer. Cyberpunk 2077 saw the biggest increase in our testing, delivering 88 frames per second at medium settings with Frame Gen and FSR on balanced at 1080p.

While you'll still need to lean on the upscaling goodies to get high frame rates in very demanding games, that's the best performance we've seen out of an iGPU to date. Not only that, but the little Beelink has some other tricks up its sleeve that make it a highly desirable machine.

For a start, it's virtually silent for most of the time, even when it's under heavy load. We managed to kick its fans into high gear only once in our testing, which is darned impressive given the loads we were putting it under.

32 GB of LPDDR5-7500 handles the RAM duties here, and that's plenty. Just as well, really, as it's soldered to the board. In fact, the only thing upgradeable here is the SSD, so those looking for something with plenty of upgrade potential will be disappointed. Still, there's an extra M2 slot, so you can whack up to 8 TB of storage split over two drives in this mini marvel without issue.

It's also a beautifully svelte design, with an all-aluminium chassis that wouldn't look out of place next to your TV, on a minimalist desk, or in the office. That frame is stacked with ports as well, with a USB Type-C and Type-A connection on the front and three more Type-A connections around the back. You also get DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, a built-in WiFi 6 connection and Bluetooth 5.2. Oh, and of course there's a 2.5G LAN option as well, for a proper no-nonsense wired option.

Unsurprisingly, given the hardware on offer here, it's not cheap at $999/£761. But if what you desire is an iGPU that can truly deliver, the Beelink SER9 is the absolute top pick.

Read our full Beelink SER9 review.

Also tested

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 also test additional PC games, such as Helldivers 2, Dead Space, Plague Tale: Requiem, and Doom Eternal, to get a broader view of the mini-PC's gaming capability.

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 measure the temperature and power draw of each unit and perform more subjective acoustic testing as well.

FAQ

When you think of a modern gaming PC you probably think of a tower unit, with a side window and all sorts of glaring RGB. However, gaming PCs in the '90s were a lot different. Back then you got a beige box of a monitor, sitting on top of a beige box of a desktop unit, and you were grateful for it.

This 3D printed miniature gaming PC gives me such a wave of nostalgia for those halcyon days, I can almost smell the plastic casing. I mean, just look at it. Those rounded lines. The weeny little lights. The miniature CD ROM/floppy drive combo. THOSE DECALS! It's my childhood distilled down to its tiniest form.

YouTuber Salim Benbouziyane set out to create a working miniature version of the ultimate '90s computer, after feeling a similar rush of nostalgia for the good old days of PCs (via Yanko Design). Unsurprisingly, under the hood is a Raspberry Pi 4 like many other miniature projects, but after that everything becomes a lot more custom.

For the screen, Benbouziyane picked a square 720 x 724 Waveshare panel, and masked the top and bottom to provide a 4:3 aspect ratio. For the light indicators, rather than simply installing a set of modern LEDs, light pipes were used to create an appropriately nostalgic glow. There's also a miniature working power button, and an SD card reader where the media drives would normally be. This required designing a custom PCB add-on for the Raspberry Pi.

The 3D printed chassis was hand sanded to create those smooth, rounded lines, and air-brushed with a custom colour to create the appropriate shade of off-white/beige. I'd highly recommend watching the full video above, as the level of attention to detail is simply staggering. Far from being a simple mock-up, Benbouziyane has gone to town on every detail possible to create something that not only looks like the cutest PC you'll ever see, but gets all the historical details right for ultimate accuracy.

There's even been the odd happy accident. The monitor wobbles on top of the chassis, which Benbouziyane characterises as a "sloppy joint", but to my mind it actually increases the accuracy. Shifting around an old desktop with a CRT on top would absolutely cause the monitor to wobble around. They were solid old beasts, '90s rigs, but the odd wobble and creak was part of the experience.

The end result, thanks to those Raspberry Pi internals and a huge dose of creative engineering, is magnificent. While it looks like it's running Windows XP, it's actually running a skinned version of Twister OS—but the PC has no issues blasting through a bit of OG Doom, Prince of Persia, or even those great bastions of my broke early gaming years, Solitaire and 3D Pinball.

Ah, nostalgia. It's a heady thing, and just looking at this miniature marvel makes me want to slap together a '90s rig of my own for the sheer joy of the experience. I don't possess the skills to make it this small, of course, but I reckon a spot of original Doom on a rig like this might bring a mist to my eyes. A tiny tear, if you will.

I'm not kidding, the AX8 Pro is an absolute marvel of miniaturisation. Measuring just 11.1cm x 11.7cm x 3.8cm, it's the most compact mini-PC we've tested by some margin, And within this tiny frame is housed one of the latest and best AMD APUs. 

Featuring eight cores and sixteen threads, the Ryzen 9 8945HS is a great little chip. In stress-testing, we saw it draw a peak of 65 W, boosting from its base clock speed of 4 GHz to a healthy 5.2 GHz, with a peak operating temperature of 92 °C under sustained loads. That might feel a bit on the balmy side, but it's still eight degrees short of the CPU's 100 °C TJMax rating, the point at which throttling kicks in.

Paired with this fine silicon is the Radeon 780M iGPU, aka RDNA 3, and this is probably the last generation of chips we'll see it in. AMD's upcoming, AI-branded Zen 5 mobile APUs will feature a Radeon 890M GPU with RDNA 3.5, and our Zen 5 laptop testing so far shows how strong that is. But until they hit the mainstream, the Radeon 780M is still the most reliably performant iGPU around, bettered only by the leap in performance—and commensurate cost—of adding a discrete mobile GPU into the mix, which we see in the likes of the ASUS ROG NUC.

What this all adds up to is a powerful, do-it-all mini-PC, a machine you can use equally for work and pleasure, with desktop-chasing productivity chops and muscle enough to run most games well at 1080p. A lot of its gaming performance hinges on that Radeon 780M, so it's no surprise to find it trades blows with previous-gen APUs equipped with the same iGPU, such as the Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 9 7940HS, and on the Intel side, the Arc-wielding Core 9 Ultra 185H.

Indie and older games are where the 780M shines and there's oodles of fun to be had at 1080p with medium graphics settings. In our testing we found Subnautica running nice and smooth at 55-75 fps, Stray at a similarly svelte 52-75 fps, Soulstone Survivors between 80 and 120 fps, and Doom Eternal at a gore-slick 70-80 fps. 

Moving to more modern and demanding AAA titles at 1080p, using medium detail settings and FSR set to auto where the engine proffers it, the AX8 Pro holds its own against those aforementioned peers, and sometimes exceeds them, but never pulls ahead by more than a nose. It puts in a solid showing with Total War: WARHAMMER 3's battle and campaign benchmarks, achieving 42 fps and 33 fps respectively. Forza gets you an unflinching 46 fps. Homeworld 3's tough benchmark sees an average of 39 fps, while Cyberpunk 2077 enjoys a healthy 51 fps.

Under heavy loads, the AX8 Pro's cooling solution gets a bit blowy, but it's the sound of air being pressed through fan-grills; there's none of the whistling whine so common with small, high-RPM fans. You're hearing the airflow generated by the mechanism, not the mechanism itself, and while it's initially quite noticeable, it's a sound you can mostly zone out. There are quieter mini PCs out there, but this thing is so compact, I'm genuinely staggered that it doesn't sound like a Lilliputian Airbus.   

Some furtive noodling around the BIOS reveals three fan modes which you can switch between to alter the cooling and sound profiles. Shifting between Quiet, Normal, and Performance modes does indeed alter the max fan speed and associated volume, but in testing we discovered that it also alters the TDP, with the fan curve shifting to match lesser or greater wattage limits and their adjuvant heat generation, so the label ‘fan mode' doesn't quite paint the full picture.

Running Prime95 to stress the chip and using HWInfo64 to measure the changes, Silent mode saw the CPU draw 51 W to hit a max turbo speed of 5.1 GHz and a max temp of 83 Celsius. Normal mode draws 59 W, which gets you 5.1 GHz at 89 °C, and Performance mode pulls 65 W to hit the CPU's max clock speed of 5.2 GHz and pushes the temperature to 92 °C. Our shrink-wrapped AX8 Pro retail sample was set to Performance out of the box, so all the benchmarks above were conducted in this mode. 

TDP changes can affect performance of course, so our final test was to rerun Cyberpunk's benchmark in all three modes and note the performance changes between the different wattages. In Quiet mode (51 W), the game saw an average of 48 fps, and the fan remained very quiet. In Normal mode (59 W), the game achieved 51 fps, and the raised fan speed was more audible, but level and ignorable. In Performance mode (65 W), it performed no better than Normal, achieving the same 51 fps in Cyberpunk but noticeably hiking the fan-noise to a prominent level. Other games may or may benefit more from the jump up to 65 W, but if so, it's hard to imagine a significant level of uptick. Our recommendation would be to drop the fan mode to Normal and leave it there.    

In performance terms, the average frame rates achieved by the AX8 Pro are what we've come to expect from mini-PCs running games on the Radeon 780M at 1080p. Assuming any Ryzen APU paired with the 780M isn't run at an undercooked wattage, it makes for a fairly level playing field between such chips and devices in terms of games performance. There's no denying that the AX8 Pro's Ryzen 9 8945HS enables it to achieve higher frame rates than its peers in some titles, but incrementally so. And that's no surprise as, on paper, AMD's 7th-gen and 8th-gen Ryzen 9 mobile APUs appear identical. 

Both the 7940HS and 8945HS boast eight cores, achieve a turbo clock speed of 5.2 GHz, they both have the same L1, L2 and L3 cache sizes, they're rated by AMD to run at the same 45-54 W TDP, and they both lean on the Radeon 780M for gaming. Same transistor count, same everything, as far as I can glean from AMD's spec-sheets, which read like a cut-and-paste job. Geekom's implementation here, which pushes the CPU to operate above its stated TDP-rating of 54 W, is most likely what gives it that minimal performance edge. But the fact remains, you're paying a huge premium here for a slightly newer CPU which is effectively a rebadge of the previous generation, and in most titles there's no performance difference at all.

One of the attractions of mini-PCs is the fact that they grant snappy general-computing and 1080p gaming power on a budget, and the AX8 Pro is objectively not a bargain compared to the prices of its competing stablemates. Plus, Zen 5 APUs which wield the new RDNA3.5 iGPU, aka the Radeon 890M, are beginning to trickle into devices.  The talented Mr. Ridley found that even in a lower-wattage notebook scenario, the Radeon 890M grants a tangible performance uplift over the 780M. It's going to be interesting to see if that performance is further improved at the kind of TDP levels offered by boxes like the AX8 Pro. So if you're thinking of dropping this amount of money on a top-end mini-PC, it might pay to wait just a little longer.

If you want the smallest PC on the planet with a highly performant APU, the Geekom AX8 Pro is just that. But be aware that you can spend considerably less and achieve near-identical results.

