AOOSTAR MACO H255 MiniPC Review
Pretty good so far, but...
It’s no secret I’m fond of MiniPCs - that small form factor can nowadays pack a real punch in terms of hardware. Chinese manufacturers dominate this space, and so far I had real hands-on experience with a couple of the most common ones.
Unfortunately, I can also testify that the quality has been hit or miss. Looking back, I so far had 5 MiniPCs and 2 of them (one from Minisforum, one from GMKtec) failed in about less than a year of use, which is an abysmal track record. We’ll see how this one from AOOSTAR holds up.
It’s a MACO H255 MiniPC that I bought barebones, as I had some RAM and SSDs to install. The Ryzen 7 H255 CPU is very performant, and together with the 780M iGPU, it’s almost as fast as my HX 370 daily-use MiniPC, per-core, despite being “only” on the Zen 4 architecture (also, it has 8 cores instead of 12).
The case is almost entire made of metal (the bottom side being the exception), and they made it very easy to swap RAM and SSDs. There are plenty of the usual ports on the front and the back side, and even an OCULINK port - definitely could be handy for some future use.
The reason I bought this MiniPC is to be at the centre of domestic infrastructure, running an AI agent, Home Automation, and at the same time be connected to the TV for the occasional game session. I’ve installed Linux on it, and I was a little bit apprehensive about how games would work on it - and I can say I’m pleasantly surprised. Steam nowadays comes with their own Linux-Windows translation layer, and apparently it works even faster than Windows on these AMD iGPUs (probably because similar AMD iGPUs are widely used in game consoles).
With 32 GB of RAM and the 780M iGPU, this MiniPC has enough performance to run the “Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MTP-GGUF” model in llama.cpp, with between 200 and 250 tok/s prompt processing speed, and between 20 - 30 tok/s generation. That’s a pretty good small model, and that kind of performance is more than bearable.
My previous experience with “assistent” style agents was mostly with OpenClaw, but now I’ve decided to try Hermes. Seems interesting so far - I’ll keep you posted if I do something cool with it.
The iGPU is “good enough” for many games, at mid or low settings. I’m enjoying the experience with Cyberpunk 2077 and Claire Obscure.
I hope this device will last. I’ll also post more info if it doesn’t.