ACEMAGIC F3A “AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370” Review – One Of The Fastest Mini PC In The Market Right Now

The adoption of AMD's APUs in modern-day mini-PCs, especially their Phoenix and Strix Point lineup, is at its peak right now, with several manufacturers emerging on the scene to capitalize on the market demand. This indeed has made it difficult for an average consumer to opt for a specific manufacturer, but out of all the options available, ACEMAGIC definitely stands out, and this isn't just simply a statement, rather it is backed by reviews of the company's product lineup, done by us and those in the market.

In the mini-PC segment in particular, it won't be wrong to say that ACEMAGIC has evolved into a leading brand, offering the industry's top-end specifications and a quality end product that ticks all the boxes. Their newest F3A mini-PC follows the same trend, as this particular device has employed AMD's Strix Point "Ryzen AI 300" platform, which is indeed one of the fastest options available in the market. ACEMAGIC was kind enough to send us a review sample, and based on our internal testing, we have categorized it as one of the best mini-PCs in the market right now.

ACEMAGIC F3A "AI Mini PC" - A Rundown of Specifications

First and foremost, the mini-PC is powered by AMD's flagship Strix Point APU, which is the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 APU. This particular chip features 12 cores based on the Zen 5 core architecture in a combination of 4x Zen 5 and 8x Zen 5c cores, and this computing layout basically targets utter efficiency, while keeping performance in line, which what makes this APU a leading option for mini-PC manufacturers. With a boost clock of up to 5.1 GHz along with 24 MB of L3 cache and 12 MB of L2 cache, high-end computing workloads are a delight with this APU.

Well, moving onto the next most essential part of the mini-PC is the onboard iGPU, which is the Radeon 890M iGPU, based on the RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture. It features 16 compute units and a clock speed of 2900 MHz, and it is one of the most powerful iGPUs in the market right now, and when you factor in technologies such as FSR 3 with Frame-Gen, AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2, HYPR-RX and many more, the graphical performance of this mini-PC becomes enough for modern-day AAA titles.

For storage/memory combination, our unit features 32 GB DDR5 memory rated at 5,600 MT/s in a dual-channel configuration, and is accompanied with a 1 TB SSD as well. The mini-PC comes with 2x M.2 2280 PCIe slots as well, hence the SSD capacity can be expanded up to 4 TB depending upon your usecase. Apparently, 32GB/1TB is the base configuration with the F3A mini-PC, and you can take it up to 64GB/1TB as well, which will ultimately push up the pricing. Apart from this, here's how the port and connectivity options look like:

• HDMI 2.1 (8K@60Hz) ×1
• USB4 Type-C (8K@60Hz) ×2
• DP2.0 ×1 (8K@60Hz)
• USB3.2 Gen2 Type-A Port ×4 (5Gbps)
• RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet Port ×2
• 3.5mm Audio Jack ×2

Now that the specifications are covered, the next part is the most of interesting of all, and based on what ACEMAGIC has integrated with the F3A, it's safe to say that the mini-PC is a complete package, offering performance, portability, connectivity and aesthetics, all in a single unit.

ACEMAGIC F3A "AI Mini PC" - Unboxing & A Closer Look

Well, having a great unboxing experience pretty much helps in concluding the quality of a product, and with the ACEMAGIC F3A, I would say that the process was pretty awesome. The box itself features the company's branding, along with the standard logo of AMD's Strix Point APUs, which is certainly great to see. At the back, the RAM/SSD configuration of the mini-PC is listed, and that is pretty much it.

2 of 9

Opening it up, the packaging is basically a "box within a box" one, likely to ensure safety during the shipping process. Inside the box, you get the elegant mini-PC wrapped up in a protective covering. In terms of the contents inside, there's a standard manual, HDMI cable and a power adapter to power up the unit. There's also a VESA mount included as well, that is if you want the mini-PC to be mounted at the backside of your monitor, but I didn't try it out, since I like the old fashion style.

Talking about the mini-PC itself, well there's no doubt in the fact that the F3A stands out due to its impressive looks, since the device features an elegant metallic design, that really catches the eye. Moreover, the mini-PC has the standard "ACEMAGIC" branding at the very front, with thermal vents on the sides as well, ensuring optimal heat dissipation.

2 of 9

One of the most appealing factor about the ACEMAGIC F3A mini-PC is the use of RGB lightning, which runs all around the unit, and that certainly adds up in the aesthetics of the product. It is more of a diffused look rather than plain RGB, which provides a feeling of premiumness to the user, or at least that is what I felt. For me, I'll give the looks full marks, especially since there aren't much mini-PCs out there that have more "gamer-oriented" aesthetics.