What this translates to is 16 cores, 32 execution-threads and a max turbo clock speed of 5.4GHz. AMD rates this little hellion to run at 45-75 W, but apparently, that isn't quite enough for Minisforum. Set to Performance Mode, the AtomMan G7 PT shovels a hefty 85 W into the 7945HX. 

Does that make sense in a mini-PC? Those sorts of figures would send any self-respecting laptop manufacturer running for the hills, wailing "kill the TDP! Kill it or WE'RE ALL DOOOOMED!" But the AtomMan G7 PT is a desktop machine, so mobility isn't a factor. It has its own 300 W external PSU, there's no battery to run down, and the chip gets Minisforum's proprietary, NASA-grade cooling to keep it in line. So why the hell not, I guess? 

Running in tandem is AMD's Radeon RX 7600M XT, a discrete RDNA3 mobile GPU most commonly found improving frame rates in notebooks and portable eGPU boxes such as the OneXGPU. It features 2048 shader units, 32 CUs, an aggregated memory bus of 128-bit, clocks up to 2600 MHz and comes with 8 GB of dedicated GDDR6 VRAM. It's a solid step-up from its predecessor, the RX 6600M, and a major leap from the Radeon 780M iGPU, which many APU-driven micro-machines lean on for gaming. However, it can't quite match the wellie of the mobile RTX 4070, which we see powering other offerings in this discrete-GPU-packing branch of the mini-PC family tree.

From the outside, the AtomMan G7 PT is roughly the length and volume of a couple of Steam Decks smooshed face-to-face. It ships with a vertical stand, which you should definitely use as the cooling fans sit beneath each of the side-panels—laying it flat will almost certainly leave it gasping for breath. The stand itself is strongly magnetised, and the machine connects to it with a snug and physically satisfying snap. In its natural tower orientation, the G7 PT's desktop footprint is very modest.

Attached to the underside of the right-hand case panel you'll find a shine-through sheet, which is positioned above a pair of large square LEDs mounted in the main body. This arrangement serves to illuminate the logo for Legend of Asaku, a popular Taiwanese entertainment IP, when the machine is powered on. Being unfamiliar with the series—and if I'm honest, becoming somewhat distracted by the constant colour-switching—I was happy to find an LED toggle in the BIOS. 

It's on or off though, there are no other LED customisation options which is a shame. The logo sheet is removable, and I imagine you could supply its dimensions, plus an image of your choice, to an online etching service and have your own panel-art made up if you're so inclined.

The rest of the spec sheet is great. It supports two M.2 drives (one PCIe 5 and one PCIe 4), is Wi-Fi7 and Bluetooth 5.3 compliant, and can take up to 96 GB of DDR5-5200 in the SODIMM format. For video output at the rear, you get HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.0, and a USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C socket, which can also be used for charging and data transfer. Below this are three USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A sockets, a 2.5G LAN port, and separate 3.5mm audio and mic jacks. Up front, you get another USB-C, another USB 3.2 Type-A, a 3.5mm combo jack for audio, and a performance mode button, which toggles the 7945HX and its attendant cooling solution between two TDP presets.

In the default Balanced mode, the machine runs the CPU at a TDP of 65 W. Tapping the button instantly bumps this to the 85 W Performance mode, no restart required. Naturally this comes with a rise in heat generation and fan activity. It basically goes from near-silent at 65 W to a bit windy—though with no coil-whine—at 85 W. Like the AtomMan X7 Ti, Minisforum's Cold Wave phase-change cooling tech once again proves its worth by keeping fan noise to a minimum, while completely taming the heat generation of a high-TDP mobile chip. During our Cinebench multicore test, 65 W saw the 16-core 7945HX chilling at 69 °C. Hiking the TDP to 85 W nudged the temperature up to just 83 °C. 

But what does that extra 20 W get you performance-wise? Actually very little in gaming terms, as our benchmarks show. More CPU-dependent titles will see a rise in frame rates—remarkably so in Homeworld 3's case—but for the vast majority of games, there's no difference at all between the two modes. With so much CPU power on tap even at 65 W, gaming frame rates are almost exclusively GPU-bound. So our advice is to leave it in Balanced mode for gaming. It's so quiet you'll forget it's even there. 

CPU-intensive productivity workloads are where you'll see benefits at 85 W. In the likes of Cinebench and Blender, the 7945HX beats all the other APU-driven mini-PCs we've tested—even those armed with the likes of the Ryzen 9 8945HS and the Intel Core ultra 9 185H—into a cocked hat. It even outperforms my desktop Ryzen 9 7900, for Pete's sake. This makes it a great machine for video rendering and other similarly intensive tasks.

Gaming, then, is largely contingent on the RX 7600M XT—a tiny GPU that excels at 1080p and can hold its own at 1440p, provided you're willing to compromise on a few detail settings. The benchmarks you see in the tables here don't really tell the full story however. To provide a solid comparison with other mini-PCs we've tested, our standard 1440p tests are all run at each game's Ultra preset, and that's not the G7 PT's strongest suit.

Let's take A Plague Tale: Requiem as a test-case. At 1440p and Ultra settings, the G7 PT manages an average of 51 fps, with 1% lows of 40 fps. Not awful of course, but if you drop the preset to high, it averages the golden 60 fps. Drop the resolution to 1080P at ultra settings, and you'll see a much healthier 76 fps average with a 1% low of 59 fps. It's a similar story in other titles, and there is definitely hay to be made from tuning individual settings around a 1440p baseline.

Where the RX 7600M XT really struggles is ray tracing. Doom Eternal, set to 1440p, with details set to Ultra Nightmare and RT on, garners 46 fps with 1% lows of 23 fps, which is not a great experience. Kill ray tracing and retain all the other settings however, and you're sitting pretty at 103 fps, with the worst dip at 66 fps. Drop the resolution to 1080, stay at Ultra Nightmare settings and keep RT off, and you're enjoying 172 fps with 1% lows of 73 fps.

It's the same deal in Forza Motorsport, but in this case, demands are compounded by Forza's thirst for VRAM. Set the game to 1440p ultra with RT on, and you get a 'VRAM out of budget' warning, which results in a 38 fpsaverage with 1% lows of 26. Oof. Even on Ultra without RT, you're still over-budget. However, stay at 1440p, drop the settings to medium and kill ray tracing, and the warning evaporates, leaping you to 80 fps with the worst-offending dip at 68 fps, which is dead smooth and still looks great.

This puts the AtomMan G7 PT in a sort of mid-level class of its own. It's massively more performant than smaller mini-PCs which rely on an iGPU for gaming, but it doesn't quite match the 1440p performance of mini-PCs which carry the RTX 4070 mobile, namely the Zotac Zbox Magnus and the ASUS ROG NUC. The RTX 4070 is a better tracer of rays, opens the door to Nvidia's Frame Gen feature, and generally delivers faster frame rates across the board. It's better-geared towards 1440p and requires you to make fewer detail-sacrifices at that resolution.

Such machines are consequently much more expensive, however, and this is where the G7 PT carves a niche for itself. Barebones, it comes in at just under a grand—nearly half the price of the ASUS ROG NUC—and that's highly attractive. Although you should also factor in an extra $150 or so for 32GB of 5200MHz DDR5, a 1TB M.2 drive, and a Windows 11 key.

So, where does this all leave us? In summary, the AtomMan G7 PT eats CPU-heavy tasks for breakfast and offers smashing 1080p gaming performance. Gaming at 1440p is not out of the question by any means, but you'll have to find the sweet spot by tweaking individual game-settings.

It earns bonus brownie points for running cool and whisper-quiet even under heavy loads, and at an appropriate price-point to boot. There are mini-PCs out there which charge a similar price for less CPU performance, and rely on an iGPU using shared system-memory rather than a discrete GPU with 8GB of dedicated VRAM. Placed in that context, it's easy to recommend the AtomMan G7 PT.

The lineup features a few gaming-focused units with somewhat spicier designs, but the Venus UM790 Pro isn't necessarily one of these. Housed in a clean, purple-tinged aluminium chassis, it's attractive in a minimalist way, but we're interested in its gaming potential as it represents an affordable way to access the Ryzen 9 7940HS and Radeon 780M CPU/iGPU double-act. Like the Ryzen 7 7840HS, which is a much more common sight in mini-PCs and gaming laptops, this SoC APU is built on the same 4nm Zen 4 architecture as AMD's desktop 7000-series CPUs. It's also the chip of choice for recent Razer Blade 14s laptops, among other premium-price crotch-cookers, and its inclusion in such machines tells us something of its capabilities.

It's worth pausing a moment to note the difference between the Ryzen 7 7840HS and the Ryzen 9 7940HS. In desktop terms, jumping from a Ryzen 7 to a Ryzen 9 bags you more CPU cores and higher clock speeds. The Ryzen 7 7700X has eight cores running at 4.5 GHz - 5.4 GHz for instance, while the Ryzen 9 7900X has 12 cores at 4.7 GHz - 5.6 GHz. 

The Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 9 7940HS APUs, however, have the same eight multithreading cores, but the 7940HS gets a 200 MHz bump in base speed, a 100 MHz bump in turbo, and a 100 MHz bump to its Radeon 780M turbo speed. That's it! No bonus cores. On the spec-sheets and in practice then, they're virtually identical. Which begs the question, why are they named as they are?

Regardless of such noodling, and before I reach for the tinfoil hat, the fact remains that the 7940HS is a great little chip. It sups a frugal 35-54 W, and still merrily drives eight cores/16 threads at a 4 GHz base clock speed, boosting to 5.2 GHz when the chips are down. AMD states a TJMax of 100 °C before it throttles which, at this kind of power draw, actually leaves plenty of headroom for cooling solutions to work with. Cooling is often proprietary in mini PCs such as this, and another important point of pre-purchase consideration, which we'll come to.

The Radeon 780M iGPU is a 12CU, pint-sized powerhouse running at 2.8 GHz, which can ringfence up to 4 GB of system memory as VRAM. Powerhouse is a relative term here of course—you won't be tracing any rays at 4K on this dinky chip at anything near playable frame rates. But in the gamut of iGPUs it's a top-shelfer, thoroughly schooling Intel's Iris and newer Arc-branded iGPUs, and snapping at the heels of older budget graphics cards such as the GTX 1650. It'll be superseded by the Radeon 890M, but until then, it's still pretty spicy for something that isn't a discrete GPU. 

The supporting cast of components is similarly solid: 4x USB 3.2 ports, a 3.5 mm audio jack, Intel Killer wireless 6E with Bluetooth 5.3, a pair of SODIMM RAM slots which take up to 64GB of DDR5 5600MHz, and PCIe 4.0 support for the dual M.2 NVMe slots. We're using the barebones version here, so we've slapped in our own M.2 PCIe 4.0 drive and 32 GB of DDR5 5600 RAM.

Opening the UM790 Pro to install your RAM and storage could be a little more elegant. You need to pull off the four glued-on rubber feet to access the screws which enable you open the case. It's fairly plain sailing after that, and the M.2 and SODIMM slots are very easy to access, but that weakened bond leaves me thinking the feet will probably drop off at some point.

