The Power of Mini PCs: An In-Depth Review of the PN50 by Asus

As I picked up the Asus PN50, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and curiosity. This mini PC was touted as an excellent performer, but how would it hold up in real-world testing? I decided to put it through its paces with a variety of games and applications to see just what it could do.

One of the first tests I ran was Halo 3 from The Master Chief Collection on low settings. To my surprise, the PN50 averaged around 58 frames per second (fps), which is impressive for a mini PC. However, when I dropped the setting to medium, the average fps dropped to around 65. While this may not be as smooth as some of the more powerful gaming PCs out there, it's still a respectable performance.

Next up was Street Fighter 5 at low settings. The PN50 easily maintained an average of 60 fps, with dips down to 58 every now and then. This is impressive for a game that can be notoriously demanding on hardware. I was able to take the setting up a notch to medium, but even then, the average fps only increased by around 10-15.

Another test I ran was Fallout 4 at low settings with a mix of medium and high settings. The PN50 averaged around 60 fps throughout, with occasional dips down to 58. While this may not be as high as some of the more powerful gaming PCs out there, it's still a respectable performance for a mini PC.

Rocket League was another test I ran, but this time at 1080p resolution and performance settings. The PN50 averaged an impressive 95 fps throughout, which is even higher than some of the more powerful gaming PCs out there. This is a testament to the power of the PN50's hardware.

However, not all tests were as smooth. I ran Fall Guys at 1080p and low settings, but unfortunately, this game struggled to maintain an average of 60 fps. It had to be taken down to 720p and low settings in order to reach a stable 60 fps. This is disappointing, especially given the fact that Fall Guys should be able to run smoothly on even the most budget-friendly hardware.

Finally, I ran GTA V at 720p and normal settings. The PN50 averaged around 68 fps throughout, which is an impressive performance for a mini PC. However, if you wanted to lock this down to 30 fps, it would have to be taken back down to 720p and low settings in order to maintain a stable frame rate.

In terms of power consumption, I was pleasantly surprised by the results. At idle, the PN50 averaged around 7.8 watts of power consumption, which is impressive considering its hardware. When running 4K video playback, it averaged around 14.3 watts, and when gaming, it averaged around 35.2 watts. The maximum power consumption I saw was around 48.4 watts during a particularly intense test.

The PN50's cooling system also impressed me. Even at high temperatures, the CPU did not seem to suffer as much as some of the more powerful GPUs out there. Fan noise was virtually non-existent, even when gaming with demanding games like GTA V.

One thing that did surprise me was the price of the PN50. The base model without RAM and storage was priced around $476, which is a relatively low price for a mini PC. However, if you want to add more power to the system, such as a 1650 GPU, it can quickly get out of hand in terms of cost.

Overall, I would say that the Asus PN50 is an excellent performer for its price and size. The build quality from Asus on these PN50s is top-notch, and the cooling system does a great job of keeping temperatures under control even during demanding tests. While it may not be as powerful as some of the more expensive gaming PCs out there, it's definitely worth considering for anyone looking for a compact and affordable PC solution.

In conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of the Asus PN50. It may not be the most powerful gaming PC out there, but it holds its own in terms of performance and power consumption. If you're looking for a compact and affordable PC solution that can handle demanding games and applications, the PN50 is definitely worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on guys this eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at a pretty interesting ryzen powered mini pc known as the asus pn50 now keep in mind most of the time when you find these online they will be bare bones so you have to add your own ram and storage but the model i have here is actually powered by the 4500 u that's a 6 core ryzen 5 apu with a base clock of 2.3 and a boost up to 4 gigahertz along with built-in radeon 6 graphic so we are working with a mobile ryzen chip here but as you can see they have taken the form factor of this and just slammed it way down this thing is super tiny it's actually a lot smaller than i thought it would be looking at pictures online of this thing and along with the unit itself you're also going to get your vase amount you get some hardware for mounting your m.2 nvme ssd and a 65 watt power supply and since this is a bare bones kit i do have to add my own ram and storage i'm going to go with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 running at 3 200 megahertz that's the maximum this little unit supports so we will get pretty decent performance out of that apu with this faster ram and a 512 gigabyte nvme ssd from silicon power now keep in mind the pn50 also supports a 2.5 inch drive be it an ssd or a mechanical drive and will fit right in the bottom so you can have up to four terabytes of storage in this unit a two terabyte nvme ssd and a two terabyte 2.5 inch drive so throwing all the extra components in here is super easy there's four screws on the bottom and the whole bottom will slide right out we have our sodium slots here so we will be running in dual channel a single m.2 slot and like i mentioned we can throw a 2.5 inch drive in here this actually mounts in the bottom of the case and everything slides on so yeah i think asus has done a great job with expandability of this mini pc given the form factor i'm going to go ahead and throw the ram in here keep in mind you can add up the 32 gigabytes of ddr4 running at 3200 megahertz but i opted for 16. we're going to be running in dual channel mode there's no way to overclock this so i'll go ahead and install both of these dimms here and this ssd is going to slide right in here and that open m.2 slot now this does come pre-installed with a wi-fi six intel card and speeds are super fast over ethernet and wi-fi here so now that i have the ram and the nvme ssd installed i just need to slide this bottom right back on there's four screws to hold it on and i'm actually about done here with the setup i just need to install windows 10 but before we move over to windows i just want to give you a quick look at all of the i o on this unit on the front here we have our 3.5 millimeter audio jack usb type c a micro sd card reader one usb 3.2 gen1 connector on the front we also have an ir receiver and our power button on both sides there's not much going on we do have some ventilation for that cpu but when we take a look at the back here we have a full-size hdmi port full-size displayport 1.4 another usb type-c connector gigabit ethernet two more usb 3.2 gen1 connectors and our power input now this little pc will actually support up to four displays at 4k we have two over usb type c one over hdmi and one over displayport so you can run four displays at 4k on this unit at the same exact time and just to give you an idea of the size here we have a raspberry pi 4 and an xbox controller sitting right next to this pc i mean it's not much bigger than an xbox controller so with my unit built here's the specs for the cpu we have that ryzen 5 4500 u 6 cores base clock of 2.3 boost up to 4 gigahertz the gpu is the radeon 6 at 1 500 megahertz we have 16 gigabytes of ddr4 running at 3200 megahertz a 512 gigabyte nvme ssd we have wi-fi 6 bluetooth 5.0 and we're going to be running windows 10 pro on this unit i've actually already installed it so let's go ahead and move over there now all right so here it is i have windows 10 pro installed on this asus pn50 we have the ryzen 5 4500u gigabytes of ddr4 running at 3 200 megahertz and the built-in radeon 6 graphics so one thing i wanted to make sure of was these graphics were hitting the correct clock so i just always test it here just to make sure here's the clocks at 400 megahertz this should jump up to 1500 just want to make sure that we're gonna get the maximum out of this and through all of my tests this has maxed out at 1500 megahertz no issues whatsoever so uh with a lot of these lower end or smaller pcs i notice they limit a lot but this one here definitely has the cpu and gpu running at full speed when it needs to so i've been really impressed with this little box here i tested a lot of mini pcs i've tested more powerful mini pcs that were just a bit bigger than this but i'm really liking this one now i am a big fan of these ryzen apus and i really do wish that i could have picked up the 4800u version of this but at close to 900 i couldn't fork out the cash for something like that so i opted for the mid-range which has that 4500 u and i gotta say this thing performs excellent for the form factor now going into this if you needed to pick something like this up for your main desktop you could definitely use it let's uh test out a little bit of web browsing i'm using the edge browser and we'll just head over to the asus website this thing is quick we got six cores there with that 4500 u and a boost up to four gigahertz uh we'll just check something else here everything loads up quickly i mean for web browsing you'll have no issues with this 4k video playback let's check out some youtube here just going to pause it real quick stats for nerds make sure we are at 4k go full screen with it we dropped two frames so far definitely would never notice that and as we play through or if we were already buffered a little bit we wouldn't drop any with 4k or 5k video playback