Acemagic Retro X5 review

It’s hard not to miss times gone by these days, ain’t it? For the majority, the stressors of modern life have become so much, so frustrating, so tangible in their presence, it’s as if they were solid. Like you could clench them up in your fist and just watch them writhe in front of you as if it was the most normal thing in the world. I think that’s partly why we’re seeing such a resurgence in such nostaligic design language. And it’s something Acemagic is very clearly capitalizing on with the Retro X5.

I mean, we can all see it, right? The X5, it’s almost a carbon copy of the NES. Except someone’s swapped the ports and the power button around. Oh, and of course, it’s a wee bit smaller too. The difference, though, (as you’ve probably already guessed because this is PC Gamer, not Edge magazine), is that this is a fully fledged SFF gaming PC. And although that doesn’t automatically make it the best mini PC at that size, honestly, mild spoilers: it’s a bloody good one.

So, if you’re like me, bumbling through life as one of the Prime Millennials. Or perhaps a Gen Xer just desperate to relive the relatively stress free pre internet-era on a tiny machine packaged up as a Windows 11 PC (and sadly not a Pop! OS box) strapped up to your 55-inch OLED 4K TV, then the Retro X5 is here for your money. Or at least some of it.

That’s my first issue, too. And yeah, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but the cost of this thing has dropped by about $400 since I first said: “yeah, I’ll happily take a look at this tiny grey box”. You can pick one up for $999 in the US (when it’s not sold out), or £889 in the UK (see above) at time of writing. A decent price all-in-all, particularly as it comes with AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 12-core 24-thread chip, and the full 16 CU Radeon 890M iGPU to back that all up on the graphics front. But… as I said, that’s with a $400/£410 price drop compared to its listing price. Man, if I were on that pre-order list prior to that price drop, I’d be seething by a good 29% or so. That’s a bad joke. I’m leaving it in.

The good news is that it’s actually fairly well equipped, even with the full-fat price tag. Acemagic’s packaged this thing up with 32 GB (2x 16 GB) of SODIMM DDR5 clocked at 5,600 MT/s, and you get a relatively healthy 1 TB PCIe 4.0 SSD courtesy of Huawei’s eKitStor Xtreme 200E model. It’s a bit of a mystery drive that one, too. Not quite a “best SSD” so to speak, and it’s not exactly new either, debuting in December of 2024. But we know it’s got 232-layer YMTC QLC NAND strapped up in a single-sided design, though the controller is a complete mystery. All I can tell you is it doesn’t have a DRAM cache, and that’s about it.

And then we get to the port selection, which is honestly impressive. We’re talking the whole spread. Peek round the back, and you’re graced with twin 2.5 Gb ethernet ports, dual USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, DisplayPort, HDMI, the works.

Flip to the front, though, and that’s where the real magic is. Sure, you’ve got another two USB 3.2 Type-As and an audio out as well (which, unless my eyes are back-to-front, is definitely forward-facing. Acemagic, you might want to tell your spec sheet that). But there’s also a full-fat USB4 40 Gbps port on display here, as well.

That’s real handy if you’re chucking a rapid external SSD dock into this thing to load up your legally acquired ROMs, or you need to plumb in an eGPU to give the X5 a bit of an extra leg up (those are still a thing, right?) It’s clean, though, real clean for a small rig like this. Heck, there’s even WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 to round everything out; it’s practically modern. And again, all regularly under the one grand mark.

Physically, though, she’s a real thing of beauty. Like the Silverstone FLP02 chassis I reviewed recently, it shares the same nostalgic design language. The hard lines, the sleek gloss black pseudo infrared-port detailing, the two-tone grey matte finish. The grooves painstakingly carved out in CAD, no doubt. It encapsulates that late ’80s early ’90s chic in a way that just feels soothing to look at. It’s like I’m almost dreaming, as if I’m about to blow on my Golden Axe cartridge and just while away a summer evening after school pretending I know how to play. Even the packaging is premium on this thing. I dig it, I really do. It’s a far cry from Minisforum’s AtomMan G1 that I looked at last month, that’s for sure, and it’ll no doubt age better because of it.

Okay, okay, I’ll stop. It’s just a bloody box, Zak. The performance, though, that’s the real challenge, particularly given its size. The good news is it might look like it’s 43 years old, but it don’t act like it. That Ryzen 9 HX 370 does some serious work in Cinebench with impressive scores both on the single core and multi-core front, and manages to sustain an average frequency of around 3,527 MHz during that 10-minute multi-run, only peaking at 85 degrees on the max temp too. That dubious SSD equally scored a comfortable 2,460 points in 3D Mark as well, which for a drive in use is pretty impressive. It’s not Sandisk WD Black SN8100 madness, no, but it’s solid for a machine of this size.

The gaming, though? Outstanding, even with a bit of added fan noise. Cyberpunk at 1080p, 38 fps without upscaling, 52 fps with it. Black Myth Wukong managed 20 fps then 30 fps with FSR. F1 24 was even more playable than that at 73 fps without upscaling, and Horizon Zero Dawn cranked out a clean 63 fps with upscaling. All top-tier titles, all look gorgeous, all ran by a tiny box that you could pick up and throw around the room with one hand. If you wanted. I certainly didn’t.

I’m not going to spoil things. But I’ve tested another incredibly similar SFF PC this week from Geekom, very much like the X5. It costs nearly twice as much, and the testing results were, in some cases, almost half what the X5 could manage in-game. That’s staggering. I can tell you now, it’s entirely due to the memory configuration. That machine’s running a single stick of 32GB, but without the bandwidth, it just doesn’t perform anywhere near as well in-game with that Radeon chip.

No matter how you look at it, the X5 is just a remarkable piece of engineering. Yeah, its fans are a bit loud, and its pricing structure is a little inconsistent, and availability, understandably, is limited, but what it needs to do, it does well. Tapping into that nostalgic culture as clear as day, without compromising on what counts. The dread is in the room with us, but now it’s selling us stuff sugarcoated and gussied up in ’80s plastic, while we keep wearing those rose tinted glasses.