Acemagic F3A an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Mini PC with up to 128GB of RAM

Acemagic F3A Power Consumption and Noise

The power brick for this one was a 19V 120W adapter. Frankly, it was more compact than many of the other power adapters we have seen. I think we were a bit surprised that this one was decently nice.

The other side to this is that the power consumption generally sat around 8W to 15W at idle and the noise was very minimal. In the 34-35dba range in a 34dba noise floor studio. Running the system at 100% would bring that up to 37-39dba after a few seconds and around 90W, and then after two minutes or so we would get in the 40-42dba range and just under 95W. Perhaps key here is that the system did not throttle down quickly as we have seen many mini PCs do.

The Acemagic F3A Quality

Here is a strange thing about the system. If we simply plugged it in and turned it on, it would actually be a good system. The BIOS options are sparse, but overall the system turned on and worked well. The caveat that we found was that during Windows setup, we had to use the HDMI port as the DisplayPort on three different displays did not give us video. At the same time, it is hard not to notice a few quality items.

One great example of this is that somehow the bright green quality control sticker being on the outside near the ports managed to pass quality control.

Is that a small thing, sure. Still, if you want to show quality, then this goes on the bottom of the unit, not a place that is easily visible when it is put on a desk.

One of the screw heads holding the RGB ring in place around the top fan just snapped off when Sam was taking photos. I think the screw head that popped off of its threads was shown in the video. To be clear, this was not a stripped screw. The head came off of the threads. Again, you might never see this unless you take it apart, but it was the first time it happened in over a hundred mini PCs we have revewed.

Then there was someone at Acemagic, after the malware incident last year, that thought the Rayson SSD was the best option. Rayson is not exactly a complete no-name brand, but it surely is not one we come across even enough to say we see it rarely. Or better put, I would not purchase a Rayson branded drive to put in a barebones system I purchased, and it would not even make a shortlist of options I was picking from.

Likewise, instead of using a well-known RZ616, or Intel AX200 series WiFi card, this is the first time we have seen the Cdltech Realtek RTL8852BE used.

On the memory side, the chips are marked HOGE, but this is not the type of memory that we normally see in mini PCs.

It is almost paradoxical. If we just plugged in the system and used it, we would probably be happy with what we got (aside from that green QC sticker.) The overall design is good, and the RGB adds some RGB spice. Then when you look a bit deeper and take the system apart, all we could think was we would have been better off getting a barebones.

If I were sitting at Acemagic after reading this, I would think to myself “but it works, so why do they care?” On the other hand, as someone who has reviewed well over 100 mini PCs, the feedback is really go with brand-name components to build trust. In a $199 mini PC, we expect extreme cost cutting. In a system with an AMD Ryzen 9 that alone costs more than those $199 mini PCs, I would want to see some upgrades.

As a reader, feel free to take this section or leave it, but we do not often have these sections in reviews.

Key Lessons Learned

To me, the DDR5 SODIMM memory is the big story here. If reviewing this from the standpoint of a gaming system that also had to do office tasks, I frankly would prefer the Beelink SER9 for the faster memory since it offers a real performance benefit. With that said, the DDR5 SODIMM added a huge amount of flexibility to the configuration. Either the 96GB or 128GB configuration ended up being spectacular since they let us run larger models locally. It was silly to have huge models running on such a low-cost mini PC.

Then there is the other side. Acemagic using SSDs and memory that are not from a brand like Crucial (Micron), Kingston, or another company makes me want to only recommend the barebones. We are only about a year removed from Acemagic using a vendor with malware in its Windows image. Since another major feature is the ability to get to 96GB or 128GB where we would replace lower-capacity SODIMMs anyway, this is one where I think the smart play would be to get the barebones and add your own memory, SSD or SSDs, and OS. We did not get any malware detections on the SSD provided, which is good, but I would rather install my own.

On the RGB, I have to say I am usually not a fan. If you are not, you can unplug the RGB strip. Still, with this we have left it in because it adds a bit of spice to the mini PC space.

Final Words

It has been some time since I have been so torn on a system. It worked and performed well. Getting to 128GB (or 96GB) of memory meant that we have had this system running for weeks now just hosting local AI models. It is a much quieter and cheaper way to run many of these instead of getting a 48GB GPU. We lose speed, but we get a new capability.

To me, I liked the dual 2.5GbE LAN and the bigger chassis compared with the Beelink SER9 was not offputting. It sounds strange, since usually I prefer faster systems, but this is a case where I prefer being able to expand the memory and get new capabilities over having 5-10% more performance from LPDDR5X.

I still think the barebones is the way to go here. At the same time, this was one of the first mini PCs that when running llama3.3 70b and deepseek-r1 70b models, albeit slowly, I really thought of it as an AI agent. I could give it a low priority task to code something, or search and come up with an answer, and I could return later to the system and it would have an answer for me with the fidelty of a 70b parameter model instead of a much smaller one. That was the big takeaway from this whole thing. I am very excited about the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 because of this system. That will cost more, and it will take some time to get, but at least we have a lower cost option that is reasonably good today.