For a higher upfront cost, you can opt to preload the UM790 Pro with different configurations of RAM and storage at the point of purchase. If you want to do it on a budget though, we recommend going barebones and sourcing your own low-priced DDR5 and M.2 storage. Shop around and you can find a 1 TB M.2 drive plus 16 GB of laptop DDR5 for little more than 100 notes. 

About the only I/O consideration it's missing is DisplayPort. That may be a dealbreaker for some, but between twin HDMI 2.1 ports and a pair of full-fat 40 Gbps Thunderbolt-capable USB4 slots up front, you're pretty much covered for high refresh-rate monitors, and even a Thunderbolt-powered eGPU if that's the way you swing.

So how does the whole package fair under gaming loads? Based on our benchmarks, it's quite capable at 1080p, providing you're not too ambitious with settings. For simplicity's sake, we ran each game at it's out-of-the-box medium settings, using FSR where available, and achieved 30-48 fps depending on the title. The only title in our suite that we can't recommend on this hardware is Homeworld 3 which, despite its 40 fps average, suffers staccato 1% lows. 

Some per-game experimentation with advanced graphics settings can of course pay dividends in terms of higher frame rates—or higher fidelity with bang-for-buck settings at the cost of more expensive ones. But in short, mission accomplished: if you can face living life below a constant 60 fps, nearly all the games we tested here were eminently playable on the Radeon 780M.

It's all good news for indie and older titles as well. Subnautica runs dead smooth at 50-60 fps at medium settings, and the same goes for Stray, which netted 45-60 fps, while Soulstone Survivors ranged from 45-90 fps, Doom Eternal saw 75-95 fps, and Bioshock Remastered ranged from around 140 right up to 200+ fps. It's safe to say there are thousands of great games out there that the UM790 Pro will run like a champ.

Being inquisitive types, I plugged a Razer Chroma X packing an RTX 4070 Ti into one of the UM790 Pro's Thunderbolt port for a look-see, and inevitably saw frame rates skyrocket. Cyberpunk at the same settings jumped from 48 to 98 fps, Warhammer 3 went from 42 to 190 fps, and the 3DMark Time Spy 1440p score enjoyed a near six-fold boost, from 3376 to 18226. Clearly the 7940HS plays very well indeed with a discrete GPU, if it can get its little robot hands on one.

The UM790 Pro has two performance modes which are toggled via the BIOS. Balanced mode runs the CPU up to its full rated power draw of 54 W, and I have to say, the cooling solution in this tiny unit is seriously impressive. It's Minisforum's own 'Cold Wave 2.0' design, comprising a liquid-metal heat exchange with extra active cooling dedicated to the RAM and M.2 drives, and it really does work. 

Maxing out all cores in Cinebench 2024's multicore rendering test, the CPU never pushes past 80 °C, and you can barely hear the CPU fan. Switching to Performance mode, we measured a modest consumption-bump to 56 W, a max core-temperature of 82 °C, a minor but distinct increase in fan volume, though still blissfully free of coil-whine, and a slight improvement in synthetic benchmark results. 82 °C is still a comfortable 18 °C below the point where the chip hits its TJMax and starts throttling. There was no detectable increase in game performance however—well okay, Forza, got an intangible 2 fps increase—so our recommendation would be to leave it in balanced mode, bask in the silence and enjoy your games.

NZXT's Flex subscription program allows you to rent that most hallowed of objects, a decently-well-specced gaming pc, in exchange for delicious monthly instalments (via The Verge). According to NZXT's newly-announced specs, for $59 a month (plus a $50 setup and shipping fee), you can be the proud not-really owner of a Player: One Core i5 14400F equipped gaming PC with an RTX 4060 handling the graphics duties.

That equates to $708 a year (minus extra fee) for a system that should actually handle modern games pretty well, although crucial specs like the RAM size and speed, along with the SSD, are missing from the new specs sheet. 

Presumably they come included to make a functional machine, of course, but they do matter a lot when gauging the potential performance of your next PC purchase.

Things scale pretty quickly further up the spec sheet. The Player: Two model features an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and an RTX 4070 Super. Both great mid-range components, but for $119 a month, that stacks up to $1,428 a year (again, plus fee) for the sort of system we regularly find on discount around the $1,200 mark.

Sitting at the top of the tree is the Player: Three, a system featuring an Intel Core i7 13700KF and an RTX 4070 Ti Super, again, with RAM specs and SSD specs missing. This one'll cost you $169 a month, or $2,028, and I'll be honest here, you really shouldn't be paying that much for this sort of spec in a gaming machine.

It's not that those components are bad. Far from it, as they're actually solid picks for a great gaming PC. But when we often find machines featuring the much more powerful RTX 4080 Super for less, it does strike as a bit of a bum deal.

There's an obvious counter argument here: this subscription system is for people that struggle to save the large amount of cash you'll need for a good machine, and NZXT are of course expecting to make some money out of the arrangement. Plus, NZXT only expect month-to-month payments that are free to cancel anytime, along with 24/7 customer support, free replacements should something go wrong with your machine, and guaranteed hardware upgrades every two years.

Looking at that RTX 4070 Ti Super machine above, however, that'd mean that if you hung on to the PC for two years in the hope of an upgrade, you'll have spent $4,056. And that's around $1,000 more than you'd pay for a discounted RTX 4090 rig if you paid up front. And trust me, not only is that system much, much more powerful than the Player: Three, it'll also be more than two years before it starts getting close to anything you could call "slow".

Ultimately, I'd advise against going for a rental option over saving your cash and buying something from our cheap gaming PC guide. There, you're going to find equivalent machines for less than you'd pay over a year under these plans, or more powerful machines for the same money, and you won't be draining your bank account each month. One large purchase, done and dusted.

Plus, if you pick well, you've now got a platform that should be upgradeable for some time to come, for much less money than you'd pay over the coming years on a subscription model like this.

Fans of the Tesla Cybertruck (yes, there are some out there) might be wondering how else they add more of the angular monstrosity electric vehicle to their lives. Well, if its inclusion in Fortnite isn't enough, then how about the Xyber XPC, an AMD-powered mini-PC, replete with moving wheels, doors, and working lights?

Technically the mini PC is still an Indiegogo project at the moment but tech YouTuber Taki Udon (via Wccftech) has received a sample that's supposedly indicative of what the full production run model will be like. Underneath the hood, if you pardon the awful pun, is an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS—an APU with eight Zen 4 cores, 16 threads, 16 MB of L3 cache, and 768 RDNA 3 shaders.

The makers of the Xyber XPC have configured the chip to run with a 54 W TDP by default but as Udon found out, that just makes the chip run far too hot, for very little performance gain. A quick bit of BIOS tweaking is all that's needed to drop it to 30 W and you get the same kind of performance you'd see with an Asus ROG Ally X, the best handheld gaming PC you can buy right now.

Udon's sample has 32 GB of DDR5-5600 which is a large amount of RAM for this kind of gaming PC, though it's not as fast as that used in the Ally X. AMD's APUs do like having lots of fast RAM so if you do end up buying a Xyber XPC, you might want to fit a really quick dual-channel DDR5 kit to get the best possible performance.

There's a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD inside, and the good news is that the motherboard supports the standard M.2 2280 size format, meaning you've got lots of choices if you want to fit a faster or larger solid state drive.

I have to say that the cooling system looks like it's being somewhat strangled by the design of the Xyber XPC's underside, but Udon's testing at 30 W shows that it copes well enough with that power consumption.

Apart from a bunch of USB ports (USB 3.1 Gen 1, 1x Type A and 2x Type-C), an HDMI 2.1 socket, and a 3.5 mm audio jack, you're not getting much else socket-wise, though you do get Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 services.

What you do get, though, is a pretty decent replication of the Tesla Cybertruck, with a moving steering wheel, suspension, hoods, and doors. It even has working front and rear lights. The power button is basically wired to the front suspension, so pushing down on the frunk switches the PC on and off.

There's no word on how much this is going to cost once in full production but would I buy one? Heaven's above, no. I mean just look at it. Xyber Team has done a great job of fitting a speedy little PC inside the Cybertruck replica but it's a Cybertruck—the very epitome of form over function.

Well, it would be if it had any form to begin with. Taste over function? Umm, maybe not. Anyway, it's a 10 out of 10 for execution from me but a zero out of 10 for the choice of inspiration material. Now, if it was a certain DeLorean time machine, then I'd be first in the queue.

In many games, it proves to be a highly competent APU double-act, capable of matching and even trouncing AMD Ryzen/Radeon duets in some situations.

On the other, there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which games it will flatter, which it will not, and which will be subjected to an Uzi-spray of 1%-low stutters, rendering them unplayable. It's baffling. But let's take a step back for a moment and look at the whole package.

The AtomMan X7 Ti is a touch larger than most of its mini-PC stablemates, but only a touch. You can bag it preloaded with 32 GB DDR5 and a 1 TB M.2 drive, or opt for the barebones version. That's the better deal here, as it'll save you a couple of hundred on the unit cost in order to shop around for cheaper RAM and storage.

The case features a tidy design with a glossy 4-inch touchscreen adorning the top (which becomes the face, if you choose to use the thoughtfully-supplied vertical aluminium stand). The screen displays comprehensive hardware-monitoring for the CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, network traffic, and fan, enabling you to adjust the screen brightness and system volume, switch the display language, enumerate all the devices you have plugged into it, and alter the screen layout. It also allows you to flip between the machine's three performance modes of energy-saving (54 W), balanced (60 W) and performance (65 W). 

This is great for the energy-conscious user, but honestly, sticking it in performance mode and leaving it there brings no meaningful downsides. Minisforum knows how to cool mini-PCs effectively and quietly, and the X7 Ti is no exception. Its ‘Cold Wave' phase-change liquid metal CPU cooler does the absolute business, and even when the fan spins up under load, it's pretty conservative. It's a windy sound, not a whizzy one, and it simply doesn't peck at your head like the frequencies commonly emitted by small-diameter fans under load. I tell you, gaming laptop manufacturers could learn a thing or two from these guys.

The Core Ultra 9 185H is a stonking little chip, and poster-boy for Intel's current have-your-cake-and-eat-it philosophy in chip design. There are two ultra-low power cores (1 GHz-2.5 GHz) for idling and simple tasks, eight efficiency cores (1.8 GHz-3.8 GHz) for common productivity, and six performance cores (2.3 GHz-5.1 GHz) for the chunky jobs, bringing us to a grand total of 16 cores and 22 threads. 

In performance mode, our test unit's CPU idled at around 1.3 GHz while nibbling a mere 6 W morsel. With the CPU and ARC iGPU synthetically turbo-maxing (Prime95 and Furmark 2, killer combo), it drew 65 W to hit its 5.1 GHz top speed. It then sat steady at 94 C°,16 degrees below the chip's TJMax, even after an extended period under load. The X7 Ti's Cold Wave cooling simply dealt with it, competently and at acceptable sound levels. And let's face it, no gaming load is going to stress the machine anywhere near that hard.

