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Mar 10, 2025

The 3 Best Mini Desktop PCs of 2025 | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Dave Gershgorn Dave Gershgorn is a writer covering monitors, laptops, and tablets. He is a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation. We've updated the What to look

By Dave Gershgorn

Dave Gershgorn is a writer covering monitors, laptops, and tablets. He is a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation.

We've updated the What to look forward to section of this guide with the new Mac Studio models, and details of other mini PCs we'll be testing for an upcoming update.

If you’re looking for a simple, small desktop computer that doesn’t take up much space in your home or office, consider a mini PC. These computers are best for everyday tasks like working on documents and spreadsheets, browsing the web, taking video calls, or watching TV. However, our top picks are also powerful enough for editing media or compiling code.

We think the best mini PC for most people is the Mac mini with Apple’s M4 processor. This tiny, powerful desktop operates silently without fans, and the M4 model has USB-C ports on the front, making it even more desk-friendly. It’s also fast enough to compile code or do some light video editing.

We’ll be testing new options for Windows users soon.

The Mac mini offers excellent performance, and the system’s fan is whisper-quiet even when you’re editing photos or videos or compiling code.

We like the Mac mini with Apple’s M4 processor because it’s powerful enough for everyday work or school tasks, has a new design that includes USB-C ports on its front, and operates silently without any fans. It has the same access to Apple services like iMessage and FaceTime as MacBooks and other Macs, but you need to supply your own monitor, mouse, and keyboard.

Keep in mind that you can’t upgrade the Mac mini’s memory or storage after you buy it, so you need to make that decision up front. Apple’s internal-storage upgrades are pricey enough that you should look at an external hard drive or a portable SSD if you need more space.

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Dave Gershgorn has reviewed and covered technology since 2015 at publications such as Popular Science, Quartz, Medium, and now Wirecutter. As a senior staff writer, he covers all computer displays for Wirecutter and is a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation. He has also built, repaired, and largely avoided frying his own computers since 2006.

Mini PCs are small computers that cram all the components of a desktop tower into a box the size of a paperback. There’s no attached display, mouse, or keyboard, so you have to buy your own. (Check out our guides to the best monitors for our recommendations on which one is best for you.) Despite these desktops’ small size, they’re more than powerful enough for browsing the web, handling basic photo and video editing, and working in documents or large spreadsheets.

Unlike ultrabooks or most all-in-one PCs, Windows mini PCs are easy to upgrade if you want to add more memory or storage, and they have all the ports you need to connect two or three monitors and your favorite keyboard, mouse, and webcam. The size of a mini PC prevents much expansion, but you can upgrade the storage and the memory on most Windows models, and some allow you to swap out the CPU, too. Instead of having a dedicated graphics card, you’re usually stuck with integrated graphics, so don’t expect a mini PC to have enough power to play many modern games; you can add an external graphics dock if your mini PC supports Thunderbolt 3 or higher, but such docks tend to be large and expensive.

Two of Apple’s flagship desktops fit into this mini PC category, and they’re a bit different from Windows mini PCs. They’re not upgradable and repairable—instead they contain desktop versions of the same powerful guts found in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Their chips are power-efficient, and they’re nearly silent, since they don’t require much cooling from fans to keep running smoothly; the Mac mini has one, but it’s almost unnoticeably quiet.

You can find mini PCs for less than $250, but Windows PCs in that price range have unusably slow processors and less memory and storage than most people need. We did not look at cheap, single-board computers, such as those from Raspberry Pi, nor would we include them in our definition of the term “mini PC.” Those ARM-based computers are slow, geared toward hobbyists, and designed to use custom Linux software.

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Here’s what we look for in a good mini PC:

We also consider the following features, but their presence has no effect on our recommendations:

After we settled on the hardware criteria, we searched the websites of major PC manufacturers such as Acer, Apple, Asus, Dell, HP, Intel, and Lenovo—and poked around in the inventory of smaller manufacturers such as Gigabyte, MSI, Shuttle, and Zotac—to find models to test.

We started our tests by booting up each mini PC and then running all available updates to the operating system and hardware.

We then ran benchmarking software, which we used to repeat the same test on multiple computers to gauge their relative speed. We used Geekbench 6, Geekbench AI, Cinebench 2024, and our own functional tests in creative applications like Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve Studio. We also set each mini PC up and used it for at least a day of work.

