 Tom here from Orange Systems. This is the Ace Magic S1 mini PC. This was said to me by Ace Magic I figured well I'll say yes to some of these emails because they sent a lot of them I think they've been reaching out to a lot of creators trying to get their name out there But this is actually not a bad little PC now because this was sent to me I'm being very upfront that no this review is not going to be shaped by that. I do not give them a preview They're learning about the review in my opinion the same as all of you with this particular video They don't get any input onto it, but I've been running this for about 30 days. Haven't had any problems with it This is the model that has the weird little display on the front So we're gonna talk about that and my overall opinion if you don't want to watch the rest of the video is It's not a bad little PC, especially with cyber Monday coming up Maybe you can find a good deal on this unit, but it's a reasonably priced Relatively tough box that hasn't given me any problems, but let's dive into the review now Now I don't give a lot of thought to the packaging to mean Unboxings are kind of boring because I just stole the box away But they did do a nice job of making this box not just a quality box But actually give you a premium feel to it including the kind of velvety pill that you have inside of it pretty nice Still gonna get thrown away now much more important than the box are the hardware specs that are of the device itself This has an Intel n95 four core four thread CPU that does a 3.4 gigahertz chair bow one single 16 gig DDR 4 Either a 512 or 1 terabyte mve depending on which one you order now while this does have an MVME the second m2 slot That's available in this is actually SATA now depending on which model you choose you'll get Y5 5.2 or Y5 5.6 This has two real tech 1 gig interfaces to HDMI ports driven by Intel UHD graphics The device is surprisingly small and light only showing about five inches when you use it standing up And you can place it standing up or laying down And if you'd want to use the magnetic base to keep it a little bit more stable in the standing up That's pretty easy just to attach. This device has two USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports the other ports available on this are going to be your two HDMI and your Kensington lock along with your auxiliary port you can access the m2 slots and memory via a magnetic cover on the side Which is really easy to remove the other side that covers the fan does not open easy And I didn't want to break it because the plastic was already cracking when I tried the system ships with Windows 11 Reinstalled and display on a system is novel But is controlled by some pre-loaded program called CYX underscore tft tool that runs on startup to keep the display working I did not see an installer for the software on ace magic sites But there is a discussion in some forms about doing some more customizations I'll leave a link down below so you can dive into that with some other people that have been trying to hack Away at it now I did run some tests with Passmark, but as expected it's not really a high-performance system I didn't leave a link so you can dive deeper into those tests and look at all the details But it is low wattage and quiet even when it's under load that fan is a laptop fan Therefore it doesn't make a lot of noise now I did test this with both proxmox 8 and xcp and g 8.3 and it worked just fine with both I didn't have any networking or loading issues didn't have to do any tricks to get it to run It'll also run Linux bare metal just fine So this is definitely good for those little low-powered Home lab use cases now I know on their site they suggest using it for potentially a router But I don't think that's a great idea because of the real tech interfaces Which means it's not going to be well suited to run pf sense or open sense So real tech drivers always just give you headaches in any of the bsd based system So unfortunately, this is not a good router for those operating systems Maybe you'll have better if you want to build it as a linux router now when I said low wattage I want to be more specific and say that this did not exceed 26 watts any of the testing I think that's reasonable for a home lab and I know a lot of people are very concerned about High wattage which also is high electric bill and also more heat being dissipated This runs cool even with the fan running It's not that much heat because it's not that many watts So that works out pretty good an alternative video I did see an alternative use case I shaved for this and I've mentioned Would be using this as a retro gaming device tech We did a good video on that and showed all the different retro games and how fast they run on it And I think that's actually pretty cool I watched a few videos on that channel because I really like retro games Now the next question of is this a good deal? Well, that's a little bit subjective because I think the display is novel But I probably will never use the display on it Using it for linux is more likely my use case for it But maybe you want to run windows on this and maybe you want to hack away And modify this even more and check out that form poster Maybe you want to try to figure out a way to make it work in linux That'd be kind of a novel project If you do that reach out to me Let me know because this will probably be running linux And I won't mess with the display But if someone writes some drivers and writes some software for it I would be willing to play with that But on ace magic site They have this same model without the cool magnetic open Which I do like I mean that just makes it easy to get inside But how often do you really need to get inside? I mean not that often But their other model has a slightly different form factor No display is $10 less as of today And they have another model with the n95 processor That is even less than that But that one doesn't have NVMe on it It doesn't have the dual slots like this one does But it's at least one set on there Maybe that's enough for your use case The other one's only $10 price difference So availability might be a big deal too Because even if you don't want the display If the only one available is the display You might end up buying that one Let me know in comments down below Which one you would choose What you think of these devices I think ace magic is making some pretty decent devices I've actually bought a few of them I have other ones that I own now And they've all held up without any problem Putting them under load and haven't overheated Haven't fallen apart I don't know that those drives they use Are the best drives But at least it does have apparently Some decent memory in it But time will tell It's one of those things like I try to load it As much as I can to do this review But I can't really run it for a year And do a review Because in a year something else will be out And that'll be what you're looking to buy But hey, these are pretty cool Like and subscribe If you want to see more content from this channel You can connect with me over in the forums Or if you'd like to hire a short project Head over to lauranceystems.com That's where you can start that process Or even connect with me on whatever socials are available When you go there All right, and thanks