Affordable Japanese mini PC with 16 GB RAM and Ryzen 5 goes on sale

Links is a prominent Japanese manufacturer of computer hardware, headquartered in Tokyo. The company is well known in the western world for a good number of small form factor and fanless mini PCs. Its latest offering, the LC7530, is positioned rather uniquely.

Measuring in at just 12.8 by 12.8 by 4.13 cm, or roughly 5 by 5 by 1.6 inches, the LC7530 mini PC is extremely compact, weighing in at around 610 g. This compactness, however, comes with a rather disappointing performance downgrade.

To put it precisely, the mini PC is powered by a rather old AMD Ryzen 5 7530U chip with six cores and twelve threads and a boost clock of 4.5 GHz. The chip is paired with 16 GB of LPDDR4 3200 RAM. Unfortunately, the RAM is not user-upgradable. 

The Ryzen 5 7530U powering the mini PC performs well enough in moderately intensive tasks, but is definitely held back by its aging Zen 3 architecture from almost three years ago. In synthetic benchmarks, the chip performs at the same level as an Apple M1 or an Intel Core Ultra 5 226V Lunar Lake chip.

In simpler terms, the Ryzen 5 chip should be able to handle the majority of moderately intensive workloads. That said, anything too demanding will almost certainly bring the mini PC its knees.

The mini PC has no room for discrete graphics and is therefore solely reliant on the RX Vega 7 iGPU with seven CUs based on the almost six-year-old Vega architecture. As a result, the iGPU is almost half as slow as a modern Intel Arc 140V found in many mid-range mini PCs. 

Clearly, only the least demanding of tasks and low-end gaming will be possible on the mini PC.

The I/O on offer is pretty decent and has been detailed below:

• 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2, 4x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A
• USB-C 10 Gbps
• HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4
• 1 Gbps LAN
• Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2
• 3.5 mm audio jack

The LC7530 mini PC is already on sale over in Japan, priced at roughly ¥95,000 (~$593) for the 16 GB DDR4 variant with 512 GB storage. Customers can also import the mini PC via Rakuten's official global shipping program.

Folks who would rather not go through the hassle of importing can also check out the Geekom AX8 Max featuring the Ryzen 7 8745HS APU, currently available for around $584 on Amazon.