on this little device so if you did want to pick something like this up for media consumption be it streaming or even setting this up as a little plex server it's going to work out just fine i mean this definitely has enough power and i wouldn't be opposed to streaming i'd say three to four 4k streams on this using it as a little plex server moving over to some benchmarks first up we have crystal disk and keep in mind i'm using that cheaper silicon power nvme so your speeds will differ depending on the ssd you use but for this one here at a 512 gigabyte nvme it's looking pretty decent next up we have cenobench r20 total score 1173 not bad for the form factor but it's really not that impressive remember we don't have any extra threads with the 4500u we just have six cores here geekbench 5 actually looked really great single core 1118 multi 4165 when it comes to just basic workflow here's pc mark 10 total score of 4078 and if we take a look at the bottom here it's stating that we're better than 35 percent of all other machines tested here so i think this is doing a pretty good job next up 3d mark night raid total score 9793 and finally fire strike with 2709 and now we're gonna move over to some pc gaming now when it comes to these mini pcs we all know that most of the time we can build something with much better performance for pc gaming for cheaper using used parts from amazon and ebay but personally i'm a big fan of these small form factor machines and it's actually amazing what these things can do in 2021 so first up we have cs go i did take this down to 720p but we have a low and medium mix i got an average of 71 fps this definitely favors intel over amd but it's looking pretty decent next up we have world of warcraft low medium settings 1080p you're gonna be able to play this at 60 all day long i just keep it locked at 60 to keep that gpu usage down and if we take a look at the top left hand corner there's a chance i could have went up a little more because we're only utilizing 38 of that gpu with wow here on low medium settings at 1080p here we have fortnite 1080p using their new performance mode and this actually averaged 68 fps i'd say this is fully playable but with performance mode keep in mind we're basically at low i do have resolution scale set to 100 though doom eternal 720p low i still think it looks absolutely amazing on low settings they've done a great job with this game we're using the vulcan back in and this little machine managed an average of 58 fps not quite 60 and when it's unlocked here you'll see it jump up to 80 every once in a while but on average this did 58. halo 3 from the master chief collection 720p low settings and if i did jump this up to medium settings we wouldn't even hit 60 but it averaged 65 fps sitting like this street fighter 5 720p low it'll run at 60 all day i did try to take it up a little bit i really wish we could have got at least medium out of this or even low 1080p but at 100 resolution scale i mean 720p is going to be the best we can get out of this 4500u in street fighter 5. here's fallout 4 720p with a low medium mix we are stuck at 60. you'll see it dip down to 58 every once in a while but overall i mean this game is fully playable at 60fps 720p low medium rocket league 1080p performance settings it averaged 95 fps by the time i was done with this and i figured that this game would run at 1080p on this machine so this is a weird one here we have fall guys and initially going into this game with basically any low end pc i figured it would run at 60 1080p on basically any machine but unfortunately that's just not the case i did have to take this down to low settings 720p to get it to run at 60 on this machine now if you wanted to lock this at medium settings 30fps 1080p but i wanted to see what we had to do to get this at 60. and finally we have gta 5 720p normal settings i got an average of 68 fps i'd say this is really playable here but then again we're only at 720p now just like fall guys if you wanted to lock this at 30 we could do 1080p normal high mix but in order to get this at 60 will have to drop it down to the seven twenty p range so with all of these mini pcs i always like to test power consumption i'm using a kilowatt meter from the wall at idle we averaged 7.8 watts 4k video playback 14.3 gaming on average it was 35.2 and the maximum i could pull out of this from the wall was 48.4 watts and that's a very extreme test by maxing out the gpu and cpu at the exact same time so you'll be hard-pressed to ever see that kind of wattage from this unit as cpu temps go this did way better than i thought it would at idle we're around 46 4k video playback does jump up to about 53 gaming on average 69 and the maximum cpu temps i saw out of this was 84 degrees celsius and that was running cinebench r23 for that 10 minute test that they have now so yeah i mean with this low wattage cpu and the cooling system they have in the pn50 it does a great job and fan noise in my opinion isn't a big deal at all even when gaming with a game like gta 5 it's really hard to hear it this is not jumped up like a little jet plane whatsoever and if you did have this let's say mounted behind your monitor you'd be really hard-pressed to hear this even with the cpu maxed out at a hundred percent so it would definitely be nice to test out that 4 800 u but like i mentioned i mean the price on that was close to 900 and i personally didn't want to spend that i picked this up for 476 for the base unit without the ram and the storage so when it's all said and done i have close to 580 into this mini pc and that's definitely expensive especially given the fact that you can take an old hp or an optiplex and add a 1650 to it and just blow this thing out of the water but you're not going to get this kind of form factor and i think that's the main selling point to something like this it definitely would have been nice if this had a more powerful cpu at the same price but i think for what the 4500 u is this is an excellent performing mini pc and the build quality from asus on these pn50s is definitely top notch but that's going to wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching i was super excited to get my hands on this i will be doing an emulation