The rest of the specs are good. No scratch that, they're great. Inside, you get dual SODIMM slots which support up to 96 GB DDR5 5600, a pair of M.2 slots and a Wi-Fi 7 module, though you'll need a compatible right-now router—and a really fat pipe—to benefit from Wi-Fi 7's insane 46 GB/s speeds. On the outside you get a pair of USB4 Type-C Thunderbolters, two USB 3.2 ports and a single USB 2.0, twin 5 GB LANs, one HDMI 2.1, one DP 2.0, an SD card reader and… an Oculink port.  

Actually, this is a god-tier spec sheet for this class of machine. And that Oculink slot makes things very interesting indeed. If you're not familiar with the interface, then consider yourself perfectly normal, as it's vanishingly rare to see it in off-the-shelf machines. Which is shame, because it has the bandwidth potential to supercharge matters with an external GPU in a way that the eGPU boxes of yore failed to do. 

Turbo side-quest: let's talk eGPUs. They're nice in principle, but invariably finicky to set up, and lossy in execution. The latest ones connect via Thunderbolt 4, which taps out at 40 GB/s, and that's just enough bandwidth to get almost full performance out of mid range GPU, but offers rapidly diminishing returns with bigger cards.

Oculink plugs into the broad estuary of your PCI-Express bus, rather than the babbling brook of USB, which brings a meaty bandwidth-jump to 64 GB/s. This provides something much closer to lossless performance for high-end GPUs. 

I find that VERY exciting. There's a community of enterprising enthusiasts out there, armed with cheap-and-cheerful Oculink connectors and GPU mounts sourced from Ali Express, plugging fat GPUs directly into their PCIE buses via M.2 storage slots. The downside of all this is the chaos it introduces to your desk. 

An Oculink setup requires a PCI-Express dock to mount your GPU in, which then connects via an Oculink cable to your PC. And if you don't have an Oculink slot in your PC, you need to find—or drill—a hole in your chassis to access an internal M.2 slot. Plus, your GPU and dock require their own PSU.

The end result is a buck-ass nude PSU and GPU on your desktop, and a veritable snakes'-wedding of cables. This is the problem that eGPU boxes such as the Razer Chroma X solved years ago by enclosing the dock, PSU and GPU in a single unit. I'd love to see a manufacturer pick that up again with Oculink and run with it. Though one imagines it would require motherboard vendors to start adding Oculink ports to their boards as standard to make it commercially viable. 

Minisforum is halfway there, at least. When you buy direct from Minisforum's site, you can give the AtomMan X7 Ti a sidekick in the form of their DEG1 eGPU docking station. It's a surprisingly cheap bolt-on and by far the most elegant Oculink dock out there, but it still requires a dedicated PSU to power both the dock and the GPU, so it doesn't entirely conquer the gnarly desk-kraken conundrum. Sadly, Minisforum didn't have any DEG1 samples ready for shipment when we requested an X7 Ti unit for this review. So there's no proof until we get hold of one and run some benchmarks, but I suspect this machine would run games at full-fat desktop speeds and high resolutions if you give that Core Ultra 9 an Oculink dock and a discrete GPU to play with.

And so we come full circle to the Core Ultra 9's ARC integrated graphics. There's just something funky going on under the hood, and It's hard to know whether this is down to the hardware, the drivers, or a combination of the two. We've also been testing Minisforum's Venus UM790 Pro mini-pc, which is armed with a Ryzen 9 7940HS and Radeon 780M iGPU, so we have some comparative benchmarks to work with.

When it comes to indie and older games, the X7 Ti does very nicely. The following titles were all run at 1080p with medium graphics settings, and both the Core Ultra 9 185H and the Ryzen 7 7940HS hit near-identical framerates. In Stray, the X7 Ti achieved 50-65 fps, Bioshock Remastered ran at an effortless 140-220 fps and Subnautica saw a pleasing 50-60 fps. Where the ARC iGPU excelled was Soulstone Survivors, beating the Radeon 780M's 45-90 fps with a score of 55-120 fps. So far so good.

Conversely, more demanding titles seem to place a much heavier burden on the ARC iGPU than the Radeon 780M. While the AMD chip achieves 47 fps in Forza at 1080P medium, the Intel core only manages 30 fps at the same settings. Same deal with Cyberpunk—while the Ryzen averaged 48 fps, the Core Ultra 9/ARC combo averaged 35 fps. Homeworld 3's benchmark is an equal-opportunities destroyer, and the Core Ultra 9 scored 39 fps compared to the Ryzen 7's 40 fps. 

The worst example was Warhammer 3; while both chips made 30 fps in the campaign benchmark, the battle engine saw the Core Ultra 9 hit 33 fps, which is 5 fps behind the Ryzen 7. No great shakes to be sure, but the experience was absolutely riddled with frequent and constant 1% lows, rendering it unplayable. This stuttering was apparent to a lesser degree in Warhammer 3's campaign benchmark, and occurred variously in all the AAA games I tested. In some it's just the odd hitch, but in others it's more pronounced.

With their discrete GPU releases over the last couple of years, it's clear that Intel is stepping up in the graphics arena, and there's no question that the ARC iGPU is a leap forward for them in the APU space. And like their discrete GPU's, It's conceivable that the gaming performance of the ARC iGPU will smooth out over time with driver support – but that's impossible to guarantee.

As for the AtomMan X7 Ti, there's no question that it's an excellent, cool-running, quiet, and powerful machine. It's pricier than your average mini PC, but with that premium comes excellent general-use computing performance and a killer spec-sheet. Without question, it can match and, in some cases, outperform its peers in terms of raw rendering power, as our Blender and Cinebench 2024 multicore tests demonstrate. But whether it'll do the same, better or worse in heavier-duty games versus the competition… that's a bit of a dice-roll I'm afraid.

Ready to take the plunge on a new gaming PC but fancy building it yourself? You've come to the right place.

There's nothing like the feeling of pressing the power button for the first time on your shiny new gaming PC, built by your own two hands, and watching it whir to life. There's also nothing like when you hit the power button and nothing happens and you realise you've messed something up along the way—but less said about that the better.

If you're new to this, don't worry. I'll make it easy for you. I've been building PCs for years and I'm going to use that experience and our expert reviews here on PC Gamer to pick out the best PC components from the remains of the Prime Day sales (which are now over, sadly) and beyond. I'll make sure it all works together and will offer you top performance.

Below you'll find my recommendations for a gaming PC build around the $1,000 mark (almost to the dollar) and targeting both excellent 1440p performance, longevity and dashing good looks. I'll also post live updates to this page further down with recommendations for further deals on PC parts that catch my eye as I find them.

The $1,000 Prime Day gaming PC build

I've not cut corners on this PC build. I've chosen parts I would want in my own gaming PC. These are components that will deliver high frame rates today and overhead to deal with the next-generation of demanding games; that look fantastic together and should keep relatively quiet while gaming.

Processor

The first decision for any PC build is which CPU to go for: Intel or AMD?

I've sided with AMD here. The Ryzen 7 7700X is my chip of choice. There are a few reasons for that.

Firstly, it's hugely discounted down to just $245 today. You can buy it at Newegg or Amazon for that price, though it's a Prime only deal on the latter. 

Secondly, AMD's AM5 platform will have more room to grow with support for future generations of AMD chips. With eight cores and 16 threads of Zen 4 at its disposal, you won't have to worry about replacing the 7700X anytime soon, but should you want to, you need only ensure your BIOS on your motherboard is up-to-date and replace the CPU with any other AM5 compatible chip. 

We know the 9000-series will use the same AM5 socket as the 7000-series, so that's one upgrade you could make. I'd wager future 3D V-Cache processors would also make for a tasty upgrade if you can spare the cash.

Graphics card

I'm also choosing AMD for the graphics card in this PC. The PowerColor Radeon RX 7700 XT found over at Amazon (now sold out at Newegg) is an excellent price to pay for a modern GPU with 12 GB of VRAM. This card will roundly beat the similarly priced RTX 4060 Ti at 1440p and offers great bang-for-your-buck at 1080p, too.

Motherboard

For the motherboard, I've opted for the ASRock B650M Pro RS WiFi. It's a compact Micro ATX motherboard but it offers all I could ask for at this sale price. The VRM is a suitable 8+2+1 design, there are plenty of USB ports (including USB Type-C) and three NVMe SSD slots. One of which is also PCIe 5.0 compatible, though I won't be taking advantage of that for this build.

This motherboard comes in a white and black colourway, which will be important once we talk about the chassis later on.

Cooler

You could opt for a cheaper cooler to save some cash here, though in the interests of noise levels under load I've decided to opt for the brand new BeQuiet! Dark Rock Pro 5. A chunky air cooler capable of dissipating up to 270 W, it won't struggle to keep this 105 W Ryzen chip under control. There are two Silent Wings PWM fans included with this cooler and designed to keep noise to a minimum.

For the avoidance of doubt, I do like a liquid cooler. However, I have an air cooler in my personal PC and they're often fantastic value for the performance on offer.

The Dark Rock Pro 5 offers 45 mm of clearance for the RAM and shouldn't pose an issue with my 40 mm tall pick below. It's also 168 mm tall, which will just slide in perfectly into the Fractal chassis (max cooler size for the case is 170 mm).

Memory

I've opted for 32 GB of genuinely fast DDR5 RAM for this build. In the interests of saving money, I had expected to go for 16 GB, though a Prime Day deal on Lexar's 32 GB Thor OC DDR5-6000 kit was too tempting to resist. It is asking little more than some 16 GB kits, and yet it's genuinely speedy memory at 6000 MHz (effective) at CL32 and officially certified for AMD Ryzen systems through AMD Expo.

SSD

For storage, I've chosen the 1 TB Lexar NM790 solid state drive. This NVMe SSD is currently discounted with a heatsink attached, though one is included on the ASRock motherboard. It might be an idea to use this Lexar drive in one of the non-heatsink slots on the motherboard and use the motherboard's heatsink for an upgrade down the line. 

I reviewed the massive 4 TB version of the Lexar NM790 and came away thoroughly impressed with the performance it delivers.

Power supply

Powering the lot is the Corsair RM750x power supply, currently on offer at Amazon. This fully-modular power supply is from a dependable manufacturer and rated to 80 Plus Gold and Cybenetics Gold standards. It also comes with a ten-year warranty for peace of mind.

Nothing makes me more uncomfortable than a thousand dollars worth of PC parts plugged into a no-name PSU with lacklustre electronics. Not on my watch.

Case

Lastly, the chassis into which it all slots in. The Fractal Design North case is held in high esteem by the PC Gamer team and further afield. You can pick it up in black or white for the same price in the sales, though I'm opting for white to match my pick of motherboard. Either way, it looks excellent with that wood finish up front. It also comes with two fans pre-installed for adequate cooling without spending any extra.

