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Best mini PC deals: Top Intel and AMD picks for performance, gaming, and more

Best mini PC deals: Top Intel and AMD picks for performance, gaming, and more

At a glance Top AMD mini PC deal picks Kamrui AM21 —$539 (23% off on Amazon) Beelink SER5 Max —$389 (15% off on Amazon) Acemagician S3A —$399 (7% off on Amazon) Top Intel mini PC deal picks Acemagic V1 —$279 (13% off on Amazon) Geekom GT2 Mega —$1,049 (9% off on Amazon) Acemagic M1 —$520 (35% off on Amazon) Whether you’re looking for a productivity mini PC, something for gaming, or just a budget-friendly machine with a small footprint, we’ve got you covered. The team at PCWorld continually sorts through all of the daily mini PC sales and puts together a curated list of the best deals available. Finding the right deals can be tricky, however, because there are so many things to consider, from the configuration to the price. Fear not! I’ve been covering mini PC deals for a long time — and PCWorld has tested thousands of PCs over four decades — so let me help you out. I select our favorite deals by thoroughly examining the list of specs, overall design, user feedback, and general value. The RAM, SSD, and CPU all matter significantly in mini PCs, and if you’re not careful, you may select a “bare-bones” rig that makes you bring your own memory and storage. All of the picks below are hand-selected for not only their performance, but most importantly, their value. I’ve also included some helpful answers to common questions about buying a computer at the bottom of this article. If you’re considering a laptop instead, be sure to check out our best laptop deals , or for more desktop choices check out best computer deals roundup instead—each are updated daily. Updated Jan. 25, 2026 to reflect the latest deals and pricing. Best deals on AMD mini PCs Kamrui AM21 , Ryzen 7 8745HS/Radeon 780M/32GB RAM/1TB SSD/quad 4K support—$539 (23% off on Amazon) The Kamrui AM21 for $180 off is a step up from the Acemagician above. It boasts the same powerful Ryzen 7 processor and Radeon 780M GPU, but doubles the RAM and SSD storage. And even though it’s a bit more expensive, it adds impressive support for quad 4K displays—I don’t know about you, but that’s more 4K monitor ports than I’ll ever user. If you’re willing to part with the extra $70, this is a worthy upgrade to splurge on right now. Beelink SER5 Max , Ryzen 7 6800U/24GB RAM/500GB SSD/triple 4K support—$389 (15% off on Amazon) If you’re looking for something a bit more budget friendly, but with enough juice to handle day-to-day tasks or act as an entertainment hub, then the Beelink SER5 Max Mini PC deal on Amazon is a good option. Decent performance features such as the powerful Ryzen 7 CPU along with 24GB of DDR5 RAM and support for three 4K displays are about as good as you can get at this price point. Amazon Acemagician S3A , AMD Ryzen 7 8745HS/16GB DDR5 RAM/512GB SSD/Radeon 780M iGPU/triple 4K support — $399 (7% off on Amazon) I really like this Acemagician S3A deal for $399 because even though the discount isn’t great on its own, the overall price for these specs just can’t be beat. It’s more than capable of handling your daily workload, browsing, streaming, and even light gaming thanks to the Radeon 780M integrated graphics. Bosgame M4 Mini , Ryzen 9 7940HS/32GB RAM/1TB SSD/quad 4K support—$600 (14% off on Amazon) Another Bosgame highlight is the M4 Mini for $100 off on Amazon. A powerful Ryzen 9 processor and generous 32GB of RAM means this mini PC is more than capable of easily churning through your productivity tasks. Plus, support for up to four 4K displays allows you to run your entire multi-display configuration—home theater, desktop, etc.