I recently attended IFA 2023 in Berlin, and as at any good tech expo there was plenty of weird and wonderful stuff to see. But I’m a computer nerd at heart, and one of the best things – by my own personal metric – at the show was this ridiculously tiny liquid-cooled gaming PC.
Tecno is a Shenzhen, China-based tech company that currently operates virtually everywhere except the United States, although that really ought to change. I saw some pretty nifty hardware on its stand at IFA, but the highlight for me was the MegaMini G1 gaming desktop – a liquid-cooled concept PC with a ridiculously small footprint.
According to the spec sheet I was shown, the MegaMini G1 features an Intel Core i9-13900H, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a 1TB SSD, and an RTX 4050 – not exactly the best graphics card you can buy right now, but it still boggles my mind that Tecno was able to fit all that inside this device. The case is just 13 square centimeters at the base and 25 centimeters tall, making it massively smaller than my previous favorite compact PC, the Corsair One.
With that level of grunt (if anything, I’d say the i9 processor is slightly overkill for the rest of the build), you need serious cooling, and the MegaMini offers this in the form of a built-in liquid loop with a single large fan. It looks fantastic; the cooling tubes are sheathed in addressable LED sleeves that shift with RGB lighting to mimic the flow of coolant. Combined with its solid metal casing and additional LEDs on the fan and pump block, it’s perhaps one of the best-looking compact PCs I’ve ever seen.
Little box of wonders
I didn’t get exact pricing details on the MegaMini G1 (since it’s still in the development phase), but it’s unlikely to be super-expensive; while Tecno isn’t a budget brand, it operates primarily in the Asian, South American, and Eastern European markets, where affordability is often vital.
With the right pricing, this dinky Windows gaming desktop could be worthy of standing among the best computers out there – though it does have fierce competition in the tiny computer space, thanks to Apple’s powerful 2023 upgrade of the Mac mini.
As for whether the MegaMini G1 will be available in North America, the Tecno team wasn’t able to give me a definitive answer – but it should be noted that you can already buy some Tecno products (including wireless routers and earbuds) on Amazon in the US. It looks like the brand is testing the waters in the American market right now, and I’m hopeful we’ll see more of its products surface across the Atlantic.
I say this because not only was I impressed with the sheer compact scale of the G1, but Tecno’s Megabook S1 – a sleek laptop that wouldn’t look out of place among the best ultrabooks. The company’s thinnest laptop yet, a special edition of the S1 was on display at IFA, featuring a pearlescent finish with hidden branding that glows under UV light. Pointless? Maybe. Cool? You bet.