gaming | rsts11 – Robert Novak on system administration

I have a few build reports for you in the coming month or so. In the meantime, this is a quick look at an interesting series of mini-PCs from ACEMAGICIAN, including one I ordered late last month and will be giving you some perspective on in this post.

As a disclosure, purchases through the links in this post may earn me a commission from Amazon’s affiliate program, and possibly a bonus from ACEMAGICIAN through Amazon from a bonus program they are offering through the end of 2024. I chose to purchase the computer itself out of my own funds, though, and neither Amazon, nor ACEMAGICIAN and its associated companies, have any say in the content of this post.

I also have another one to review for you soon. Acemagician is promoting a Ryzen 7 5700 model with more USB and some other different features. I’ll be writing that one up soon, and doing a bit more testing and benchmarking to compare them in the near future. Same caveats above, including paying out of my own pocket, apply to the newer one as well.

With that out of the way, let’s look at the computer itself.

The machine I got, the AM06PRO with a Ryzen 7 5825U, 32GB RAM (2x16G), and a 1TB m.2 SATA SSD, came in pretty much the same packaging ACEMAGICIAN uses for most of their mini-PCs in the NUC/MacMini form factor. Specs are listed partially on the back, and at the time of my order, the computer was selling for $319 after checkbox coupon on Amazon. It’s currently unlisted, but there are 16/512 and 32/512 versions for under $300 on the page this link leads to.

I chose the 5825U over the 5800U options for a tiny bit of extra juice (2.00-4.50GHz for the 5825U vs 1.90-4.40GHz on the 5800U). Some benchmarks I read had the 5825U at as much as a 30% advantage in certain apps. It was one factor for me, along with the RAM and SSD specs for the price. As a regular desktop, a mini-server with Linux, home firewall/router, or even a USB-based NAS, either CPU should be fine for your needs.

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I’m a bit embarrassed to have let rsts11 drift most of the year. For what it’s worth, I’ve dug out some project machines, and I may have acquired one or four in the last couple of months, so I’m planning to bring you some build logs and reports to entertain and edify you heading into the holidays.

From a ThinkStation M920x one-liter tiny PC that can take a 40 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, to a HP Z6 G4 workstation that a vendor recently called a “real chonker,” I have some fun stuff to review for you. And I’m finally making use of some RTX 3000-series GPUs that have been useless for crypto mining for years.

Wherever possible, I’ll help you find the bits to build or upgrade your own, but in most of these cases (heh) I started with a machine at least partly built up. Check your local marketplaces to see what people are building and selling locally, and you may find an interesting configuration you hadn’t thought of.

Below are teasers of three of the machines I’ll be working on. The Machinist system was purchased locally, while the other two were from eBay.