—all through the same space-saving centralized hub. Oh, and did I mention the RAM is DDR5 as well? GMKtec M7 , AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 6850H/16GB DDR5 RAM/1TB SSD/quad 4K support/Oculink — $470 (16% off on Amazon) Personally, I think the GMKtec M7 deal here is a sneaky bargain. Sure, it comes with less RAM than the Bosgame above and a slightly weaker CPU, but it makes up for it with additional 4K and Oculink connectivity—meaning you can easily hook up an external GPU should you decide to get your game on. GMKtec K12 , Ryzen 7 H 255/Radeon 780M/32GB RAM/512GB SSD/quad 4K support/Oculink—$600 (17% off on Amazon) Another great GMKtec deal right now is for the GMKtec K12 for $120 off on Amazon. This has the specs of a more premium mini PC, but for the price of a midrange option thanks to the discount. Not only will you have great performance capable of breezing through work and productivity tasks thanks to a Ryzen 7 processor and 32GB of DDR5 RAM, but you can also do some light gaming with the 780M GPU—or even hook up an external discrete graphics card for more demanding games thanks to the Oculink connection. Best deals on Intel mini PCs Acemagic V1 , N150/16GB RAM/1TB SSD/dual 4K support — $279 (13% off on Amazon) This deal for the Acemagic V1 is just a good overall bread-and-butter mini PC deal. The N150 processor and 16GB of DDR4 RAM means it’s powerful enough to handle your productivity and everyday work tasks. It comes with enough SSD storage to save just about everything you need—and includes an additional M.2 slot in case you want to upgrade later. It might not be fancy, but this is a good price for a mini PC that’ll be sufficient for most everyone’s needs. Geekom GT2 Mega , Intel Core Ultra 9 285H/Arc 140T/32GB DDR5 RAM/2TB SSD/quad 4K support — $1,049 (9% off on Amazon) If you’re looking for an Intel mini PC that can do it all, then the Geekom GT2 Mega is the one to buy. Packed with a Core Ultra 9 processor, DDR5 RAM, and ample 2TB of onboard SSD storage, this will easily handle everything you throw at it. It’s a full desktop replacement with a smaller footprint and cheaper price tag. Plus, thanks to the Arc 140T GPU you can do all of the esports gaming you want or even play modern AAA games at 1080p with decent frame rates. Acemagic M1 , Core i9-11900H/32GB RAM/1TB SSD/triple 4K support—$520 (35% off on Amazon) It’s not too easy to find mini PCs with powerful Intel chips right now—especially at a good prices. That’s why the Acemagic M1 for $280 off on Amazon is such a good deal. A powerful Core i9 processor combined with 32GB of DDR4 RAM and a generous 1TB of onboard SSD storage is a real bargain at this price. There is also room to expand the RAM to 64GB or add an additional M.2 PCIe 3.0 SSD if you want to upgrade in the future. Kamrui Hyper H2 Mini , Core i7-13620H/32GB RAM/1TB SSD/triple 4K support—$510 (38% off on Amazon) Similar to the above Acemagic M1, this Kamrui Hyper H2 Mini for $310 off is a good deal on Amazon. The 13th Gen Core i7 processor might not be the latest, but it’s still a mid-to-high end CPU that can churn out excellent performance with demanding multitasking and productivity work. The Hyper H2 Mini also comes with