test so keep an eye out on the channel and if there's anything else you want to see running on the pn50 just let me know in the comments below but like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on guys this eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at a pretty interesting ryzen powered mini pc known as the asus pn50 now keep in mind most of the time when you find these online they will be bare bones so you have to add your own ram and storage but the model i have here is actually powered by the 4500 u that's a 6 core ryzen 5 apu with a base clock of 2.3 and a boost up to 4 gigahertz along with built-in radeon 6 graphic so we are working with a mobile ryzen chip here but as you can see they have taken the form factor of this and just slammed it way down this thing is super tiny it's actually a lot smaller than i thought it would be looking at pictures online of this thing and along with the unit itself you're also going to get your vase amount you get some hardware for mounting your m.2 nvme ssd and a 65 watt power supply and since this is a bare bones kit i do have to add my own ram and storage i'm going to go with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 running at 3 200 megahertz that's the maximum this little unit supports so we will get pretty decent performance out of that apu with this faster ram and a 512 gigabyte nvme ssd from silicon power now keep in mind the pn50 also supports a 2.5 inch drive be it an ssd or a mechanical drive and will fit right in the bottom so you can have up to four terabytes of storage in this unit a two terabyte nvme ssd and a two terabyte 2.5 inch drive so throwing all the extra components in here is super easy there's four screws on the bottom and the whole bottom will slide right out we have our sodium slots here so we will be running in dual channel a single m.2 slot and like i mentioned we can throw a 2.5 inch drive in here this actually mounts in the bottom of the case and everything slides on so yeah i think asus has done a great job with expandability of this mini pc given the form factor i'm going to go ahead and throw the ram in here keep in mind you can add up the 32 gigabytes of ddr4 running at 3200 megahertz but i opted for 16. we're going to be running in dual channel mode there's no way to overclock this so i'll go ahead and install both of these dimms here and this ssd is going to slide right in here and that open m.2 slot now this does come pre-installed with a wi-fi six intel card and speeds are super fast over ethernet and wi-fi here so now that i have the ram and the nvme ssd installed i just need to slide this bottom right back on there's four screws to hold it on and i'm actually about done here with the setup i just need to install windows 10 but before we move over to windows i just want to give you a quick look at all of the i o on this unit on the front here we have our 3.5 millimeter audio jack usb type c a micro sd card reader one usb 3.2 gen1 connector on the front we also have an ir receiver and our power button on both sides there's not much going on we do have some ventilation for that cpu but when we take a look at the back here we have a full-size hdmi port full-size displayport 1.4 another usb type-c connector gigabit ethernet two more usb 3.2 gen1 connectors and our power input now this little pc will actually support up to four displays at 4k we have two over usb type c one over hdmi and one over displayport so you can run four displays at 4k on this unit at the same exact time and just to give you an idea of the size here we have a raspberry pi 4 and an xbox controller sitting right next to this pc i mean it's not much bigger than an xbox controller so with my unit built here's the specs for the cpu we have that ryzen 5 4500 u 6 cores base clock of 2.3 boost up to 4 gigahertz the gpu is the radeon 6 at 1 500 megahertz we have 16 gigabytes of ddr4 running at 3200 megahertz a 512 gigabyte nvme ssd we have wi-fi 6 bluetooth 5.0 and we're going to be running windows 10 pro on this unit i've actually already installed it so let's go ahead and move over there now all right so here it is i have windows 10 pro installed on this asus pn50 we have the ryzen 5 4500u gigabytes of ddr4 running at 3 200 megahertz and the built-in radeon 6 graphics so one thing i wanted to make sure of was these graphics were hitting the correct clock so i just always test it here just to make sure here's the clocks at 400 megahertz this should jump up to 1500 just want to make sure that we're gonna get the maximum out of this and through all of my tests this has maxed out at 1500 megahertz no issues whatsoever so uh with a lot of these lower end or smaller pcs i notice they limit a lot but this one here definitely has the cpu and gpu running at full speed when it needs to so i've been really impressed with this little box here i tested a lot of mini pcs i've tested more powerful mini pcs that were just a bit bigger than this but i'm really liking this one now i am a big fan of these ryzen apus and i really do wish that i could have picked up the 4800u version of this but at close to 900 i couldn't fork out the cash for something like that so i opted for the mid-range which has that 4500 u and i gotta say this thing performs excellent for the form factor now going into this if you needed to pick something like this up for your main desktop you could definitely use it let's uh test out a little bit of web browsing i'm using the edge browser and we'll just head over to the asus website this thing is quick we got six cores there with that 4500 u and a boost up to four gigahertz uh we'll just check something else here everything loads up quickly i mean for web browsing you'll have no issues with this 4k video playback let's check out some youtube here just going to pause it real quick stats for nerds make sure we are at 4k go full screen with it we dropped two frames so far definitely would never notice that and as we play through or if we were already buffered a little bit we wouldn't drop any with 4k or 5k video playback on this little device so if you did want to pick something like this up for media consumption be it streaming or even setting this up as a little plex server it's going to work out