Chinese brand FEVM has managed to shove AMD’s flagship Strix Halo processor into a 1-litre chassis, 1.02-litre to be exact, all while leaving room for three M.2 slots. With its Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip containing a Radeon 8060S GPU, this tiny machine punches above its weight, and it has 128GB of RAM too.
A BiliBili channel managed to grab an FEVM FAEX1 unit and tore it apart, revealing a densely packed motherboard and plenty of connections. Understandably, the RAM is soldered to the board, so you can’t upgrade it; you get what you order, and that’s it. FEVM offers two capacities – 64GB or 128GB of LPDDR5X-8533. On the top side, you will find one M.2 slot occupied by an OCuLink adapter, plus two easily accessible PCIe Gen 4 M.2 slots on the bottom side for SSDs.
The 16-core Zen 5 CPU contains a powerful Radeon 8060S iGPU boasting 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, which shares the aforementioned memory pool with the CPU. This APU can be configured at 100W, 120W, or 160W, fed via an external 20V adapter. To cool it, the FAEX1 calls for a large vapour chamber coupled with two blower fans, resulting in reasonable noise levels at the normal 120W target.
Despite its limited real estate (220 x 133 x 35mm), this mini PC packs a wide range of connections, including two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, a DisplayPort 2.0 output, an HDMI 2.1 socket, and a 3.5mm audio jack. There’s also an SD card reader, two LAN ports (2.5Gb/s plus 10Gb/s), and most importantly, OCuLink plus USB 4 ports, so you can hook up an external GPU. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 are also present.
Regarding performance, the FAEX1 managed to achieve an 11,745 graphics score in 3DMark’s Time Spy benchmark, which is as fast as an RTX 4060 desktop or RTX 4070 mobile. Funnily enough, the entire PC is also the size of an RTX 4060 FE. On the CPU side, the 16-core Ryzen CPU at 160W was slightly faster than an Intel Core i9-13900KS at 253W. Gaming-wise, the CPU/GPU combo was enough to deliver 90fps in Cyberpunk 2077, 125fps in Forza Horizon 5, and 107fps in Tomb Raider, at 1080p resolution.
Unsurprisingly, this performance doesn’t come cheap, as the FAEX1 starts at ¥10,999 (£1,165) for a model with 64GB of RAM and without an SSD, going up to ¥13,999 (£1,483) for the top variant with 128GB of RAM. For now, this mini PC seems to be only available on JD.com, but we may see it in other stores later.