a good amount of DDR4 memory and expandable M.2 slots for up to 4GB if you decide to upgrade in the future. It’s a good all-around deal if you’re looking for a strong Intel-powered mini PC. Beelink EQi12 , Core i5-1235U/16GB RAM/500GB SSD/dual 4K support—$407 (5% off on Amazon) The Beelink EQi12 on Amazon is a budget-friendly deal for a mini PC with reliable performance features. While it isn’t the cheapest budget mini PC on offer this week, it does sit nicely right between budget and midrange. Thanks to the Core i5 processor this Beelink mini PC can handle most heavy computing tasks with ease. There is also expansion slots for an additional M.2 SSD and up to 64GB of RAM if you decide to upgrade. The only thing you should be aware of is that there aren’t as many connectivity options—only 2xHDMI ports—as some competitors so you’ll need to consider that before you buy. Mini PC deals FAQ 1. What should you look for when buying a mini PC? The first thing you have to check off your list is just what configuration you need to get your job done. Are you going to use your new mini PC for browsing only? Then a cheap budget-friendly device with a decent CPU and 16GB of RAM will do the trick. Do you want it to be able to juggle a bunch of apps and not choke on 50 browser tabs? Then a more powerful CPU and at least 32GB of RAM would be better. Do you want to do some light gaming in your downtime? Look for a device that comes with a GPU or Occulink connectivity to hook up an external GPU instead. Are you looking to utilize the mini PC as a home server? Your priority then should be a large SSD—2TB or more. There are devices for each and every one of these scenarios, and they’re all quite affordable. The best part is that mini PCs are… well, small, so they can be placed practically anywhere depending on your intended use and available space. They also support multiple monitors out of the box, which makes it easy to replace your old, larger desktop and you won’t even need to pay for extra hubs. 2. Can a mini PC replace a desktop computer? For most people, the answer is “yes”! Mini PCs are definitely powerful enough to replace desktops for most users, especially if you’re going to use it for work, browsing, or streaming movies. If you want something for photo and video editing, or even gaming, there are models that allow you to do that, but they’ll cost a bit more. If you’re into hardcore gaming, however, you’re still better off with a proper gaming PC or laptop. 3. Can a mini PC run modern games? Mostly, yes. But it will ultimately depend upon the mini PC you buy and which modern games you want to play. Some high-performance mini PCs can run modern AAA games. You might not be able to run them at the highest settings though, and performance will depend heavily on the specific hardware. If you do want to game on a mini PC, look for powerful models with dedicated discrete GPUs such as an Nvidia RTX or AMD Radeon rather than integrated graphics. Alternatively, you can opt for cloud streaming services to game on less powerful mini PCs, which bypasses the need for high-end hardware. 4. Which mini PC brands are reliable? Some of the most reliable mini PC brands are Minisforum, Beelink, GMKtec, and Geekom. Of course Apple’s Mac minis are also excellent computers if you prefer using macOS. Brands such as Asus, Lenovo, HP, and Dell all make high-quality smaller-footprint PCs, but they might not fill the same niche and/or they are typically more expensive.