Hey, welcome to the live page covering the best component deals from Prime Day and beyond. I'm Jacob, senior hardware editor here at PC Gamer. 

I'll post any great deals I find on components right here, including any alternatives for the build above. The page will automatically update, so stay right here.

So, you want something cheaper.

If you can't stretch your budget to the above, I've some cheaper CPUs for your consideration. The Ryzen 5 7600 is a six-core, 12-thread processor with all the benefits of the Zen 4 architecture and AM5 socket still intact.

A 65 W TDP means the 7600 is happier with a cheaper cooler, such as the Hyper 212. Though you can also get by with the entirely free cooler included in the boxed version of the chip. Neat!

There are other options available to you, however. Intel makes a mean CPU in the Core i5 13400F, though it will require a complete rethink of the motherboard. As will one of AMD's last-generation 5000-series chips, which are on the AM4 socket.

Though many Ryzen 5000-series chips are incredibly affordable for what you get. You can score one of the best gaming CPUs of the AM4 generation, the Ryzen 7 5700X3D, for less than the 7600 today—no cooler included on that one, however.

Eyeing up more storage space?

While it used to be the done thing to buy a Samsung SSD and be done with it, we actually prefer some other brands of SSDs for straightforward gaming use. Such as the WD Black SN850X, Lexar NM790, or Nextorage NEM-PA. All three are quick, effective and cheaper than the Samsung 990 Pro.

We gave all three drives high scores in our reviews, as you can check out for yourself below.

Nextorage NEM-PA review
WD Black SN850X review
Lexar NM790 review

If you want to improve your frame rate above and beyond what the RX 7700 XT can muster, you might want to check out the RX 7900 GRE. Launched exclusively in China for a short while, this model has since been released to the rest of the world. It's on the cheaper end of 4K capable—though would make a superb GPU for 1440p or ultrawide performance.

The alternative from the green team is the RTX 4070, if we're talking a straight price comparison. The GRE does generally outdo the RTX 4070 in rasterised performance, though as with most AMD vs Nvidia battles, turn on ray tracing and Nvidia claws back performance. That's especially true of the RTX 4070 Super, which is more competitive versus the RX 7900 GRE across the board, though costs quite a bit more. 

Check out our RX 7900 GRE review for more.

Time for an upgrade.

We've spoken about saving cash, but what if you wanted to spend more of it on this gaming PC build? You have a couple of options for a drop-in CPU upgrade, all on sale right now.

The best of the lot for gaming, courtesy of a huge Prime Day discount, has to be the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. This is the fastest gaming CPU on the planet right now, so for pure performance in games, go for this.

If you prefer to prioritise performance in heavy multicore applications, you might want to look into the Ryzen 9 7900X. This is a multitasking champ.

Finally, if you prefer a blend of productivity and gaming, it's the Ryzen 9 7900X3D you're after. This offers the higher cache quantity of the 7800X3D with all the extra cores of the 7900X. You might think this is the clear winner of the lot, considering it's one of the cheaper chips, too, and I'd agree with you. However, it's worth pointing out that the 7800X3D is reliably a teeny bit quicker in games and the 7950X is reliably a teeny bit quicker in CPU tests. I mean, it's marginal either way, so imma say pick this and don't sweat it.

Our Nick has searched across the web to find the five deals on PC cases worth buying this Prime Day. He's made some good picks here—which I say as someone that has built PCs into the Corsair 5000D and Lian Li O11 Dynamic. The former is wicked for cable management and tidy builds, the latter for customisation options with fully liquid cooled machines.

We don't often talk about power supplies much. We should, they're underrated, but we don't. And that's sad. 

So here are a few prime picks from Prime Day (and beyond):

BeQuiet! Straight Power 12 1200W | $179.99 at Newegg (save $70)

Corsair RM1000x 1000 W | $123.49 at Newegg (save $66.50)

Corsair RM850x 850 W | $94.99 at Amazon (save $55)

Hey, check it out: our favorite quiet air cooler is on sale for a nice little discount for Prime Day. Here's what we had to say about it in our guide to the best CPU coolers:

"It's a single-tower cooler with the company's highly regarded Pure Wings 2 PWM fan, with a low 26.8dB(A) noise rating. That means it's very quiet indeed. It feels excellent, too, an indicator of good build quality... The Pure Rock 2 will keep your chip cool and quiet for anything other than high-end CPUs. If you're interested in bling and want something that's a step up from bundled coolers, the Pure Rock 2 is a fantastic choice. It will cool out of sight, mind, and earshot."

These 6 Prime Day PC gaming deals under $50 are like a quality of life patch for my actual life

Lauren put together this fun (but also practical!) list of affordable accessories no PC gamer should be without. Well, maybe you can do without the rabbit-eared charger, but a mic arm, better cable management gear, and a compressed air duster for keeping your computer and keyboard clean? Vital tools, and they're all cheaper than usual.

If you're going to pick just one, I gotta recommend the cable management kit.

Hey, Jacob here again for the morning shift. Prime Day may be over but don't fret: there are still plenty of deals available across the web.

Newegg's Fantastech sale is still on for another day, which means many of my picks here are still live and kickin'.

It specialises in handheld gaming PCs (such as the Ayaneo Kun and the Air 1S), built around AMD's low-power, performant APUs, but dabbles in mini-PCs as well. The Retro Mini AM02 is its second such release, and it's cute as a button. 

It's a pint-sized homage to the original Nintendo Entertainment System, complete with a front hood which pops open to reveal twin USB 2.3 ports, a USB4 Type-C, and a combined audio socket. It's elegant, tactile, easy on the eye, and once you have it installed on your desk (or by your TV, we'll come to that), I defy you not to throw admiring glances at it from time to time.

The styling of the Retro Mini AM02 goes hand-in-hand with the capabilities of the machine. It says "Make an emulator out of me! PLAY ALL THE GAMES YOU GREW UP WITH!", which you absolutely can, you absolutely should—I absolutely did—but that doesn't preclude the fact that the hardware is capable of more. 

Housing AMD's Ryzen 7 7840HS, the higher-wattage version of the 7840U found in Ayaneo's handhelds, and packing a Radeon 780M iGPU, most modern games should run playably at 1080P, provided you're willing to sacrifice higher graphics settings.

There's a 4-inch touchscreen on the lid which can be swiped left or right to display detailed system info, a clock, or a quick-access panel to switch between preset performance modes. It's just begging for some custom wallpaper options, though the functionality isn't there yet—Ayaneo is planning this for a future software update. 

Round the back, you get twin 1 Gb and 2.5 Gb Ethernet ports, HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4, a pair of USB 2.0 ports, and a USB-C port reserved for the AM02's power adapter. The kit also handles WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. In short, it's all good on the specs front, though a second USB-C on the front would've been welcome.

The Retro Mini AM02 ships preinstalled with Ayaspace, Ayaneo's hardware and game-library interface layer. Designed for their handhelds, it feels most at home with a gamepad. This implies a strong use-case for the Retro Mini as a dedicated micro-console to plug into your TV, and in that scenario, you can configure Ayaspace to run fullscreen at boot. It's still an app running in Windows 11 of course, not an OS in its own right, and for more traditional desktop PC use, I set it to minimise to the system-tray at Windows boot and invoked it only when needed. 

It can feel a little clunky and slow-to-act using a keyboard and mouse as your principle input devices—the UX has clearly been designed around gamepad controls first—but it works well enough. What I did notice in my time with the Retro Mini was several small technical and UI-improving updates to Ayaspace, which I would expect to continue.   

The performance tab of Ayaspace is awash with tweakers. These toggles and sliders expose BIOS-level hardware settings, including the CPU's TDP limit, sliders for the CPU and iGPU clock speeds, a CPU turbo toggle, a general power-policy setting, and automatic or custom fan-curves for the CPU cooler. 

There are three presets out of the box: Power Saving (8 W TDP, potato mode, borderline fine for web browsing), Balanced (15 W TDP, good for emulation and simpler indies) and Extreme (28 W TDP, with less-than-full CPU and iGPU clockspeeds, but fine for less demanding titles). You can create custom presets too, though only the factory presets show up on the 4-inch touchscreen's mode-switcher. 

Obviously the first thing I did was to crank everything up; that TDP slider goes to 45 W after all. It's possible to get some nice performance gains with custom presets, though whether those gains are marginal or appreciable is entirely title-dependant. I set up an 'Overclock' preset, with the TDP set to 45 W, the CPU and iGPU given free rein with their full clockspeed ranges, and the CPU Turbo option activated.

Bumping things up like this gets you a decent performance uptick. The best boost I saw was in Doom Eternal—which looks fabulous at 1080p with medium settings, by the way—and switching between the stock 28 W Extreme preset and my 45 W custom 'Overclock' preset, the frame rate jumped from around 60-70 fps to 70-90 fps playing the same section of the same level. Which was deeply gratifying, and speaks volumes for how enormously well-optimised Doom Eternal is. Just don't expect those kind of gains in every game. 

On paper, the Ryzen 7 7840HS can reach up to 54 W, but Ayaspace sets a max limit of 45 W. Similarly, the chip ought to boost to 5.1 GHz, but Ayaspace limits this to 4.7 GHz. We queried Ayaneo on this, and it responded by telling us the Retro mini is designed with specific size and thickness constraints, and that the limitation is in place to ensure effective cooling and optimal performance. Which makes sense; it is indeed a tiny box, and no doubt a challenge to cool. 

It's a tactic sometimes seen in the laptop space to keep temps down and preserve battery life, though the latter is clearly not a consideration here. So it's a shame you can't access the absolute top-end of the 7840HS' capabilities, which some other manufacturers have achieved with their own proprietary cooling solutions. 

In terms of modern game performance, and if we're considering a 30+ fps as playable, the Retro Mini gives a decent account of itself. Cyberpunk at 1080P with Ultra settings, FSR2 set to auto and no Ray Tracing runs nicely at 52 fps. Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign map is rather more bruising, netting only 25 fps at 1080P/medium/28 W, though this rises to a more comfortable 30 fps when we bump up the TDP to 45 W and crank the clock speeds. Forza Motorsport was slick, smooth and enjoyable at 45 W, but It's difficult to recommend Homeworld 3 on hardware of this category; despite the tested average of around 40 fps, you're beset with frequent, jagged 1% lows. 

We also ran a handful of indies and older games at 1080p/medium/45 W, to get a feel for the sort of frame rate-ranges you can expect across different games. None of the following have built-in benchmarks, so we've kept them off the official table, but hopefully they'll give you a flavour of the Retro Mini's wider capabilities. Subnautica was eminently playable around the 50-60 fps mark, Stray sat comfortably in the 45-60 fps range, Soulstone Survivors got 90 fps which dropped to a still-highly-palatable 45 fps during peak pyrotechnics, Still Wakes the Deep managed 60-70 fps, and Bioshock Remastered capered along at a frankly hilarious 130-200 fps.

