Recommended Premium & Workstation Mini PCs for Full Desktop Power, Palm-Sized

These are the premium and workstation-class mini PCs I'd run on my own desk — Ryzen AI and Core Ultra machines that do real work in the footprint of a paperback, chosen after 16 years of fixing computers at our Erina workshop. The catch with mini PCs is heat: cram desktop power into that volume and cheap ones throttle or cook their storage. I've picked MINISFORUM, Beelink, GMKtec, ASUS NUC and AOOSTAR units for genuine cooling, upgradeable RAM and NVMe, and the ports you actually plug into. When one needs a fresh drive, a memory bump or a Windows rescue, we service mini PCs on the bench.