The Ultra-Compact PC, Defined

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 an ultra-compact PC, which uses a 10cm x 10cm motherboard. In case that doesn’t translate for you immediately, it’s really small!

Today, the most powerful palm-sized PCs on the market leverage AMD Ryzen CPUs. While Intel defined the ultra-compact PC category with its trend-setting Next Unit of Computing (NUC, pronounced “nuck”), Intel has fallen seriously behind with its 11th-Gen NUC kits. They were due in March 2021, and while its dual-core models were finally listed in July and quad-core models in August, they are almost always out of stock. But they weren’t worth waiting for: they pale in comparison to the six- and eight-core AMD-powered systems that have been on the market much longer.

This Month’s “Intel NUC” Build, Featuring AMD Again!

For December 2021, we recommend the ASRock 4×4 barebones kit, which features the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U 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. 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 kit 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 up from $700 to around $850, and if you’d like to really max it out, we suggest 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD too, bringing the price to just under $1000. 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.

Final Thoughts

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