Setting it up as an emulator was a doddle using the free and fantastically user-friendly Emudeck, and in no time I had my favourite games of yesteryear populating my Steam library, flawlessly playable on the TV using an Xbox Elite gamepad. And I think that's just glorious. I mean sure, any old PC can be set up as an emulator in the same way. But when you turn the Retro Mini AM02 into a living-room retro console emulator, everything falls into place, and you get the sense it's fulfilling its destiny.

It's a neat, compact, matte-black package, and comes in two flavours: the ROG NUC 760 (Core Ultra 7 155H, RTX 4060 mobile, 16 GB DDR5-5600, 512 GB M.2 drive) and the ROG NUC 970 (Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, RTX 4070 mobile, 32 GB DDR5-5600, 1 TB M.2 drive). Both specs are also available as barebones units called the NUC Extreme, and come without the RAM, M.2 storage or Windows 11 installation, in a plain black version of the chassis.

It's the fully pre-loaded 970 model we're looking at today and it's no slouch, packing Intel's flagship Core Ultra 9 185H coupled with Nvidia's RTX 4070 mobile GPU and a thoroughly ample 32 GB of SODIMM-shaped 5600MHz DDR5 (user-upgradeable to 64GB). It's a well-matched component-set, from which you'd rightly expect power enough for gaming at 1440P.

These innards, though, are built for mobile. Compared to their desktop counterparts, they offer higher efficiency, lower power consumption, enjoy fights in tight spaces, but are naturally less performant. The RTX 4070 Mobile for example, is a different beast from even the basic non-super, non-Ti desktop RTX 4070. With a 128-bit memory bus down from 192-bit, 8GB VRAM rather than the desktop card's 12GB and lower-clocked core and memory, you get roughly a third less performance, give or take.

Similarly, the Core Ultra 9 185H is geared towards high-end laptops unlike the out-and-out desktop powerhouses of the latest 14th Gen  Core i7 and i9 desktop chips, and that's reflected in its power consumption. The CPU in our test unit drank a peak 115 W to hit its max turbo speed of 5.1GHz at full load; compare that to the volcanic 253 W draw of an i7-14700K at full 5.6GHz tilt. In brief, both the CPU and GPU are excellent choices for a super-compact system, enabling the ROG NUC to occupy a mere 2.5 litres in volume.

You can upgrade the RAM and storage but the CPU and GPU are for life, not just for Christmas. So while the NUC 970 can comfortably deliver the solid framerates of a midrange desktop PC in today's games—provided you don't flog it past 1440P—it's also the material equivalent of a gaming laptop, complete with external power-brick. That goes for the cooling too; the small-diameter, high-speed fan-noise at load is equivalent to that of a gaming laptop. However, the ROG NUC can be set to silent mode in Asus' preinstalled Armory Crate app, which reduces the noise to a totally palatable level, and it barely touches the frame rate. 

Going from Turbo mode (noisy) to Silent mode (well, quieter mode), we noted a drop of just 2 fps in Cyberpunk, which is simply undetectable in practice. Our advice? Stick it on silent and fugeddaboudit.

It's not terribly future-proof but for this machine's target demographic, I suspect that's just fine. There's something attractive about a compact gaming PC that neither offers nor encourages invasive surgery and just cracks on with the job of being a PC, which the ROG NUC 970 does. There are few manufacturers offering such a seamless plug-and-play PC gaming experience that will do the desktop-level business at 1440p.

The ROG NUC 970 takes design cues from 2018's Intel Hades Canyon NUC, albeit larger in volume. It sports a similar corner-cut shape and RGB panel on the top-case, for which you can get your own acetate masks printed to mount internally and change the RGB shine-through image. It also adheres to the ROG brand style guide—angular shape-language, ‘challenging' font—so your mileage may vary on the style accents. It ships with an exceedingly robust steel stand to mount the unit vertically, which is a welcome, footprint-reducing addition. Overall, the ROG NUC 970 has an appealing sense of density. There's no question that the power-to-volume ratio this machine exudes is attractive.

Elsewhere on the spec sheet, things are similarly tidy. Intel Killer WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, a trio of M.2 2280 slots running on PCIe 4.0, and 2.5G Intel LAN. The I/O options are largely good. Round the back you get 2x USB 3.2 ports, 2x USB 2.0 slots, a 2.5G RJ45, 2x DisplayPort 1.4a ports, a single HDMI 2.1 port, and a lone Thunderbolt 4 port which also doubles up as DP 2.1 for the CPU's Intel Arc iGPU, which you will absolutely never have a reason to use over the RTX 4070.

Up front you get another two USB 3.2 slots, combined audio jack, and an SD card reader. Where the IO sorely lacks is in USBC ports, especially up front. A single type-C Thunderbolt 4 at the back doesn't really cut it on such a premium product. I don't know about you but the majority of cludge I plug into my PC these days (phone, headset dongle, mechanical keyboard, Xbox Elite gamepad dock) operates via USBC. If I'm buying this for its compact minimalism, I don't want to spoil it with an external USBC hub flapping about.

On to performance then, and the headline is straightforward enough: even with its mobile-focused parts, the ROG NUC 970 offers good-to-great frame rates at 1440p, and outstanding ones at 1080p. 

76 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p at the Ray Tracing Ultra preset, DLSS set to auto and frame-gen on is as smooth and good-looking as you need. Total War: Warhammer 3 at Ultra settings just makes it to 60 fps. Forza Mortorsport clips along at 68 fps with Ultra settings, full-quality DLSS and Ray Tracing at 1440p. And if 1080p is your playground, you'll see frame rates thunder well beyond the 100 fps mark in pretty much everything you throw at it bar Homeworld 3, with its surprisingly punishing built-in benchmark

We also gave the ROG NUC 970 a run at several titles outside of our benchmark suite. We haven't added these findings to our official list of numbers as these games don't have built-in benchmarks tools, but we think getting a frame rate range and a general vibe for how it runs stuff at 1440p is still useful.

The Dead Space remake performs admirably at 1440p/Ultra/DLSS balanced, and in the final boss battle, we saw between 75 and 107 fps. Even with that variance in range, the action remained buttery-smooth. It's a similar story in Helldivers 2, where, regardless of the scene, the ROG NUC 970 knocks out an unflinching 70-73 fps at 1440p Ultra with textures set to high. A Plague Tale: Requiem's 'Hives' level saw 74-94 fps at 1440p ultra, with DLSS set to quality and Frame Gen on. In short, all three titles play silky smooth and stutter-free.

It's compact and it does the business at 1440, no question. So let's tackle the elephant in the room: the price tag. Because at $2,199 (£1,999) fully loaded with RAM and storage, the ROG NUC 970 is eye-wateringly expensive for what it does.

How much of that price is down to the R&D costs the ROG NUC 970's unique design implies, how much is down to ASUS adding its ROG-brand markup, and how much is down to the specific component choice is impossible to guess at, but the fact is, it's a very expensive way to game at 1440p. It certainly won't win over any seasoned system-builders; for the same outlay as the full-fat ROG NUC 970, you could build a machine around a desktop RTX 4080 Super and enjoy massively better frame rates at 1440p, or comfortably make the leap to 4K, though you'd be trading the ROG NUC's USP—compactness—for that performance.

But that's not who this machine is aimed at. It's for the PC gamer who wants faff-free fun at 1440p, in the most petite package possible, and doesn't care about a future upgrade path beyond memory and storage. If that's you, and you're willing to part with this kind of money, I don't think you'll be disappointed. Better still, If you're up for shopping around for DDR5, storage, and a Windows key, go for the Barebones version and install them yourself. You'll save yourself literally hundreds.

British PC builder Chillblast has been helping gamers of all levels and aspirations assemble the rigs that are right for them—whether you like to hand-pick every piece from the GPU right down to the case, or just say what kind of games you want to play at what framerate, and let the experts take care of the rest. Each PC to emerge from the Chillblast labs is created by a team of specialists and engineers, whose confidence in their work is reflected in the  five-year warranty that every build comes with. There's a good reason why Chillblast is the UK's most awarded PC-building site.

They have an awesome range of rigs, especially with the release of the new Chillblast Edge, with the Verge as its flagship. But before we get to the star attraction, let's check out the other hot properties in Chillblast's brand new Edge range. 

Chillblast Karve 

Price: From £1440

Specs: GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, 16GB DDR4 3200MHz

First up is the Karve, a cool ice box of gaming power packing a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, which is perfect for 1440p gaming with moderate ray tracing (or 1080p if you want to hit those triple-figure fps numbers). The six cores of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X combined with 16GB DDR4 RAM will breeze through multitasking and day-to-day use, while 2TB of storage is plenty enough to hold those big triple-A games you'll be playing on this thing.

All that power obviously needs to keep cool, so you've got an AIO CPU Liquid Cooler as well as three chassis fans in there, lit up with a stylish soft purple hue that you can admire through the tempered glass side panel.

Chillblast Vantage 

Price: From £1990

Specs: GeForce RTX 4070 Super, Intel Core i5 14600K, 32GB DDR5 5600MHz

If you want a build that will turn heads, then check out the Vantage, with its eye-catching Hyte Y60 case that features a tapered glass corner to really let you see inside that PC.

Which is just as well, because there's a lot to see in there. The RTX 4070 Super is a 1440p powerhouse that you can bump up to native 4K on the latest games with a little bit of tweaking. The 14-core i5-14600K is a computing beast, delivering up to 20 threads that should handle just about anything you're likely to throw at them. A three-fan 360mm AIO Liquid Cooler, along with a further four case fans, mean you can game deep into the night without your rig turning into a (great-looking) home heater.

Chillblast Verge

Price: From £5490

Specs: GeForce RTX 4090, Intel Core i9 14900K, 64GB DDR5 5600MHz

The star of Chillblast's lineup, the Verge is a godmode rig that'll keep you on the Mount Olympus of gaming for years to come. The RTX 4090 GPU is designed for unfettered 4K gaming (so make sure you get a good enough TV or monitor to do it justice), while the CPU runs on Intel's pioneering Raptor-Lake Refresh Architecture, capable of boosted clock speeds up to 6GHz. And what are you going to do with 64GB of 5600MHz RAM? Well, anything you want, pretty much…

The stylish Hyte Y60 case makes a return for the Verge, but this time with a customisable digital display built into it, monitoring everything from your GPU heat to your CPU usage (not that heat will be a worry with the custom water-cooled loop, RGB Responsive Coolant, and 360mm Radiator keeping things nice and cool in there).

So head over to Chillblast to check out the stunning new Chillblast edge gaming range. The work never stops at their UK lab, so if you want to keep up with all that's happening, follow Chillblast on Twitter/X, Facebook, and Instagram. 

Lenovo has released just such a PC (H/T Tom's Hardware). It's not a budget tier PC with low-end specs either, this model ships with a choice of i9 14900HX or i7 14650HX CPUs, with GPU choices ranging from an RTX 4060 up to an RTX 4070 Ti Super. Add 32GB of RAM to that, capable cooling, a very good looking case, and you've got yourself a high quality gaming PC.

