Deal | Gaming mini PC with 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 APU and OCuLink support gets 31% discount
During Black Friday, mini PCs scoring attractive discounts is a common sight. We have already covered a few gaming as well as affordable mini PC deals in the past week. The GMKtec K12 gaming mini PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 H 255 APU has also gone on sale, dropping back to its all-time low price of $499 on Amazon for Prime members.
This can be verified with a single glance at reliable price trackers such as Camelcamelcamel, and considering that the product is sold by GMKtec's official Amazon store, potential customers can purchase this decently equipped mini PC without harboring any unnecessary concerns.
AMD Ryzen 7 H 255: Rebadged Hawk Point APU for mid-range performance
At its core, the GMKtec K12 mini PC is powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 H 255 "Hawk Point" APU with performance that is identical to the well-reviewed Ryzen 7 8845HS APU found in a plethora of mini PCs. Although the Zen 4 cores have started to show their age, the 8-core, 16-thread APU is still perfectly adequate for moderately intensive workloads and daily tasks.
There is no room for a discrete GPU, which is pretty standard for a mini PC of this size. The GMKtec K12 therefore relies solely on the Radeon 780M iGPU, promising acceptable performance in lightweight graphical tasks and casual gaming at low settings. Should users require more performance, an OCuLink port is present to handle fast eGPU connections. Memory and storage are handled by 32 GB of DDR5-5600 RAM and 512 GB of flash storage, both user-upgradeable.
GMKtec K12 mini PC: Good performance and I/O, but gets noisy
In our review of the GMKtec K12 mini PC, we were quite displeased with the rather loud cooling system which packs a vapor chamber and dual fans. However, we encountered no other major issues. We did praise the triple M.2 slots, and the overall build quality as well as the I/O selection. The ports on offer are listed below:
- OCuLink
- USB4, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C (DP, PD)
- HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4
- Dual USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A, Dual USB 2.0 Type-A
- Dual 3.5 mm audio
- Dual 2.5 GbE LAN, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2
At its current all-time low price courtesy of Black Friday, the GMKtec K12 mini PC is a decent choice for customers who have moderate performance requirements and can take advantage of the OCuLink port and dual 2.5 GbE ports. That said, customers considering making their purchase are definitely advised to refer to our in-depth review before pulling the trigger.
Source(s)
Amazon (linked above)
