My $350 mini PC beats your $2000 gaming rig and also harms the planet less

← back to blog techgamingsustainabilitymini-pc My $350 mini PC beats your $2000 gaming rig and also harms the planet less Sunday, 22 March 2026

← back to blog techgamingsustainabilitymini-pc My $350 mini PC beats your $2000 gaming rig and also harms the planet less Sunday, 22 March 2026 I know two people who built dedicated gaming setups that cost upwards of two thousand euros.

Both of them primarily play DOTA.

DOTA. The game from 2013 that runs on a potato. Two thousand euros.

I play on a Minisforum U790. It's an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS APU — meaning the CPU and GPU are on the same chip, no dedicated graphics card, no tower, no RGB lighting I'll turn off in three days. The whole unit is smaller than a shoebox. It cost around 350 euros with RAM and storage.

It runs PUBG. Smoothly. It runs most games I care about at settings I'm comfortable with.

And I'm sitting here thinking: why does nobody talk about this?

What an APU actually is

An APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) puts the processor and graphics on one chip. AMD has been making genuinely impressive integrated graphics for a few years now — the 780M in the Ryzen 9 series is not a toy. It's not going to run Cyberpunk at 4K ultra, but the gap between "dedicated GPU gaming" and "APU gaming" has shrunk dramatically.

The 7940HS in the U790 is also the chip in the Steam Deck. Valve shipped a handheld gaming device to millions of people running this architecture. That should tell you something about what's possible.

The PS5 replacement argument

Here's a thought I've been sitting with: a well-configured mini PC APU is actually a reasonable alternative to a PS5 for most use cases.

You get PC game access (Steam, Epic, GOG), backwards compatibility with everything ever, native controller support, and the ability to install Bazzite or another gaming Linux distribution that turns the whole thing into a couch console. The PS5 has exclusives. It also costs 450 euros and has a library that doesn't talk to your existing Steam library.

For someone who games casually — and I think most people who own gaming setups game more casually than they'd admit — the AP