Acemagic F3A Internal Hardware Overview
In terms of perplexing perplexities, here is one. The lid is held in place by a screw that prevents a latch from being operated. Remove the screw, and the latch becomes functional and you can easily pop off the top.
Once you do that, however, you cannot access components. Instead, there is a fan to cool the memory and SSDs, but that panel takes another four screws to remove. We could not figure out why you would make essentially a tool-less lid, but then require tools to do anything underneath.
The lid mechanism actually worked well too.
Once we remove that fan, we get to our components.
Our system came with a 1TB from Rayson. This is not a well-known brand, so I would replace this with something I know to be reliable. That is just one of the slots as there is a second slot so you can have two SSDs.
On the memory side, this is what we got. These are DDR5-5600 SODIMMs, but again, not from a well-known brand.
In terms of WiFi, we only get WiFi 6 and it is a bit of a bummer. This is a Cdltech Realtek RTL8852BE card. Normally we would expect something like an AMD/ Mediatek RZ616 or an Intel AX210. Also, for a higher-end mini PC like this, it would have been nice to see WiFi 6E/ WiFi 7.
Opening the bottom of the system, we can see the cooler for the AMD Rzyen AI 9 HX 370.
The coolertakes up most of the bottom of the chassis. Also, getting to that battery to swap would be a pain.
Overall though, this cooler worked well.
Next, let us get to the performance.
Consider changing the hero image description to “Acemagic F3A: ISO 64,000” LOL.
According to the review this mini PC can run DeepSeek R1 70B distilled although slowly. How slowly? I’ve tried the same model on an older dual socket Epyc server and quickly realised that too slow makes a big difference in terms of usability.
As large language models perform differently than what’s included in the current selection of Serve the Home benchmarks, I think comparing DeepSeek R1 70B performance across a wide variety of CPU and GPU hardware would be make a very interesting article.
Did this thing come with preinstalled Windows? Be careful, Acemagic shipped Mini PCs with preinstalled malware/spyware in the past; you can find this documented very well on YT.
TBH, since then i dont trust them. Uefi is clean? With that, it would be possible to undermine anya installation, also fresh own ones.
I’d guess, no ECC Ram capabilities? This i’d love: a silent Ryzen mini PC for proxmox with 2 fast Lan ports and ECC support.
I am also waiting for the AMD AI MAX+ 395 MiniPCs to come out. I agree with Eric Olson that it would be nice to see an LLM inference speed comparison across different CPUs and GPUs. For me the expandable RAM is key. I was looking at the SER9 when it launched late last year, but I ended up with a 8945HX MiniPC because I didn’t like that I couldn’t get at least 48 GB of RAM in the SER9. I do LLM inference on some of my MiniPCs but my primary use for them is part of a Proxmox cluster so having expandable RAM is more important than maximum performance.