Ayaneo's Macintosh Style Retro Mini PC AM01 Is Here, Hands-On
The next product in Ayaneo's Remake Collection has arrived. The Retro Mini PC AM01 is technically Ayaneo's first mini PC, although one could argue that the company's many x86-based handheld gaming systems also qualify. Still, this is the company's first machine without an attached screen or gaming controls, and you can snag it right now for $150 if you're fast.
We wrote about it back when Ayaneo first revealed the Remake Collection, but in case you're new to the product, the AM01 is a mini PC styled after the original Macintosh. The aspect ratio of the faux screen isn't quite correct, but nevertheless the resemblance is clear. As you'd expect from an Ayaneo product, it's based around an AMD mobile processor.
You can see the full specifications above, but the short version is that you get a full-featured mini-PC with up to 64GB of DDR4 memory and up to 2TB of NVMe storage. The machine also has a 2.5" bay for a single SATA-III SSD. It has Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 as well as Gigabit Ethernet, and there's a decent little bundle of USB ports including a USB 3.2 Type-C port as well as a handful of USB Type-A connections. HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4, and a 3.5mm audio jack round out the connectivity.
The AM01 can be had with your choice of either a Ryzen 7 5700U or Ryzen 3 3200U SoC inside. Neither of those are exactly current-generation processors, with the Ryzen 7 5700U implementing AMD's Zen 2 architecture, while the Ryzen 3 3200U is based on Zen+. The 5700U sports fully eight cores, though, and they'll clock all the way up to 4.3 GHz if cooling and power limits allow.
The Ryzen 3 3200U is considerably punier with just two Zen+ cores, but then, that's why you can pick up that machine with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD for $150. That's early bird pricing, and you'll have to jump in quick to get that deal, but even the $199 regular price is pretty reasonable for a complete system. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 7 5700U machine starts at $219 for a barebone—a crazy value considering you get an eight-core CPU, motherboard, case, and power supply.
It's hard to overstate how tiny this thing is.
We actually have the Ryzen 7 5700U model of the Retro Mini PC AM01 in for testing, and we'll have a review of the machine for you sooner than later. Let us know if there are any specific workloads or capabilities that you're interested to see tested on Ayaneo's new baby, or, if you want one right now, head over to the Indiegogo campaign to pre-order.
