- Messages
- 792
- Price and Quantity
- $600, with options to add or remove some features
- Rating
I like buying computers to mess with and employ in different situations. For a while, we've had these mini PCs on the market, and they make great portable machines where you can staple them behind your TV or something and get a nice living room PC for playing movies or something.
However, these mini PCs are usually very weak. It's not unexpected, because they are small, cheap, and under-powered, but they will get the job done for your basic computing tasks. My current TV PC, I paid about $200 for, and while it's been pretty great at doing what I got it for, it's been choking on some Youtube playback lately, so I decided it was time to look for an upgrade. I stumbled into this thing while looking.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGTYKBP4
Being a huge fan of the Steam Deck, and finding its APU to be enough to play games like Elden Ring, I decided I'd give it a try. I got the $600 version with a 1TB drive and 32GB RAM. What I didn't expect when it arrived, that it was going to MASSIVELY out perform the Steam Deck. In fact, it out performs it so well, I flirted with the idea of keeping my desktop gaming PC off during the summer and using this thing so that there's less heat being generated in my office.
But then I got to thinking, Elden Ring is really the only game my older gaming machines couldn't keep up with, in fact it won't even launch on several of them. Gaming as a whole is starting to languish, and most of the good games I want to play are low-spec indie games that are far more simple than an open world game like Elden Ring. Also, it doesn't take much power by today's standards to run emulators for most of the consoles. Even a couple of these mini PCs in the same class were suggesting PS3 emulation in their product title on the store page. Is there anything this tiny box can't do?
Well, short answer, yes. I wouldn't suggest it if you're a CAD renderer or something, because if you're looking for top-tier power, you're going to need to pay a top-tier price. This on the other hand, meets practically every gamer's needs at a super affordable price. A price so low it's console-tier, and it also requires no assembly. I also was running Elden Ring at 720P, but using AMD's FSR upscaling, it was looking close enough to as good as max settings at 1080p on my main PC, and it cost less than 1/3rd the price.
So, as far as I'm concerned, with a device like this, there isn't even a hesitation in my mind that if you want to play games, this is literally all you need. Steam games are cheap for the patient, and they will stick with you for as long as you have the account. GOG is also an option. Nintendo keeps shutting down their digital stores, and Sony and Microsoft are barely offering anything worth playing on their consoles either.
The biggest flaws I have found so far:
- The Wifi antenna seems a bit weak. I've had a microwave half way across the house interfere with it, and it wasn't placed between the PC and the router. It does have Ethernet, so there's ways out of that problem for anyone that also has a similar issue.
- The graphics hardware seems to have a bug in it that doesn't play nice with Ryujinx while playing Tears of the Kingdom. I'm getting blotchy purple squares at complete random that my Steam Deck didn't have. A Google Search showed me it was more likely a hardware issue and not being properly compatible with the emulator, as it's not a discrete video card. Something like that may disappear with time and development of these emulators.
So in summary: I have 2 spare monitors, a very nice bluetooth mechanical keyboard and gaming mouse, PS4 gamepad, and a set of USB speakers set up on this machine now, and it's become a full gaming rig for around $900 total. Some cheaper accessories would have driven that price down too. Console systems are now fully obsolete.
However, these mini PCs are usually very weak. It's not unexpected, because they are small, cheap, and under-powered, but they will get the job done for your basic computing tasks. My current TV PC, I paid about $200 for, and while it's been pretty great at doing what I got it for, it's been choking on some Youtube playback lately, so I decided it was time to look for an upgrade. I stumbled into this thing while looking.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGTYKBP4
Being a huge fan of the Steam Deck, and finding its APU to be enough to play games like Elden Ring, I decided I'd give it a try. I got the $600 version with a 1TB drive and 32GB RAM. What I didn't expect when it arrived, that it was going to MASSIVELY out perform the Steam Deck. In fact, it out performs it so well, I flirted with the idea of keeping my desktop gaming PC off during the summer and using this thing so that there's less heat being generated in my office.
But then I got to thinking, Elden Ring is really the only game my older gaming machines couldn't keep up with, in fact it won't even launch on several of them. Gaming as a whole is starting to languish, and most of the good games I want to play are low-spec indie games that are far more simple than an open world game like Elden Ring. Also, it doesn't take much power by today's standards to run emulators for most of the consoles. Even a couple of these mini PCs in the same class were suggesting PS3 emulation in their product title on the store page. Is there anything this tiny box can't do?
Well, short answer, yes. I wouldn't suggest it if you're a CAD renderer or something, because if you're looking for top-tier power, you're going to need to pay a top-tier price. This on the other hand, meets practically every gamer's needs at a super affordable price. A price so low it's console-tier, and it also requires no assembly. I also was running Elden Ring at 720P, but using AMD's FSR upscaling, it was looking close enough to as good as max settings at 1080p on my main PC, and it cost less than 1/3rd the price.
So, as far as I'm concerned, with a device like this, there isn't even a hesitation in my mind that if you want to play games, this is literally all you need. Steam games are cheap for the patient, and they will stick with you for as long as you have the account. GOG is also an option. Nintendo keeps shutting down their digital stores, and Sony and Microsoft are barely offering anything worth playing on their consoles either.
The biggest flaws I have found so far:
- The Wifi antenna seems a bit weak. I've had a microwave half way across the house interfere with it, and it wasn't placed between the PC and the router. It does have Ethernet, so there's ways out of that problem for anyone that also has a similar issue.
- The graphics hardware seems to have a bug in it that doesn't play nice with Ryujinx while playing Tears of the Kingdom. I'm getting blotchy purple squares at complete random that my Steam Deck didn't have. A Google Search showed me it was more likely a hardware issue and not being properly compatible with the emulator, as it's not a discrete video card. Something like that may disappear with time and development of these emulators.
So in summary: I have 2 spare monitors, a very nice bluetooth mechanical keyboard and gaming mouse, PS4 gamepad, and a set of USB speakers set up on this machine now, and it's become a full gaming rig for around $900 total. Some cheaper accessories would have driven that price down too. Console systems are now fully obsolete.
The problem is, I kinda stopped using my Deck as a portable game system while it was connected like this, and now I can lay in bed playing games with it again.