It's a China-only release for now, but there's always the possibility the Lenovo Legion 7000K will see a wider release in the months ahead.

So, why would Lenovo opt to release a desktop gaming PC with a mobile chip when it could opt for something like an i9 14900 or 14900T instead? It's a good question.

I'm a huge believer in power efficient, quiet PCs. I would like to assume that's the thinking behind this choice. If I focus on the i9 14900HX, it can be thought of as a downclocked, power efficient version of the desktop i9 14900K. But the latter is in another league when it comes to power consumption, with its 125W / 253W (and even higher) PL1 and PL2 power limits. In contrast, the 14900HX has a 45W base TDP, ranging up to 157W. That's despite still being able to reach as high as 5.8GHz on its P-cores, just 200MHz less than the 14900K. 

So, the 14900HX will consume less power under load and idle conditions, it'll run a lot cooler, and it'll give you almost all of the performance of a desktop i9. It makes additional sense for a gaming rig, as gaming seldom puts all cores under heavy sustained loads.

However, there are some compromises.  Mobile CPUs are usually soldered, meaning you won't be able to upgrade it—not that you would in this case, as 14th Gen is the end of the line for this generation. It also means the cooler is a bespoke one. I don't see that as a problem given it's going to be superior to any laptop cooling you could ever hope for. 

Mobile CPU aside, the system really does look good in my opinion. It's got decent connectivity options and what looks to be capable cooling.

If Intel can't get its high end chips to run without gulping power, then I would be very happy to see more mobile-on-desktop options. Let's see how Arrow Lake desktop CPUs go. If the top performers need 300W+, maybe we'll see Lunar Lake equipped gaming PCs in the months ahead.

The Legion 7000K is available for pre-order in China. It starts from around $1,303 for the i7 14650HX /  RTX 4060 combo, up to $2,350 for the i9 14900HX / RTX 4070 Ti model.

But it's sleek, comes with the most powerful Snapdragon X Elite chip we've seen—with a higher boost clock speed than any touted for its laptops—has all the ports, and I am absolutely digging the transparent look with the black PCB. 

The chip at its heart is still a 12-core X Elite, but it has a designation of X1E-00-1DE and comes with a boost clock 100 MHz higher than the X1E-84-100 (the top of the laptop range) offering a dual core boost of up to 4.3 GHz. 

Otherwise it's still using the same Oryon cores with 42 MB of total cache, a 4.6 TFLOPs Adreno GPU, and maybe most importantly, the 45 TOPs Hexagon NPU. 

Important, because this is a dev kit designed specifically to help developers not just port application code over to the Arm ecosystem to work natively on the Snapdragon silicon in Windows, but also to shift over a bunch of the processing that can be run on the NPU instead of the CPU.

The Snapdragon X Elite is, after all, currently the only hardware capable of matching what Microsoft wants when it comes to Copilot+ AI PCs. They need to be able to deliver 40+ TOPs of AI processing power, and no, it doesn't count GPUs in that. Because it's only allowing these Copilot+ features to run natively on the NPU, for reasons.

The rest of the Dev Kit specs deliver 32GB of LPDDR5x memory and 512GB of NVMe storage. On top of that you get a bunch of USB4 Type-C sockets, a pair of Type-A, an ethernet, an audio combo jack, and a HDMI port. You also get Qualcomm's Wi-Fi 7 capable networking silicon, too.

Obviously the Snapdragon Dev Kit isn't really designed for home users, and we still have no idea how it really functions in the Windows environment under emulation, less so whether the X Elite CPUs will "just work" with PC games, but there is a certain perverse part of me that really wants to get hold of one and see what happens when I strap an eGPU to it.

The Snapdragon Dev Kit should be available from the Windows on Snapdragon developer portal now, priced at $900.

Snapdragon Dev Kit specs

The Navigator Pro is a ready assembled gaming PC with a pre-defined specification. That means if you were to order one today, you'd receive something extremely similar to the PC in front of me for review. 

The Navigator Pro I have here includes an Intel Core i5 13600KF, PNY GeForce RTX 4070 Super 12GB Verto, and Teamgroup Delta RGB 32GB DDR5-6000. There's also a 2TB T-Force Z44A7, which is a good hunk of speedy storage. That's slotted into an MSI Pro Z790-P Wifi motherboard. Of that lot, it's possible to find a different model of graphics card or SSD installed, as neither are specified on the Starforge Systems website.

Altogether, it's a sensibly mid- to high-end gaming PC specification inside the Navigator Pro. I would put something similar together myself, if I were in the market. The 13600KF is the iGPU-free version of a CPU I rate as one of the best CPUs for gaming today, and the GPU is the much improved RTX 4070 Super, which feels a much stronger proposition than the regular RTX 4070 in 2024. That said, this is on the more expensive side versus some pre-built gaming PCs with a similar graphics card inside them.

Starforge Systems is asking for $2,100 to purchase your own Navigator Pro, and that's around the price you can find systems with RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics cards inside them from more budget system builders. We've even seen RTX 4080 Super PCs down that low with hefty discounts. To justify that leap, Starforge will have to impress with its build quality and those 'secondary' components that keep a PC happily ticking along over many years. So let's take a look at those.

First off, cooling. Starforge has loaded the Navigator Pro with a number of fans throughout its XPG Invader X chassis. There are seven Deepcool FC 120mm in total. That's three down the side of the boxy case, two mounted in a push configuration on the included 240mm Deepcool LT520's AiO cooler's radiator, a fan pulling air up through the bottom of the chassis, and then a single exhaust out the rear. 

The side-mounted fan configuration within the Invader X chassis isn't going to blow cool air as directly onto the warm components in the PC as a front mounted array would, though that's somewhat offset by the inclusion of the bottom-mounted fan. And, anyways, thermals were nothing to worry about in my testing.

That off-side fan mounting is due to the chassis' tempered glass panels, covering the front and side. While these might not be handy for a traditional cooling setup, they are great for viewing the RGB LEDs covering the fans and dual sticks of RAM. You also get a glimpse of the neatly arranged cables within the Navigator Pro, which have been neatly arranged with cable clips and CableMod ModMesh sleeved extensions. You'll find few of these flourishes on cheaper systems.

Altogether the case is neat, tidy, and extremely easy to get into, with only a few thumbscrews holding the panels securely together.

With the panels removed, however, I can get a much better look at the finer details of this PC's construction. In the rear of the Navigator Pro, I'm happy to see connectors that could come loose either in transit or with a tug on the cable are taped together for added security. Each cable run is tied together with a cable tie, and everything seems firmly in place. That does mean replacing any cable requires ripping up the neatly arranged runs and starting again, but in theory it shouldn't have to come to that for quite some time.

I'm quite impressed with the power supply included on the Navigator Pro. It's not some entirely unknown quantity; it's an MSI MAG A850GL, an 80 Plus Gold, fully modular unit. It's also PCIe 5.0 compliant, which means there's only a single power cable run required to reach the graphics card, which saves on messy cables. 

Speaking of which, the PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR cable was the only one I needed to disconnect and reconnect in setting up this PC. That's pretty good going, considering the distance this PC travelled over to me.

Starforge Systems is based in Austin, Texas. I do not live in Austin, Texas. I live many miles away in the United Kingdom, and that means Starforge Systems had to ship this PC halfway around the world, which it did so with everything connected and ready to go. If that sounds dangerous to you, I also had reservations, especially when such a compact box showed up at my door. And yet the PC within was perfectly okay. 

Robust packaging is used to store the chassis box, in which contains the PC itself, and within the PC everything is held firmly in place with custom-moulded Instapak. I only had to disconnect the GPU power cable to slide the Instapak away from beneath the GPU, other than that it worked out of the box, and on closer inspection I saw no signs of stress or damage to any of the PC's components. The Instapak also comes in handy should you ever need to send this PC back, under the included two-year warranty (parts and labour).

This wasn't a specialised delivery for me to review this machine, by the way, which is likely why Starforge thought to include a UK plug where most don't. The company will ship to the US, Canada, the UK, Norway, and the EU.

Though bear in mind you'll likely pay a chunky customs fee on a high-end gaming PC, which is added to the cost at checkout. For example, the Navigator Pro's $2,100 price tag ends up at $2,714.03 with taxes ($514.06) and shipping ($99.98) factored in for delivery to the UK. Similarly, a return may prove costly, lengthy, or both if requiring a PC to be sent from Europe to the US and back again. So, that's probably a no-go for most when there are system builders closer to home.

I've not found anything to fault with the construction of the Navigator Pro. I removed the GPU, SSD, and peeled away most of the cables from the rear of the machine and all was neatly organised, properly connected, and sensible stuffed out of sight. I did spot a rogue SATA cable, which I initially thought a bit odd. This PC comes with a single 2TB NVMe SSD, after all. Yet when I traced it back, I found it went close by to the SATA SSD mounts located on the rear of the case, should you ever need to use it. So, that's actually pretty handy.

I didn't even have to tweak the BIOS to get this PC up-and-running—everything was already set correctly. XMP came enabled and the fan curve was appropriately set. Perhaps it has a slightly aggressive ramp past 65°C, but that's probably fair, as we'll see in a moment.

With a tick in the assembly box, let's move on to performance.

The Horizon Pro's RTX 4070 Super performs in line with what we'd expect from the GPU, with reasonable cooling. Unsurprisingly, there's no issue with the CPU slowing it down either, as the Core i5 13600KF is plenty capable of keeping up. Moreover, the 13600KF is also capable of standing its own ground in creative tasks, performing well in synthetic tests like Cinebench R23, but more importantly dealing well with Blender, video editing and photo editing benchmarks.

The choice of SSD has proven itself a good one, too. The T-Force Z44A7 in a 2TB trim is not only a lot of space for your OS and a healthy Steam library, the drive performs highly in testing, with a solid score in 3DMark's Storage test and a Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers benchmark loading time on the higher scale of all PCIe 4.0 drives we've tested.

The system deals well with the heat spewed out by the GPU under load—the GPU reached 73°C during three runs of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition. However, the CPU can get a little more toasty at 88.5°C during a 10-minute run of Cinebench R23. That's higher than our standard test bench setup, though we use a 360mm liquid cooler on that system, which certainly helps a lot. There's not much to worry about with CPU temps while gaming on this system, anyways, as the CPU temp kept under 70°C throughout my testing.

That said, I would still prefer to see those CPU temps drop down a touch. Similarly, while the PC is not overly loud while gaming, it's far from the quietest machine I've used. There are a lot of fans here, and admittedly the vents on the side panel on which three fans are mounted are right within earshot of where I sit, but the AIO pump is also quite audible during use.

As a complete package, I'm thoroughly impressed with the Horizon Pro. The build quality, the attention to details, and the overall gaming PC performance is excellent. A smartly devised and appropriate specification just rounds off a very impressive pre-built gaming PC. 