just fine i mean this definitely has enough power and i wouldn't be opposed to streaming i'd say three to four 4k streams on this using it as a little plex server moving over to some benchmarks first up we have crystal disk and keep in mind i'm using that cheaper silicon power nvme so your speeds will differ depending on the ssd you use but for this one here at a 512 gigabyte nvme it's looking pretty decent next up we have cenobench r20 total score 1173 not bad for the form factor but it's really not that impressive remember we don't have any extra threads with the 4500u we just have six cores here geekbench 5 actually looked really great single core 1118 multi 4165 when it comes to just basic workflow here's pc mark 10 total score of 4078 and if we take a look at the bottom here it's stating that we're better than 35 percent of all other machines tested here so i think this is doing a pretty good job next up 3d mark night raid total score 9793 and finally fire strike with 2709 and now we're gonna move over to some pc gaming now when it comes to these mini pcs we all know that most of the time we can build something with much better performance for pc gaming for cheaper using used parts from amazon and ebay but personally i'm a big fan of these small form factor machines and it's actually amazing what these things can do in 2021 so first up we have cs go i did take this down to 720p but we have a low and medium mix i got an average of 71 fps this definitely favors intel over amd but it's looking pretty decent next up we have world of warcraft low medium settings 1080p you're gonna be able to play this at 60 all day long i just keep it locked at 60 to keep that gpu usage down and if we take a look at the top left hand corner there's a chance i could have went up a little more because we're only utilizing 38 of that gpu with wow here on low medium settings at 1080p here we have fortnite 1080p using their new performance mode and this actually averaged 68 fps i'd say this is fully playable but with performance mode keep in mind we're basically at low i do have resolution scale set to 100 though doom eternal 720p low i still think it looks absolutely amazing on low settings they've done a great job with this game we're using the vulcan back in and this little machine managed an average of 58 fps not quite 60 and when it's unlocked here you'll see it jump up to 80 every once in a while but on average this did 58. halo 3 from the master chief collection 720p low settings and if i did jump this up to medium settings we wouldn't even hit 60 but it averaged 65 fps sitting like this street fighter 5 720p low it'll run at 60 all day i did try to take it up a little bit i really wish we could have got at least medium out of this or even low 1080p but at 100 resolution scale i mean 720p is going to be the best we can get out of this 4500u in street fighter 5. here's fallout 4 720p with a low medium mix we are stuck at 60. you'll see it dip down to 58 every once in a while but overall i mean this game is fully playable at 60fps 720p low medium rocket league 1080p performance settings it averaged 95 fps by the time i was done with this and i figured that this game would run at 1080p on this machine so this is a weird one here we have fall guys and initially going into this game with basically any low end pc i figured it would run at 60 1080p on basically any machine but unfortunately that's just not the case i did have to take this down to low settings 720p to get it to run at 60 on this machine now if you wanted to lock this at medium settings 30fps 1080p but i wanted to see what we had to do to get this at 60. and finally we have gta 5 720p normal settings i got an average of 68 fps i'd say this is really playable here but then again we're only at 720p now just like fall guys if you wanted to lock this at 30 we could do 1080p normal high mix but in order to get this at 60 will have to drop it down to the seven twenty p range so with all of these mini pcs i always like to test power consumption i'm using a kilowatt meter from the wall at idle we averaged 7.8 watts 4k video playback 14.3 gaming on average it was 35.2 and the maximum i could pull out of this from the wall was 48.4 watts and that's a very extreme test by maxing out the gpu and cpu at the exact same time so you'll be hard-pressed to ever see that kind of wattage from this unit as cpu temps go this did way better than i thought it would at idle we're around 46 4k video playback does jump up to about 53 gaming on average 69 and the maximum cpu temps i saw out of this was 84 degrees celsius and that was running cinebench r23 for that 10 minute test that they have now so yeah i mean with this low wattage cpu and the cooling system they have in the pn50 it does a great job and fan noise in my opinion isn't a big deal at all even when gaming with a game like gta 5 it's really hard to hear it this is not jumped up like a little jet plane whatsoever and if you did have this let's say mounted behind your monitor you'd be really hard-pressed to hear this even with the cpu maxed out at a hundred percent so it would definitely be nice to test out that 4 800 u but like i mentioned i mean the price on that was close to 900 and i personally didn't want to spend that i picked this up for 476 for the base unit without the ram and the storage so when it's all said and done i have close to 580 into this mini pc and that's definitely expensive especially given the fact that you can take an old hp or an optiplex and add a 1650 to it and just blow this thing out of the water but you're not going to get this kind of form factor and i think that's the main selling point to something like this it definitely would have been nice if this had a more powerful cpu at the same price but i think for what the 4500 u is this is an excellent performing mini pc and the build quality from asus on these pn50s is definitely top notch but that's going to wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching i was super excited to get my hands on this i will be doing an emulation test so keep an eye out on the channel and if there's anything else you want to see running on the pn50 just let me know in the comments below but like always thanks for watching\n"