With Amazon Prime Day just a few weeks away, here’s one deal you may want to grab right now. #
This mini PC from Yxk is on sale on Amazon for just under $120 – in comparison, the Mac Mini M4 costs $599.
I have not seen anything offering better value for money than the S15 – and it is now at an all-time, record low price, making it cheaper than even a Raspberry Pi 5 barebone PC.
Today’s best mini PC deal
Like Apple’s diminutive personal computer, it has 16GB of RAM and 512GB system storage.
However, it does offer a slower but yet capable quad-core Intel N100 CPU that should be enough for a wide range of tasks including office and media consumption (think NAS, video surveillance or HTPC).
Unlike many of its peers, it adopts a design similar to that of business thin clients (think Dell Wyse). Perched on a stand, its chassis has a lot of holes for cooling but no VESA mount which is a let down for anyone keen on hide it behind a monitor.
It has a solid number of ports (six USB, including a Type-C one that can drive a 4K monitor), one DisplayPort, one HDMI, capable of handling one 4K screen each and two separate audio connectors.
Corners have been cut though to reach this price point although they are relatively minor.
There’s only one SODIMM slot (so no dual channel performance boost), the SSD is SATA rather than PCIe (so you take a hit on system performance) and there’s no memory card. Other than that though, it’s a clean sheet: Windows 11 Pro, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 and a Gigabit Ethernet port for fast wired broadband.
And the Apple Mac Mini M4 can’t match the fact that (a) it can be upgraded and (b) it supports Ubuntu and other Linux distros (e.g. Mint). There’s simply nothing in this price range to rival it when it comes to sheer value for your dollar.
For those curious about the performance difference between the N100, N95, N97, N150 processors, here’s a table from Passmark Software, the developers of the popular CPU Benchmark. It clearly shows there’s hardly any difference (less than 5%) between the fastest CPU (the N97) and the slowest one (the N95).
