Need a powerful PC for work-for-home or small business use, but can’t stand the thought of a big, bulky desktop tower on your desk? Then go for the most powerful palm-sized PC on the market today, which leverages a stellar AMD Ryzen CPU. While ultra-compact PCs have previously been defined by Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC, pronounced “nuck”), Intel has fallen behind in the launch of its 11th-Gen NUC kits, which were due in March. Its dual-core models have finally arrived, but they pale in comparison to the six- and eight-core AMD-powered systems that have been on the market for months. AMD simply offers far greater performance per dollar, and a better overall ecosystem as well. The AMD-based system uses a high-performance Ryzen CPU and a custom 10cm x 10cm motherboard to give you the smallest high-end desktop on the market.

For June 2021, we recommend the ASRock 4×4 barebones kit, which features the AMD Ryzen 5 4550U six-core processor. It also has the excellent AMD Radeon Vega graphics solution on board. Because this is “barebones” kit, you need to add your own RAM, solid-state drive, and operating system. We suggest 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, plus a fast 500GB PCIe solid-state drive, although you can certainly go with higher-capacity components if you’d like, and many people choose 32GB and a 1TB PCIe drive. To complete your PC Build, we recommend you pick up a copy of Windows 10 Home on USB. By the way, this system also has WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5, and both front- and rear-mounted USB Type-C ports.

Need even more power? Well, we list an incredible upgraded version of this PC later in this guide, which features the top-of-the-line AMD Ryzen 7 4800U, an eight-core, 16-thread CPU. It brings the total cost of this PC from around $700 to around $850, but wow, is it fast! With all that said, if you decide you want extreme power but don’t need something quite this small, check out the other options in our Small Form Factor Build Guides, which leverage the power of midrange and high-end desktop-class processors.

Note that we provide links to Amazon, Newegg, or B&H for US readers, and our Amazon links will auto-convert for our readers in Canada, the UK, and parts of the EU, with regional substitutions made where necessary. If you decide to purchase any of the products we list, please use the links provided, which helps support continued development of these guides.