Unboxing it
The AMR5 comes in a normal box, but when you open it you’ll see a transparent piece of paper telling you about the three different power modes of the mini-PC (more on this later!). Inside the box is a user manual, a power supply (with power cable), an HDMI cable, and of course the mini-PC itself.
The looks
It’s a standing design that’s very sci-fi, obviously aimed at appealing to gamers like me. One of the most prominent features is the power button on the top. It looks like a sniper scope and incorporates the on/off button, but you can also turn it to select one out of three performance modes:
Silent mode for simple office tasks or media playingA medium mode if you’re for instance doing Photoshop or keeping 80 tabs open in ChromeA high-performance mode for gaming or video editing
It’s a clever piece of coding, that basically controls the speed of the fans and the power consumption through a physical turn-button. You could set this up yourself on any PC with a piece of software for Windows, but the fact they integrated it is nice. The silent mode is probably a bit more energy-efficient as well. The ARM5 has two slabs of grey hard-plastic on the side, and a black layered block in the middle, obviously optimized for cooling. The sides have lights inside, for which you can choose the modes ‘Breath’, ‘Cycle’, ‘Rainbow’, and off. (I personally love the Cycle one.) The lights definitely add to the atmosphere while gaming. One thing I’ll say about the looks is that it becomes a character almost, at least to me. It’s small — the size of my hand — yet looks like a cool gadget. I haven’t given it a name like “Wall-E”, but I’ve definitely fallen in love with this fella powering my games (and sometimes… working at home). Looks are a feature for a mini-PC because you put it on top of your desk, which is pretty visible.
Performance
I’ve been very reluctant to buy a mini-PC for gaming because either the performance is pretty bad, or they’ll cost well above $1500. But the AMR5 is way cheaper and still comes with stellar performances. Let’s go through the specs. It operates with Windows 11 Pro (fully licensed). It’s powered by an AMD Rayzen 5 CPU, you can choose the 4500U or 5600U version. For GPU it runs AMD Radeon™ Graphics, with 7 graphic cores, and a frequency of 1800 MHz, and supports the latest DirectX 12. For memory, there’s a 16GB DDR4 memory and a 256GB SSD hard drive. The RAM memory is expandable to an outrageous 64GB. (You can easily take off the right side of the AMR5, which is held by magnets, and add more memory in the slots). If you want to expand the hard drive, you need to purchase the 512GB option, or expand to a maximum of 2TB. If those numbers don’t say a lot to you, let me say I played GTA5 on 1080P settings and still it goes smoothly beyond 60FPS, much like many other games I quickly tried: Fortnite, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch 2. (I played on a single monitor.) I prefer to use cables but the AMR5 also has WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. On the front of the AMR5, you’ll find a regular audio jack, two normal USB plugs, and a USB-C one. On the back are another two normal USBs, a LAN plug (1Gbps), and a DC plug for power. You can do dual-screen easily with the HDMI & Display Port which both support 4K, even triple screens if you use the USB-C on the front (also supporting 4K).
Cooling & sound
The cooling of the AMR5 is done quite well, and this is actually where the standing design comes in, with air sucked in from the front and pushed out the back — through copper components for better heat transfer. You can push the AMR5 to the maximum and the fans inside will react and blow more air through the internals. It’s not noisy at all, but if you like me put the mini-PC in the same as where you sleep, you may want to keep the sound from the fans to a bare minimum at some times. For instance, if you’re downloading stuff overnight, or just want to watch a movie (and you don’t need the high performance or energy consumption). This is where the three performance modes mentioned earlier come in. This directly affects the balance between cooling and the sound of the fans — so it’s great you have the choice.
Summary & where to buy
It’s not like the AMR5 is the highest-performance PC that money can buy — for that you’d have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. But it is a really high-performance rig that happens to be a mini-PC. And a great-looking one as well, which I’m sure will attract a lot of gamers, including me.
