Bosgame's new mini PC pairs a $250 price tag with a curious AMD Ryzen CPU

Bosgame has quietly added another inexpensive mini PC to its line-up. Dubbed the E2 Plus, the new model combines relatively basic hardware with an unusual AMD Ryzen processor that appears to be finding its way into more budget mini PCs.

The Bosgame E2 Plus is powered by the Ryzen 5 3501U, a quad-core APU with eight threads, a 2.1 GHz base clock and a maximum boost clock of 3.7 GHz. Despite its somewhat unfamiliar name, however, the processor is based on AMD's decidedly old Picasso silicon and Zen+ CPU architecture.

Curiously, there appears to be little separating the Ryzen 5 3501U from the Ryzen 5 3500U that AMD introduced years earlier. Both use four Zen+ CPU cores with SMT, clocked between 2.1 GHz and 3.7 GHz, alongside a Vega 8 iGPU running at up to 1.2 GHz. Cache sizes, memory support and the 15 W default TDP are identical, too. Thus, at least on paper, AMD appears to have bestowed a new model number upon what is effectively the same Picasso APU.

Bosgame complements the Ryzen 5 3501U with 8 GB of DDR4 memory and a 256 GB SATA SSD in the base configuration. Memory is upgradeable to 32 GB, thus giving the diminutive system at least some room for expansion despite its budget positioning.

The E2 Plus can also drive up to three displays simultaneously at 4K and 60 Hz. Display connectivity consists of two HDMI outputs and a USB Type-C port, while Gigabit Ethernet is available for wired networking. Bosgame also ships the machine with Windows 11 Pro. At the time of writing, Bosgame has priced the E2 Plus at $249.99 through its online store. That price puts it firmly towards the inexpensive end of the mini-PC market, although the use of SATA storage and DDR4 memory greatly limit upgradability.

Interestingly, the Bosgame E2 Plus also appears to have inherited the Amazon listing of its predecessor rather than receiving an entirely new one. The same ASIN, B0DFWNT1NK, can be traced back to at least December 2024, when it referred to the regular Bosgame E2 with a Ryzen 5 3550H, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512 GB SSD. Archived storefront data continued to associate the ASIN with that configuration thereafter. However, Amazon now uses it for the E2 Plus with the Ryzen 5 3501U and a base 8 GB/256 GB configuration. Thus, the age of the Amazon listing should not be taken as evidence that the Ryzen 5 3501U-powered E2 Plus itself has been available for the same length of time.

Bosgame does not appear to be the only mini-PC manufacturer using the curious processor, either. A Geekbench listing shows the Ryzen 5 3501U inside a system identified as the GMKtec NucBox G10 Plus. That machine achieved 1,102 points in the benchmark’s single-core test and 3,131 points in multi-core. The NucBox G10 Plus is yet to appear on GMKtec’s official website, but a Geekbench listing is a solid indicator of an imminent release.