This process usually consisted of running a web browser with at least 15 tabs open at a time (Google Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Slack, Twitch streams, YouTube videos, and plenty more), streaming music through the Spotify desktop application, video chatting, and recording audio. This real-world testing allowed us to get a feel for how each mini PC performed on a daily basis, and it also gave us time to discover any quirks related to bloatware or driver issues.

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The Mac mini offers excellent performance, and the system’s fan is whisper-quiet even when you’re editing photos or videos or compiling code.

The Mac mini with Apple’s M4 processor is fast, tiny, and silent in its operation, all of which make it the best mini PC we’ve tested. Apple’s M4 processor is the same chip that powers the iPad Pro, iMac, and some 14-inch MacBook Pro models, and in our tests it has proven to be fast enough for work or school projects. We opened dozens of tabs, typed documents, and streamed video on the new Mac mini, and it significantly slowed down only when we opened more than a dozen tabs at once or edited large videos.

It has a fast processor that’s great for everyday tasks. The 2024 Mac mini’s M4 processor makes it about as fast as the new 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro, so it’s great for web browsing, document and spreadsheet work, and casual photo editing yet still usable in a pinch for professional tasks like app development and video editing. If you plan to use it mainly as a day-to-day computer, the basic $600 version with 16 GB of memory works just fine. If you want to run professional apps, getting 32 GB of memory is worth paying an extra $200, since you can’t upgrade the Mac mini yourself after buying it. Apple’s storage upgrades are similarly expensive, so we recommend buying an external hard drive or a portable SSD rather than paying Apple’s prices.

It has more ports than a MacBook. The M4 Mac mini has five USB-C ports, three of which are located on its back; two USB-C ports, plus a headphone jack, reside on its front. Previous Mac mini models had only rear ports, and the M4 version’s layout makes it way easier to plug in flash drives or other accessories. The M4 Mac mini also has an HDMI port, an Ethernet port, and an AC power jack.

It supports up to three displays. If you’re the multi-monitor menace at your office, the M4 Mac mini can now power up to three 5K displays, rather than the two monitors previously supported.

Apple’s storage upgrades are expensive, so we recommend buying an external hard drive or a portable SSD rather than paying Apple’s prices.

It’s the smallest Mac mini yet. Apple redesigned the M4 Mac mini to be significantly smaller than previous generations, at just 5 inches wide, 5 inches deep, and 2 inches tall. It really disappears on a desk and is short enough to fit under a monitor. As part of this redesign, Apple moved the power button to the underside of the computer, which is pretty inconvenient.

It runs silently. The Apple M4 version of the Mac mini is barely audible even when you’re playing a game or encoding video files. Apple’s chips, originally designed to fit into small, fanless iPhones and iPads, are more efficient than Intel’s, so they generate less heat and use less power. In laptops like the MacBook Air, that manifests as a few extra hours of battery life. In a desktop computer like the Mac mini, it means that the system doesn’t need a loud fan, and your power bills will be a little lower.

It comes with Apple’s standard one-year warranty. Extending that coverage to three years with AppleCare+ costs $99; doing so also adds accidental-damage protection and three years of “priority access to tech support.”

The Mac mini cannot be repaired or upgraded at home. In this regard it stands in stark contrast to our Windows pick, which is one of the most repairable PCs that we recommend. Apple’s choice to make its devices non-upgradable means that if you run out of storage on your Mac mini, you won’t be able to swap out its storage drive to gain more space. Your only options are to buy an external hard drive (though some synced iCloud services like iMessage cannot be stored on external devices), to buy Apple’s cloud storage for a monthly cost, or to buy a new Mac mini.

Apple offers paltry storage sizes for entry-level devices. Part of what makes Apple products compelling is the suite of great applications that sync across all its devices, such as iMessage and Photos. Unfortunately, the size of Apple’s default storage drives hasn’t grown as quickly as the number of people who take photos and send them to their friends. And larger drives are extremely costly, adding hundreds of dollars over the typical market price to the cost of the Mac mini. Long-term Apple fans who have years’ worth of saved photos, videos, and messages and who don’t want to pay for iCloud must now pay a premium to store all that data on their own drives.

Gaming mini PCs promise full gaming capabilities in a package smaller than most game consoles, but they don’t make sense for most people. Gaming mini PCs are considerably pricier than the models in this guide, and buying one is usually much more expensive than building a larger PC yourself. They run hot, which can lead to a shorter lifetime for the components. The components are slower than what you get in a midrange gaming PC, and you’re usually limited in the kinds of CPU and GPU upgrades you can perform when you need more speed. In most instances, you should still stick to a gaming PC in a Mini-ITX case if you’re looking for something small, because such a PC will have better cooling, cost less to build, and be easier to upgrade later on. If you’re more concerned about portability, a gaming laptop is a better option.