Many AI founders now find it necessary to raise at valuations requiring absolute domination of the field; Brex, once valued at $12B, shows the downsides of this (Jason Lemkin/SaaStr)

Many AI founders now find it necessary to raise at valuations requiring absolute domination of the field; Brex, once valued at $12B, shows the downsides of this (Jason Lemkin/SaaStr)

Jason Lemkin / SaaStr : Many AI founders now find it necessary to raise at valuations requiring absolute domination of the field; Brex, once valued at $12B, shows the downsides of this —  Capital One just announced it's acquiring Brex for $5.15 billion.  An incredible, top .1% “exit” in less than 10 years …

Outside Parties is the creepiest Playdate game yet, and I'm kind of obsessed

Outside Parties is the creepiest Playdate game yet, and I'm kind of obsessed

Never underestimate the chilling powers of grainy grayscale imagery and ethereal whooshing sounds. Outside Parties asks, "What if I Spy , but in an alien hell dimension?", and it is impressively unnerving despite the fact that nothing's really happening at any given time. It goes all in on atmosphere, to great effect. This is the Playdate horror game that I've been waiting for. Adams Immersive's Outside Parties is a sort of scavenger hunt across a massive image of a realm called the Outside, which can only be visited by astral travel, according to the lore. There are lots of unknowns about what or where it really is, though explorers have mapped it fairly extensively through out-of-body excursions and they've encountered thousands of different entities there, including the spirits of the dead. As the player, you have come across a Hellscryer K5 — the communication device, psychic camera and recorder used for these trips — and now you're combing through the mission logs, getting sucked into the mystery of it all. Think of the K5 as your Playdate, except powered by blood and runes. At the center of Outside Parties is a 1.44 gigapixel, 360-degree panoramic HDR image which has dozens of eerie scenes hidden within it: skeletons of human, animal and paranormal origin; scary robed figures and occult symbols etched all around; what appear to be fountains and rivers of blood; a Stonehenge of teeth. These are the targets you're meant to track down, and as you hone in and check them off your list, voice signals attached to each one will reveal more and more of the explorer's spellbinding story. But this isn't a straightforward "find the object" puzzle game by any means. When you first look at the zoomed-out photo, it's akin to a strip of TV static with some heavily shadowed areas throughout. You can zoom to up to 64 times magnification to get a better look at specific zones, but you also have to adjust the image brightness using the crank to improve the clarity of the objects. Making it brighter or darker will reveal more objects in certain spots while simultaneously obscuring others. There are 150 targets according to the developer, which should take players somewhere from 10-20 hours to complete. I've been at it for hours and still have plenty left to find. (If you're stuck, you can turn to the helpful target lookup page, which provides hints with varying degrees of specificity.) All the while as you're hunched over your Playdate, laser-focused on the screen to find targets that are buried in a sea of fuzz, unsettling audio transmissions are cutting in and out, disturbing images are flashing on-screen at random and a constant atmospheric whooshing is playing in your ear. The sound design of this game is seriously brilliant — it's worth playing for that alone, not to mention all the other cool stuff. From the startup page to the menus where you'll find bits of a background story, to the creepy clips of people wailing and ominously reciting numbers, the sounds of Outside Parties make for a truly immersive, disconcerting experience that I previously wouldn't have thought possible on a Playdate. It's really something special. Outside Parties also comes with a screensaver that once again makes me yearn for the Playdate Stereo Dock . Pop on the Void Monitor, sit back, and enjoy the horrifying sights and sounds of the Outside. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/outside-parties-is-the-creepiest-playdate-game-yet-and-im-kind-of-obsessed-213142541.html?src=rss

A profile of Mercor, which pays about $2M daily to ~30K experts training AI models at $95/hour on average, with roles like radiologists earning up to $375/hour (Bethan Staton/Financial Times)

A profile of Mercor, which pays about $2M daily to ~30K experts training AI models at $95/hour on average, with roles like radiologists earning up to $375/hour (Bethan Staton/Financial Times)

Bethan Staton / Financial Times : A profile of Mercor, which pays about $2M daily to ~30K experts training AI models at $95/hour on average, with roles like radiologists earning up to $375/hour —  Tens of thousands of professionals are joining tech start-up Mercor to hone technology in their skills  —  At first Lola thought the job ads were fake.

