Prime Computer PrimeMini 5
Built with the environment in mind, this compact and silent PC is also extremely cheap to run
SCORE
PRICE £959 (£1,151 inc VAT) from boston.co.uk
As the price above indicates, the PrimeMini 5 isn’t trying to be just another compact business PC. This is a computer with environmental considerations at its heart, and if your business has similar ethical goals then you may be able to stomach the price.
Besides, there are TCO advantages of switching from a gas-guzzling desktop PC. With over-powered innards and multiple fans, it isn’t unusual for a PC to consume 80W at idle; the PrimeMini sips 13W in general use and even at its peak draws only 30W. Over the course of five years, that’s a saving of roughly £150 based on typical usage and electricity rates. If you need a computer to stay on all the time – and this is a PC designed with 24/7 usage in mind – then that saving triples to £450.
Prime Computer points out that its fanless design also makes its PC more suitable than most for environments such as cafés and medical surgeries. No fans mean no routes of ingress for dust and grease, and it’s easier to wipe clean for the same reasons.
Then there’s the more obvious benefit of a fanless design: to remove the final moving component from a PC and, therefore, reduce failure rates. So the asking price above isn’t simply buying you a PC but also peace of mind; if you are to believe Prime Computer’s online TCO calculator, its PCs have a 1.2% failure rate compared to 4% for a PC with a fan. Finally, note the five-year warranty – albeit return-to-base rather than on-site.
There’s an obvious benefit to your working environment in switching to a fanless computer too, and that’s silence. Switch on the PrimeMini 5 and the only sign that it’s operational is the h blue LED surrounding d the h power button. Compared to the sporadic fan noise of the HP EliteDesk 705 ( see p59) that’s a welcome relief.
Prime Computer achieves this by using a low-power mobile processor, the Core i5-8365U. This only needs a handful of watts to keep going at its base 1.6GHz frequency, and a TDP of 15W indicates why this PC’s peak power consumption is so low. You can’t expect raw power, but with 16GB of RAM the PrimeMini 5 runs Office apps with no difficulty. It’s unlikely that typical office tasks (or Windows updates) will trouble this PC during a five-year lifespan, but it would still have been reassuring to have an 11th rather than eighth-generation Core processor inside – this would likely have pushed its score in our benchmarks from 84 to around 120.
The quoted price includes a 250GB Samsung Evo 860 M.2 SSD, although for testing it relied on a 2.5in Evo 850. These are SATA 3 drives, but you can opt for an NVMe SSD. There’s space for both M.2 and 2.5in SSDs in the chassis and you can fit them yourself, along with the RAM; four tightly fitted crosshead screws secure the base.
One scenario definitely off the cards is gaming, with Intel’s UHD Graphics 620 accelerator showing its age. Its bright spot was in the OpenGL benchmark of GFXBench’s Car Chase test (offscreen, 1080p), where it returned 31fps. OpenGL apps will take advantage, but once we switched to DirectX games it failed to reach playable rates – even at 720p in the undemanding Dirt: Showdown. More strenuous games proved too much for the PrimeMini 5 altogether, with the system s freezing.
“It isn’t unusual for a PC to consume 80W at idle; the PrimeMini 5 sips 13W in general use and even at its peak draws just 30W”
This is an area where PCs such as
the HP EliteDesk have an advantage, and the other is size. While this is a tiny PC compared to most, it’s almost twice the height of the EliteDesk and considerably wider at 177mm. It’s also built like a tank, with an aluminium case that weighs 1.4kg. I’m not sure I’d describe the PrimeMini 5 as stylish, but it’s certainly distinctive. To the untutored eye it actually resembles a compact router, but that’s due to the pair of Wi-Fi aerials that you’ll need to attach at its rear to take advantage of Wi-Fi 5 (not Wi-Fi 6, note).
The system on review includes two HDMI outputs along with Thunderbolt 3, USB-A 2 and a trio of USB-A 3.1 ports, but if you have particular needs then you should get in touch with Boston, the UK distributor. For instance, our review sample (and the price above) includes an RS232 serial port and a second Gigabit Ethernet connector, but this is configurable at the time of purchase.
Indeed, while the price isn’t this PC’s most attractive feature, you should bear in mind it’s for a single unit with this specific configuration. You may not want an RS232 port, you may desire the maximum storage available (3TB), you might want a Core i7 processor and 32GB of RAM, and note that bulk purchases will come at a discount. As such, the price we quote is a guide rather than a precise figure.
What’s far more certain is that the Prime Computer PrimeMini 5 will help environmentally conscious companies to hit their goals, and in doing so will not only reduce electricity bills and CO2 consumption but also quieten an office’s fleet of
PCs. If you divide the cost by a likely life of five years, that may not be too high a price to pay.
SPECIFICATIONS
Four-core 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-8365U 16GB 2,400MHz DDR4 RAM Intel UHD Graphics 620 250GB Samsung Evo 860 M.2 SSD
Intel NUC motherboard 2 x HDMI 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Thunderbolt 3 3 x USB-A 3.1 USB-A 2 RS232 port Wi-Fi 5 Bluetooth 5 90W external PSU Windows 10 Pro 177 x 114 x 55mm (WDH) 1.4kg 5yr RTB warranty