You can also find a slew of mini PCs sold with more limited Intel Celeron and Pentium processors, which might be fine for emulating games from older consoles but don’t meet the processing-power threshold that we set for daily use. If you’re looking for a mini PC to emulate retro games, the reviews posted by the YouTube channel ETA Prime are thorough and widely sample the category.

A handful of other powerful barebones gaming mini PCs exist, but most of them come from smaller companies like ASRock and Zotac and have shorter warranties and worse support. They’re also harder to find and to buy, and their makers haven’t always updated them to use the newest processors and GPUs.

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If you’re looking for a mini PC we haven’t mentioned for daily use or to replace a desktop tower, consider the recommendations we outline in the How we picked section as you shop for one. The configuration should include a 13th-generation Intel processor, at least 8 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of SSD storage.

Mini PCs have other uses, however, like acting as small servers to host websites or the Plex media-management app. For these specialized situations, you could relax our stated requirements for the latest processors and go down to 4 GB of RAM, and wind up saving quite a bit of money on an older mini PC. We don’t recommend going older than the 10th generation of Intel processors, however, since at that point your system would really start to run slow on modern applications. We also don’t recommend Celeron or Pentium processors, which are unlikely to be powerful enough to handle anything but the simplest computing tasks.

Apple announced a new version of the Mac Studio, its high-powered desktop mini PC that’s traditionally competed with computers many times larger. The new Mac Studio has the M4 Max chip that’s currently found in the MacBook Pro, and a new M3 Ultra chip that Apple says will be nearly twice as fast as the M4 Max versions. The mini PC will otherwise be outfitted with USB-C ports certified for Thunderbolt 5, an upcoming evolution of Thunderbolt 4 that can achieve speeds up to 120 Gigabits per second (compared to Thunderbolt 4’s 40 Gigabits per second maximum).

The M4 Max version of the Mac Studio starts at $2,000, and comes with 36 GB of unified memory, which acts as memory for both the computer’s CPU and GPU, and it can be configured with up to 96 GB of memory. The M4 Max equipped Mac Studio starts with 512 GB of internal storage, which can be upgraded up to 8 TB, though buying the maximum amount does add $2,400 to the price tag. It will support up to five external displays, with four Thunderbolt 5 ports on its back, and two slower 10 Gigabit per second USB-C ports on the front.

The M3 Ultra version starts at $4,000 and comes with 96 GB of unified memory, but can be configured with up to 512 GB for those with incredibly demanding AI workloads or cinema-level 3D rendering. It can also hold up to 16TB of internal storage, though that configuration does cost about $10,000 on Apple’s website. It supports up to eight external displays, with four Thunderbolt 5 ports on its back and two on its front.

The Mac Studios will be available March 12, and we’ll update this guide shortly after with our review. Additionally, we’ll be testing a new batch of mini PCs from smaller manufacturers, including the Aoostar GEM12 Pro Max, Beelink GTi14 Ultra, Beelink SER8, Khadas Mind 2, Minisforum AI370, and the Minisforum AI X1 Pro.

We also saw a slew of new mini PCs at the CES 2025 tech trade show, just in time for our latest round of testing.

Asus acquired Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC) business in 2023, and has four different mini PCs we’re interested in testing. The NUC 14 Pro AI+ is built around Intel’s latest Core Ultra Series 2 processors, with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and a fingerprint reader. The 14 Pro AI+ also has an E Ink screen on its top with customizable graphics, but we can’t tell whether you can have the display show useful stats like internal temperatures. It’s a Copilot+ PC, meaning it meets Microsoft’s standards to support local generative AI models. The NUC 15 Pro is a more streamlined mini PC with Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors, but none of the Copilot branding or extra buttons. It has Thunderbolt 4 ports, Bluetooth 5.4, Wi-Fi 7, but in a more subtle case than the 14 Pro AI. The NUC 15 Pro+ is nearly identical to the base NUC 15, but it’s slightly larger and has access to the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H processor, rather than just the Core Ultra 7 lineup. It’s supposed to have better cooling than the 15 Pro as well.

Asus’s ExpertCenter PN54 pivots away from Intel with the AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 APU, which is a CPU with a built-in graphics processor. It has the same Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity, but has dual 2.5 gigabit ethernet ports. It also has a Copilot button in addition to its power button.