The era of agentic AI demands a data constitution, not better prompts

The era of agentic AI demands a data constitution, not better prompts

The industry consensus is that 2026 will be the year of "agentic AI." We are rapidly moving past chatbots that simply summarize text. We are entering the era of autonomous agents that execute tasks. We expect them to book flights, diagnose system outages, manage cloud infrastructure and personalize media streams in real-time. As a technology executive overseeing platforms that serve 30 million concurrent users during massive global events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl, I have seen the unsexy reality behind the hype: Agents are incredibly fragile. Executives and VCs obsess over model benchmarks. They debate Llama 3 versus GPT-4. They focus on maximizing context window sizes. Yet they are ignoring the actual failure point. The primary reason autonomous agents fail in production is often due to data hygiene issues. In the previous era of "human-in-the-loop" analytics, data quality was a manageable nuisance. If an ETL pipeline experiences an issue, a dashboard may display an incorrect revenue number. A human analyst would spot the anomaly, flag it and fix it. The blast radius was contained. In the new world of autonomous agents , that safety net is gone. If a data pipeline drifts today, an agent doesn't just report the wrong number. It takes the wrong action . It provisions the wrong server type. It recommends a horror movie to a user watching cartoons. It hallucinates a customer service answer based on corrupted vector embeddings. To run AI at the scale of the NFL or the Olympics, I realized that standard data cleaning is insufficient. We cannot just "monitor" data. We must legislate it. A solution to this specific problem could be in the form of a ‘data quality – creed’ framework. It functions as a 'data constitution.' It enforces thousands of automated rules before a single byte of data is allowed to touch an AI model. While I applied this specifically to the streaming architecture at NBCUniversal, the methodology is universal for any enterprise looking to operationalize AI agents. Here is why "defensive data engineering" and the Creed philosophy are the only ways to survive the Agentic era. The vector database trap The core problem with AI Agents is that they trust the context you give them implicitly. If you are using RAG, your vector database is the agent’s long-term memory. Standard data quality issues are catastrophic for vector databases . In traditional SQL databases, a null value is just a null value. In a vector database, a null value or a schema mismatch can warp the semantic meaning of the entire embedding. Consider a scenario where metadata drifts. Suppose your pipeline ingests video metadata, but a race condition causes the "genre" tag to slip. Your metadata might tag a video as "live sports," but the embedding was generated from a "news clip." When an agent queries the database for "touchdown highlights," it retrieves the news clip because the vector similarity search is operating on a corrupted signal. The agent then serves that clip to millions of users. At scale, you cannot rely on downstream monitoring to catch this. By the time an anomaly alarm goes off, the agent has already made thousands of bad decisions. Quality controls must shift to the absolute "left" of the pipeline. The "Creed" framework: 3 principles for survival The Creed framework is expected to act as a gatekeeper. It is a multi-tenant quality architecture that sits between ingestion sources and AI models. For technology leaders looking to build their own "constitution," here are the three non-negotiable principles I recommend. 1. The "quarantine" pattern is mandatory: In many modern data organizations, engineers favor the "ELT" approach. They dump raw data into a lake and clean it up later. For AI Agents, this is unacceptable. You cannot let an agent drink from a polluted lake. The Creed methodology enforces a strict "dead letter queue." If a data packet violates a contract, it is immediately quarantined. It never reaches the vector database. It is far better for an agent to say "I don't know" due to missing data than to confidently lie due to bad data. This "circuit breaker" pattern is essential for preventing high-profile hallucinations. 2. Schema is law: For years, the industry moved toward "schemaless" flexibility to move fast. We must reverse that trend for core AI pipelines. We must enforce strict typing and referential integrity. In my experience, a robust system requires scale. The implementation I oversee currently enforces more than 1,000 active rules running across real-time streams. These aren't just checking for nulls. They check for business logic consistency. Example: Does the "user_segment" in the event stream match the active taxonomy in the feature store? If not, block it. Example: Is the timestamp within the acceptable latency window for real-time inference? If not, drop it. 3. Vector consistency checks This is the new frontier for SREs . We must implement automated checks to ensure that the text chunks stored in a vector database actually match the embedding vectors associated with them. "Silent" failures in an embedding model API often leave you with vectors that point to nothing. This causes agents to retrieve pure noise. The culture war: Engineers vs. governance Implementing a framework like Creed is not just a technical challenge. It is a cultural one. Engineers generally hate guardrails. They view strict schemas and data contracts as bureaucratic hurdles that slow down deployment velocity. When introducing a data constitution, leaders often face pushback. Teams feel they are returning to the "waterfall" era of rigid database administration. To succeed, you must flip the incentive structure. We demonstrated that Creed was actually an accelerator. By guaranteeing the purity of the input data, we eliminated the weeks data scientists used to spend debugging model hallucinations. We turned data governance from a compliance task into a "quality of service" guarantee. The lesson for data decision makers If you are building an AI strategy for 2026, stop buying more GPUs. Stop worrying about which foundation model is slightly higher on the leaderboard this week. Start auditing your data contracts. An AI Agent is only as autonomous as its data is reliable. Without a strict, automated data constitution like the Creed framework, your agents will eventually go rogue. In an SRE’s world, a rogue agent is far worse than a broken dashboard. It is a silent killer of trust, revenue, and customer experience. Manoj Yerrasani is a senior technology executive.