What's left to be said is the price. No doubt you could build your own gaming PC for less, that's a given with any pre-built PC. As I said at the beginning of this review, you've likely already decided you don't want to do that. The trickier bit for Starforge Systems is when competing against other pre-built PCs, some of which are much cheaper for a similar specification. 

What you get here is peace of mind from a system builder that clearly knows what they're doing. I do wish the Navigator Pro was $2,000 or cheaper to make that decision easier, but as it stands this $2,100 system is at least a couple hundred dollars more expensive than a budget-focused gaming PC from Newegg with a matching or very similar specification. For that extra expense, Starforge offers a rare build quality in a pre-built PC, quality cooling, and much more recognisable brand names on your components. That includes the PSU, which is important.

If that sounds like a good deal to you, the Starforge Systems Navigator Pro has barely put a foot wrong in my entire time with it.

Like millions of people around the world, I love coffee. In fact, just the thought of writing that made me go and make a mug. I also love computers and gaming, spending many hours engrossed in both of them. If only there were a way to combine all those passions into one handy system. Well, one popular engineering YouTuber has done precisely that and it's the most glorious PC-with-coffee machine you'll ever see.

The YouTuber in question is Nerdforge and I've been following the channel for a long time. For many years, Martina and Hansi have been creating all kinds of mods and DIY projects, sharing their successes and failures across hundreds of videos. Sometimes they're very small and simple, but others are like this—a PC build that also houses a coffee maker, including a bean grinder and drip filter.

Nerdforge never does things by half and when they decided that the most appropriate PC case to house it all in was a Corsair Obsidian 1000D, I knew this was going to be a seriously good project. That's a massive chassis, but the fan mounts kind of get in the way of coffee machines, so cue much hammering and cutting of a $550 PC chassis.

With some judicious 3D printing to get everything nicely mounted, it didn't take long to get the bean grinder and drip filter installed. Nerdforge then turned to a little Arduino kit, some relays, an ultrasound sensor, and a spot of coding to control the whole thing from a single button. Like all good engineering projects, it didn't work the first time but perseverance is a hallmark of Nerdforge videos—though in this case, it was an 'oops, we didn't plug it in' problem more than anything else.

The actual PC build is a fairly typical modern setup, with an Intel Core i7 14700K in an Asus ROG Strix Z790-F motherboard. The graphics card is an MSI GeForce RTX model, but I couldn't tell exactly which one. As for cooling, Nerdforge had to eschew air flow norms—rather than drawing air in from the front of the chassis, a couple of 120 mm fans pull air in at the rear, and along with some more fans and a Noctua NH-U12A CPU cooler, it's all pushed out at the front.

If you're thinking they've got that all the wrong way round, it's like that because of the coffee machine. That generates quite a lot of heat and you don't want it being blown across the PC components, hence the reversed airflow.

The whole build was finished off with the use of wooden sticks (designed for stirring paint!), oiled and glued together. Coupled with some nice LEDs, the whole thing gives off a Scandinavian sauna vibe. The build shown at the end of the video is still a little rough around the edges, but it still looks really cool—albeit somewhat huge, thanks to the 1000D case.

I love custom, weird builds like this and it made me wish I did more of them in my engineering days, rather than just trying to overclock everything to destruction. Nerdforge's blend of creativity, modding skills, and warm positivity (just check out how Martina dealt with losing a finger) is the perfect inspiration for anyone to give projects like this a go.

Mobile gaming PCs really took off last year, with offerings from Asus, Lenovo, OneXPlayer, and Ayaneo all trying to knock Valve off the top position for best handheld gaming PC. One thing they nearly all have in common is AMD, as the majority of models sold sport a Ryzen APU of one kind or another. The Asus ROG Ally, for example, houses the Ryzen Z1 or Z1 Extreme, which is a modified Ryzen 7 7840U laptop chip.

I have quite a soft spot for APUs so when AMD released an updated version of the aforementioned chip for the desktop market, the Ryzen 8000G-series, I couldn't wait to get my hands on one and start mucking about with. When the Ryzen 7 8700G finally dropped on my desk, I got to thinking about how it compares to the Ryzen Z1 Extreme and whether they'd be a good match, if one was looking to have a cheap gaming PC.

On paper, they're virtually identical. They both have eight core, 16 thread CPUs based on the Zen 4 architecture; they both have the same RDNA 3 GPU, with 768 shaders (12 Compute Units). Things begin to differ when you compare maximum clock speeds and power limits, though. Asus limits the APU in the ROG Ally to 30 W and only when plugged into the mains, but the CPU can still reach a boost clock of 5.1 GHz and the GPU can hit 2.7 GHz.

Like all of AMD's latest desktop APUs, the 8700G has a 65 W limit. You might think this permits much higher clock speeds, but the CPU limit is still 5.1 GHz and the GPU's only 7% higher at 2.9 GHz. However, the CPU base clock in the 8700G is almost 1,000 MHz higher than that in the ROG Ally. That won't matter if you keep the handheld plugged in and the clocks really only drop to the base level when constrained by power or temperature.

What the greater power limit really does, though, is let the processor maintain high clock speeds for longer, until the chip reaches a temperature limit and then gets throttled back. Both systems can boost to the same level, but the handheld's 30 W limit means it just can't sustain that for as long as the desktop chip.

One of the biggest differences to be found is in the memory configuration. The ROG Ally has four LPDDR5-6400 chips soldered onto its motherboard, for a total of 16GB, whereas I've been using two 16GB sticks of DDR5-6400 in the 8700G's board. With APUs, the CPU and GPU both share the same pool of RAM, so it's important to have lots of fast memory, to ensure games can run as well as they can.

The low powered stuff in the Ally isn't the best stuff you can have, despite its high speed rating. I carried out a range of bandwidth and latency tests on both systems, and the handheld PC's average results were 57 GB/s at 251 nanoseconds; repeating the scenario for the 8700G gave figures of 68 GB/s and 173 nanoseconds. The desktop chip has much better latency, but it doesn't have significantly more bandwidth, apart from in very specific scenarios.

But, we're not here to talk about theoreticals. What we want to really see is whether it makes sense to spend $700 on a gaming handheld PC or put that money towards building an APU-powered desktop PC. So on to some benchmarks!

To start with, I ran Time Spy Extreme and Night Raid from 3DMark, with the expectation that the graphics scores for the two chips would be quite similar, but the CPU results would favour the 8700G. And to no surprise, that's exactly how things panned out. The higher power limit of the desktop Ryzen means the CPU section can maintain its boost clocks for longer, but it doesn't do much for the GPU part.

For game testing, I didn't plan anything comprehensive, just F1 22, Doom (2016 version), Horizon Zero Dawn, Cyberpunk 2077, and Skyrim: Special Edition. Because why the heck not. Well, as you can see below, the results were not quite what I was expecting.

First of all, F1 22 point blank refused to work on the ROG Ally, no matter what settings I tried, but everything else worked fine and in two of the games, it actually ran marginally faster than the Ryzen 7 8700G system. All of this was in-game testing, not a benchmark tool, and I confirmed the figures in several areas, across multiple runs.

The problem turned out to be the setting for the UMA buffer size in the 8700G's motherboard. This value controls how much of the RAM the graphics chip sees as VRAM, and I had initially conducted all of the testing with this set to Auto. However, on the ROG Ally, I had been using a value of 6GB, as the default value of 4GB was just a little too small. It does go up to 8GB, but that would take up half of the handheld's 16GB, leaving insufficient RAM for lots of games.

However, since the 8700G platform had 32GB in it, there was no problem about running out of 'normal' RAM for the game. So the UMA buffer size was set to 8GB and then everything was repeated. F1 22, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Cyberpunk 2077 ran noticeably better with the higher setting, but Doom and Skyrim were effectively unchanged.

Inspired by this success, I then tried the ROG Ally again, but this time with its UMA buffer size forced to the maximum 8GB value. Sadly, it made no difference to any of these games and F1 22 continued to sulk in the corner.

I've spent a fair bit of time just doing some general gaming on both systems and for the most part, the Ryzen 7 8700G system was typically smoother and easier to game on than the ROG Ally. The handheld could be quite picky at times about which games it was happy to run and even those that did, some of them spat out the dummy over the input system (i.e. touchscreen and gamepad controls).

So, just on the basis of this minor batch of tests, it's tea and biscuits for the 8700G and leftovers in a bowl for the ROG Ally, yes? Well, not quite.

Despite having a limit more than double that of the ROG Ally, the 8700G wasn't massively better in terms of outright gaming performance. As mentioned before, that 65 W limit helps the CPU maintains its boost clocks but since the GPU is relatively weak, most games are going to be limited by the graphics processor.

It's worth noting that the ROG Ally can only run with a 30 W limit when plugged into a charger—remove that and the limit drops to 25 W at best, which rapidly eats into the battery's lifespan, though performance relatively unaffected. Use the 10 or 15 W modes, though, and games take quite a hit in frame rate.

The desktop APU also had double the amount of RAM to work with, and it has more bandwidth and better latencies. Asus had to make everything as power light as possible for the ROG Ally, whereas there was no such restriction with the desktop PC.

Unfortunately I didn't have a spare 16GB DDR5-6400 kit to hand to make things more equivalent, but I would expect the 8700G to run into the same balancing problem between UMA buffer size and free RAM for games as the ROG Ally.

Asus also had to make its handheld relatively affordable, whereas the 8700G was in a test platform that has various components which would be overkill for a typical APU setup. Where the Ally costs $656 on Amazon at the moment, the combined price of all the parts that made up the other system comes to around $1,200—and that's not including the monitor and input devices.

Obviously it's not hard to make a variety of changes to chop that cost right down and get it near that of the ROG Ally, but if you want to include a good monitor in a $700 limit, you'll begin to impact performance by having to use slower RAM and storage.

But it's not particularly expensive to add a docking station for the ROG Ally, to make it convenient to attach a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Just $40 gets you an iVANKY model, with one LAN, one HDMI, and three USB ports. If you've already got a 1080p monitor, as well as a suitable keeb and mouse, then it's a piece of cake turning the Ally into a perfectly serviceable, if rather noisy, desktop PC.

I can't really turn the 8700G system into a handheld device!

But what a desktop computer lacks in portability, it more than makes up with flexibility—need more storage? Most AM5 motherboards come with at least two M.2 slots and four SATA ports. Need better graphics? Easy to jam a new GPU in and switch over to that, instead of using the integrated Radeon 780M. Want total silence while gaming? Just use a high end cooler and turn the fans right down, as the 8700G barely gets hot.

None of this is to diminish what the ROG Ally is good at, i.e. being a portable Windows PC for gaming, and with the right accessories, it can turn its hand to being a little desktop of sorts. But if it was my money, I'd put it all on a nice little Ryzen 7 8700G setup—it's plenty fast enough for 1080p gaming and you don't need to spend a fortune on the rest of the setup to have a great starter PC.

If you're planning on doing the same, just make sure you pair it with as much of the fastest RAM you can afford, and the motherboard supports. That way, you'll be giving the little GPU inside the APU the best chance it has of reaching its full potential.