The Asus NUCs we saw in person all seemed easily upgradeable, with easy latches to remove the bottom panel to access internal components. All of these mini PCs also have two USB-A ports and a USB-C on their front, which gives easy access to the ports most likely to be used by accessories. We don’t have exact pricing or a release timeline for these NUCs, but we expect to see them sometime in the first quarter of this year.

Acer announced a mini PC called the Revo Box AI, also built around the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors. It will be configurable with up to 32 GB of RAM, comes with Wi-Fi 6E, and has dual 2.5 gigabit ethernet jacks. It will start at $800 and launch in Q2 2025.

We recommended an older version of the HP Z2 Mini G1i, and are looking forward to seeing HP’s newest model. It’s larger than most mini PCs we test, but houses a powerful Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 processor and up to 128 GB of unified memory. This AMD architecture could be very competitive with Apple’s M4 Pro chips, especially for those who do a lot of media editing and could use a larger pool of fast memory. We don’t have pricing or availability yet.

The Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini x can come equipped with either a Qualcomm Snapdragon X or Snapdragon X Plus processor, up to 32 GB of RAM, and Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. It looks a bit more pared down than the competition, with one USB-A and one USB-C port on its front. It will be available in April starting at $660.

We’re looking to test mini PCs from smaller manufacturers, and will be evaluating the Minisforum EliteMini AI370 and the Minisforum AI X1 Pro. Both these mini PCs use the powerful AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, which also powers the Asus ProArt P16, one of our top picks for video editing, so we’re interested in how the processors will perform in a different cooling structure. The AI X1 Pro goes on sale at the end of January, and the $1,099 EliteMini AI370 is on sale now. We’ll be testing both in the coming weeks.

Finally, MSI is making a mini PC called the MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 2M. Like our previous top pick, the HP Pro Mini 400, the Cubi NUC AI+ 2M can be powered directly over USB-C by a monitor that can output 100W. This means your desk setup could run on just two cables: one power cable for your monitor, and one cable connecting your monitor to your PC. We really are living in the future—or might be once MSI releases pricing and availability for this mini PC.

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The HP Z2 Mini G9 had some drawbacks that prevented us from making it a pick. In our tests, our upgrade pick, the Apple Mac mini with an M2 Pro processor, proved to be more than 30% faster at certain tasks, especially multi-core tasks such as media editing. The Mac mini was also whisper-quiet, even under heavy load, whereas the Intel processor in the Z2 Mini required a fan, which audibly kicked on while it was handling that same workload.

We tested the Dell OptiPlex 3000 Micro and found it very similar to the HP Pro Mini 400 G9. The two computers are available with similar processors, RAM, and storage configurations, but the HP model is less expensive and more flexible in terms of configuration. Most important, the Pro Mini 400 also has a USB-C port. If the HP model is out of stock or wildly more expensive than $800, or if you don’t care about USB-C, this Dell model is a comparable purchase.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q Tiny, M80q Tiny, and M90q Tiny are virtually indistinguishable, as they provide most of the same ports and processor options. Compared with the HP Pro Mini 400 G9, however, they cost more for less RAM, storage, and processing power, and Lenovo systems have had fluctuating pricing and availability this year, likely due to supply-chain issues.

As a general rule for any mini PC, you can skip models that use older 9th- or 10th-generation Intel processors, as those processors are aging and will receive support for a shorter amount of time.

We used to recommend Chromeboxes as a low-cost alternative to mini PCs for people who need only to surf the web and check email, and who mainly rely on Google services. However, new Chromeboxes with modern processors aren’t released as often as Chromebooks, and generally Chromebooks offer a better value for those people who don’t need a full PC.

For more details, read our guide to the best Chromebooks.

Apple has another version of the Mac mini with an M4 Pro processor, which offers more graphics processing power and faster memory. We’re still testing the M4 Pro processor to confirm that the increase in performance is in line with the system’s higher base price of $1,400.

The latest version of this article was edited by Arthur Gies and Caitlin McGarry.

Dave Gershgorn

I am based in Seattle and responsible for Wirecutter’s computer monitor coverage, as well as all our guides to Apple laptops and desktops. I also review higher-powered laptops, such as business laptops and laptops for photo and video editing. Plus, I write our reviews for all-in-one computers, ergonomic keyboards, and home 3D printers. If it has a screen, sits on a desk, and isn’t a basic Windows ultrabook, I’m usually the person to try it out.

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