Mini-PC for gaming?

[MC.Morrado]

I was wondering if there is a mini-PC that has better performance than my current Micro-ATX STGAubron PC with an i7-3770, 32GB DDR3, boots Windows 10 on SATA SSD, and has an 8GB AMD Radeon RX 580 2048SP.

 

Mini-PC's are good for downsizing and was looking into one since I mainly deal with old chunky computer towers and potato laptops at home. For me the only criteria besides being faster than my current PC (and a better GPU), is NVMe storage and 32GB of DDR5

[OhYou_]

im currently waiting on an asrock deskmini x600 on backorder.
for the price on newegg it's hard to beat, slap a 9700x in it and go

it's igpu only though

[Ha-Satan]

If you're talking about CPU performance, yeah there are tons of mini-PCs with CPUs that are way faster than the i7-3770. Like, basically any mini-PC that you can currently buy new will be almost certainly faster than the 3770 (though you probably still want to look for something that is a Ryzen or Core CPU instead of one of the lower-end Intel CPUs like the N150).

 

The GPU side is harder, because realistically the only integrated graphics solution that meaningfully beats the RX 580 (even the 2048SP version) is going to be AMD's latest Strix Halo GPUs like the 8060M. The last-gen 890M is only about on-par with the 580 in most tests that I have seen. The Strix Halo CPUs are starting to show up in mini-PCs but there aren't a ton that I have found yet and they are very expensive to the point that you might as well just build your own ITX system.

 

There are also a few mini-PCs with dedicated laptop GPUs in them, like the Minisforum Nucxi5/Nucxi7, but they are once again very expensive for the performance you get.

 

I've looked into this a lot in the past few years because right now I just have my mid tower gaming PC stuffed behind my TV for gaming, and it would be nice to replace it with something smaller, but when I look at the actual price-to-performance of mini-PCs for gaming, I always end up deciding that my setup is just fine, actually.