System builders in the small form factor (SFF) niche absolutely love cramming the most powerful parts into the smallest case possible, and making it look good in the process. But desktop manufacturers seem to have a lower limit on these designs.
One boutique builder seems to have busted through it, though. The MegaMini G1 is… well, it’s just the cutest lil guy.
We’ve seen preliminary designs for the MegaMini G1 a few times this year, including at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress. But now the manufacturers — mini PC specialist Geekom and general electronics brand Tecno — are ready to start selling.
Well, almost. It’s up on Kickstarter now with an early bird price of $1,500 and a shipping date set for November 2024.
The itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, Intel-powered mini PC packs a 13th-gen Intel Core i7 processor and a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 discrete graphics card into a case that’s just 255mm tall and 150mm square at the base. That’s a volume under six liters. (For comparison, the current go-to favorite MiniITX case, Fractal Design’s Terra, is 10.4 liters.)
But this thing isn’t just tiny. It’s a showpiece! The MegaMini G1’s case is a sleek vertical affair with windows on three sides, showing off the custom heat exchanger and four transparent pipes running to an L-shaped radiator on the rear. Geekom says the package is under 36 decibels for noise, compared to 45 to 60 for a standard PC. Note the internal RGB lighting and small LCD screen on the top to show off status messages.
I’m impressed by the port selection. You get four USB-A ports and a headphone jack on the front, and around the back you get two more USB-A ports, double USB-C, double HDMI, DisplayPort, and a full Ethernet jack. Not bad at all for a mini PC.
Naturally, there are going to be some compromises. The CPU and GPU are both laptop parts, so this is essentially a gaming laptop with the screen and keyboard replaced with a massive cooling system. (That’s how they’ve crammed all those ports down into the bottom.) You’ll also have to make do with laptop SO-DIMM RAM (32GB on the base model). Both 1TB and 2TB SSDs are offered, allegedly with dual M.2 slots.
But if you can replace the RAM or storage, the campaign isn’t saying so. So, yeah, this is a fairly one-off design with very limited upgrade options, no matter what the video says about AI TOPS and how it “performs just as well as any top-notch workstation.” Maybe a top-notch workstation from five or six years ago.
For the price, you can build an SFF PC — or even buy another mini PC based on laptop parts, like the Asus ROG NUC — that’s going to stomp it in terms of number-crunching power.
Still, if you’ve always dreamed of having the smallest, cutest gaming PC on the block, this might be your way in. Just don’t expect to beat out some less-stylish machines in terms of performance.
