Our first Meteor Lake mini PC review: AcePC Wizbox AI shows solid gains over Raptor Lake

Various mini PC makers are starting to roll out their Intel Meteor Lake implementations and the first to hit our test labs is AcePC’s Wizbox AI system powered by the Core Ultra 7 155H SoC. This model is supplied with 32 GB DDR5-4800 RAM and a 512 GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD straight from AcePC. Such specs are decent, but for the $1,199 MSRP, we would have expected better performance. Nonetheless, users can easily upgrade the specs with faster RAM and larger SSD capacities thanks to an intuitive design.

As far as performance goes, the Core Ultra 7 155H processor appears to be a solid upgrade over last year’s Raptor Lake-P and even the faster H-series models. The CPU side shows 42% gains over Raptor Lake-P and 25% over Raptor Lake-H, while the iGPU side shows at least 25% gains over Raptor Lake-P, but it still trails behind AMD's Radeon 780M. Additionally, the SoC also integrates an NPU for AI workloads. Unfortunately, we could not really compare it to AMD’s implementation as it is not supported yet by UL’s Procyon AI testing suite.

Other features that recommend the AcePC Wizbox AI model include a speedy Wi-Fi 7 + BT 5.3 card, support for up to 96 GB of DDR5 RAM, dual M.2 SSD slots for up to 4 TB and some of the lowest DPC latencies ever recorded on a mini PC.

The only glaring downside we found for this model, besides the price, is the relatively barebones port selection No Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 connectors here, while the competition appears to future-proof their models more aggressively. We also noted the sub-par performance of the supplied SSD, but this solution can be replaced with something faster.

Overall, AcePC’s implementation for the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is commendable given that the company is somewhat new to the mini PC scene. There is room for improvement in the port selection and the pricing departments, however. Check out the full review below.