Unique gaming mini PC with AMD Ryzen 9 and OCuLink support goes on sale

Almost exactly two weeks ago, we covered a unique unreleased gaming mini PC, which was showcased on the ETA Prime YouTube channel. Dubbed the Piston V, the mini PC featured a capable Ryzen AI 9 APU and supported a dual boot configuration of Windows and Bazzite.

Spotted by VideoCardz, the Piston V mini PC is now available for purchase via Kickstarter. Judging by the sheer number of backers and total amount raised, the crowdfunding campaign appears to have been a success.

As mentioned earlier, the gaming mini PC is powered by the Zen 5-based Ryzen AI 9 365 APU with a 10-core setup paired with 16 GB of DDR5-5600 RAM. The RAM is easily user-upgradable and can be either upgraded to 64 GB. The same goes for its storage, with the base variant packing a 500 GB M.2 Gen 4 SSD (Crucial P310 curr. $107.15 on Amazon), which can be upgraded to 4 TB. 

In synthetic benchmarks, the Ryzen AI 9 365 is almost exactly as powerful as the Ryzen 9 7940HS. In fact, a modern Intel Core Ultra 5 338H is only around a few percentage points faster. The Radeon 880M iGPU is no slouch either and can easily keep up with the Intel Arc 140V from the Lunar Lake family.

Folks who desire even more GPU grunt can easily go the eGPU route courtesy of the OCuLink port which allows for speedy eGPU setups.

In simpler terms, most lightweight and moderately intensive workloads should be easily doable on the Piston V mini PC. As we covered in our previous article, ETA Prime did take a closer look at the gaming performance of the system and was left mostly impressed by it. With the help of FSR magic, the YouTuber managed to squeeze an average of 75 fps at 1080p high settings in Spider-Man 2.

The I/O offer has been detailed below:

• Single USB4 Type-C with DisplayPort 1.4, Dual USB Type-A (unspecified)
• HDMI 2.1
• OCuLink
• Wi-Fi 7. Bluetooth 5.3
• Dual 2.5G Ethernet

The Piston V gaming mini PC also sports a 4-inch display at its front, featuring an IPS panel with touch support and a resolution of 720 x 720.

As for pricing, the base variant with 16 GB of RAM and 500 GB SSD is priced at $559 for super early birds. Unfortunately, this specific slot has been completely sold out. A few slots for early birds are still left, priced at around $590.

Beyond that, the Piston V mini PC will be priced at around $715. Interested customers are definitely advised to be mindful of the risks associated with backing crowdfunding campaigns.