2 of 9

The bottom of the mini-PC has the standard air vents to push air out of the unit, and in terms of the I/O configuration, the front panel contains the power button with a white light indicator, 2x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A ports, 1x USB Type-C port and a 3.5mm audio jack. At the back, the unit is equipped with 2x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A, USB4 Type-C, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.0 and 2x LAN (2.5G) connections as well, so overall, the F3A is pretty equipped when it comes to support interfaces.

Next up is the performance testing part, and that is the most interesting portion of this review, since we have done justice in terms of getting the maximum performance out of ACEMAGIC's F3A.

ACEMAGIC F3A Mini PC - CPU Performance

First up are synthetic benchmarks, and for these, we had the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 run at default 28W TDP, instead of ramping up to other profiles, just to ensure stable performance. Despite this, the results were pretty impressive.

ACEMAGIC F3A Mini PC - 1080p Integrated GPU Performance

Well, graphical performance out of a mini-PC is what we all want to be top-notch, and with the F3A, it is safe to say that you can run any modern-day AAA title, that too at decent FPS. We managed to compare the onboard Radeon 890M iGPU against similar counterparts, at titles like Cyberpunk 2077, God of War: Ragnarök and many more.

ACEMAGIC F3A Mini PC - AI Benchmarks

With "AI" in the name of the onboard CPU, it won't be justice to test out the ACEMAGIC F3A in AI workloads, notably through benchmarks available on Geekbench. We stacked up the mini-PC against multiple laptops and handhelds in the similar CPU segment, and while TDP ratings across these systems are different, the key idea here was to judge the APU's performance under power-efficient conditions.

Moreover, we also tried running DeepSeek's distilled models locally on the machine, and I'll share the results ahead.

ACEMAGIC F3A Mini-PC - Running DeepSeek R1 Locally

Well, I had the knack of running DeepSeek locally on any of my devices, and what better way to test it out than with AMD's newest Strix Point APUs. I decided to run DeepSeek locally using the Ollama, a local LLM management application used to run open-source models on your machines with ease. With DeepSeek however, we decided to run "distilled" models, featuring 1.5 billion parameters reaching up to 70 billion. The key factor in better performance on local models is the GPU VRAM size, with RAM capacity playing a part.

Ollama doesn't have any sort of in-built metric to measure metrics like token response, since it is more of a powershell-based implementation, but I judged the performance based off how quickly I was getting responses, and how seamless the experience was with each distilled model variation. Starting with the base "DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B", this isn't hard to run locally at all, since it requires 8 GB RAM as the minimum, which was ample enough for our system.

As expected, the 1.5B parameter model ran without any problems at all, being responsive to our prompts, although it did provide concise information, but that is likely the nature of the model. Next up, we tried the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-8B, which is more of a demanding distilled model, but for the ACEMAGIC F3A, tackling it out wasn't an issue at all, although we saw a bump in memory consumption, but this was something imminent.

Lastly, maxing out the system specifications, we decided to run DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-70B, which is said to be a server-grade model, but unfortunately, AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 was uncapable of this particular distilled variant. The model was huge in size, and the mini-PC simply didn't have enough hardware to run it locally, hence we decided to skip it.

ACEMAGIC F3A Mini PC Conclusion - Solid Strix Point Performance

ACEMAGIC has quality products all through its consumer hardware lineup, and the F3A "AI mini PC" is certainly one of the more impressive products from the company. With AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 onboard, we get insane CPU and GPU performance in such a small and compact design that it's just astonishing to witness, showing how far PCMR has evolved. And, our internal testing clearly shows that this machine is capable of managing any modern-day AAA title, at either medium or high settings with FSR enabled, and that is something exciting to see.

With such compact devices, thermals are always an issue, but with the F3A, we saw temperatures well under balance, with temps peaking out at around 80C with the default 28W configuration, and if we had bumped up the TDPs up to 54W, the temperatures would've surely increased, but nothing that the F3A can't manage. Apart from this, the mini-PC looks great when it is on your table, offering great aesthetics, takes less place, and gives you everything in a single package.

One more impressive factor about this device is its price point, since in the 32GB+1TB configuration, the F3A mini-PC retails for $809.00 at the time of this review, since there's an ongoing discount that has dropped the pricing by up to 23%. At this price tag, this mini-PC is one of the contenders if you are looking for the best perf/$ values, being higher than counterparts like the Beelink SER9, which we have also reviewed. We can only say that you'll be surprised once you get your hands on this machine.