Acemagic Retro X5 Is a Tiny NES-Style Gaming PC With Real 1080p Muscle
Acemagic’s Retro X5 is very clearly playing the nostalgia card. One glance and you’ll know the vibe: grey box, black strip, hard-edged 80s console energy. PC Gamer’s review basically confirms what everyone is thinking — this thing looks dangerously close to an old Nintendo-style machine, just shrunk down and rebuilt as a proper Windows 11 small form factor gaming PC.
But the interesting part is that the Retro X5 is not just a cute desk ornament. Under that retro shell, Acemagic has packed in AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, a 12-core, 24-thread chip paired with the full Radeon 890M integrated GPU. That matters because the 890M is currently one of the more exciting iGPU options for people who want a compact machine that can actually game without immediately begging for a dedicated GPU.
For Malaysia and SEA gamers, this is the kind of device that makes sense if your setup is more living room than full tower. Not everyone wants a massive RGB PC beside the TV, and not everyone has the desk space for a proper ATX build. A tiny box that can sit under a 4K TV, run Windows, handle emulation, indie games, esports titles and some modern AAA games at sensible settings? Memang ada appeal.
The spec list is solid too. PC Gamer’s unit came with 32GB DDR5 SODIMM memory running at 5,600 MT/s and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 Huawei eKitStor Xtreme 200E SSD. The drive is not positioned as some flagship monster SSD, and PC Gamer notes it uses YMTC QLC NAND without a DRAM cache, but it still performed decently in testing.
Port selection is where the Retro X5 gets properly interesting. Around the back, it has two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.0 and DC-in. Up front, there are two more USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a 3.5mm audio jack and a USB4 Type-C port rated at 40Gbps. Add WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, and this little box suddenly looks more modern than half the prebuilt PCs sitting in Malaysian homes.
Performance is the real headline. In PC Gamer’s testing, Cyberpunk 2077 ran at 38fps at 1080p without upscaling and 52fps with upscaling enabled. Black Myth: Wukong hit 20fps normally and 30fps with FSR. F1 24 reached 73fps without upscaling, while Horizon Zero Dawn managed 63fps with upscaling. For a machine this small, those numbers are genuinely impressive — especially for players who are okay tweaking settings instead of demanding ultra everything.
The review also points out something important for buyers: memory configuration matters a lot for integrated graphics. PC Gamer compared it against a similar small PC from Geekom that used a single 32GB stick, and that machine performed much worse in some games. Dual-channel memory is not just a spec sheet flex here; it directly affects the Radeon 890M’s gaming output.
Pricing is the tricky part. PC Gamer says the Retro X5 was available at US$999 in the US and £889 in the UK at the time of writing, after a major drop of around US$400 / £410 from its earlier listing price. For Malaysian buyers, US$999 works out to roughly RM4.7k before shipping, taxes and any reseller markup, depending on exchange rate. At that kind of money, it becomes a niche purchase: cool, powerful and compact, but not exactly cheap versus building a budget gaming desktop locally.
The other caveats are fan noise, inconsistent pricing and limited availability. So the advice is simple: if it lands in Malaysia or SEA at a sensible price, the Retro X5 could be a very fun living-room gaming PC. If import pricing goes crazy, better tahan dulu and compare against gaming laptops, mini PCs or even a proper desktop build.
Still, as a blend of retro design and modern AMD performance, Acemagic’s little grey box has serious charm. It looks old-school, but the gaming results are anything but.
Source: PC Gamer
