The novelty of having a palm-sized desktop PC can wear off once you realize that, in terms of performance, it sort of just gets by. “Meh” is not the reaction you want to have for a brand-new desktop PC, even if it’s saving you money upfront. GMKtec’s G10 Mini PC is not a “meh” machine at all — it can outperform many of its bigger full-tower rivals and even some of the big-brand laptops. It’s well worth the new Amazon Black Friday price of $219, which is 27% less than its full retail $300 tag for a limited time.
GMKtec has managed to stuff all sorts of goodies and useful features into this 2-pound package, starting with an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U processor that can hit 3.7GHz when you put the pedal to the metal for multitasking, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe solid-state storage drive, and integrated Radeon Vega 8 graphics that’s powerful enough (1200 MHz) to run up to three external monitors. There’s also room under the hook to expand that RAM to 64GB and enough expansion slots and ports to drive the storage as high as 16TB.
The Underdog Wins
That AMD Ryzen 5 processor and Radeon Vega 8 integrated graphics might not grab your eye if you’re just skimming Amazon listings for Intel products. Which would be understandable since Intel is the gold standard for PC processors. But the Ryzen 5 3500U that’s at the heart of the GMKtec G10 has more than held its own in benchmark tests against Intel’s N-Series chips and often beats them, and for less money overall.
You can feel free to push the processor and the rest of the GMKtec G10 as hard as you want or need to, because all that hard work isn’t going to cause any internal meltdowns thanks to the tiny turbo cooling fan built into the mini PC’s body. That little fan can crank all day long, and do it quietly — 35 decibels, which is slightly louder than the sound of breathing.
All the Connections
The most important connections, of course, are the ones that get you on the internet, and the GMKtec G10 has Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 along with a super-fast 2.5GB Ethernet jack. From there the connections are all about expansion and the ability to turn the GMKtec G10 into the hub of your workstation, and in that regard it’s fully loaded — dual USB-A 3.2 ports in the front, and a full array in the back, including HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4, along with two USB-C ports (one for data) and another USB-A 2.0.
Jumping at this limited-time Amazon deal taking 27% off the price of the GMKtec MIni PC isn’t settling. It’s grabbing a more-than-proficient desktop PC that can run up to 3 external monitors and handle all of your workload and then some for a great price — it’s just $190 while this deal lasts.
