Corsair’s new decked-out Ryzen mini PC is perfect for AI enthusiasts

Mini PCs are exploding in popularity as an affordable alternative to laptops. Even Corsair is entering the market… though it probably won’t appeal to quite the same people. The new AI Workstation 300 is—you guessed it—designed for AI developers, powered by a Ryzen AI Max laptop chip and shipping with absolute gobs of memory and storage.

The tiny machine (measuring just 247.5mm or 9.7 inches on its longest side) can be equipped with either a Ryzen AI Max 385 or Max+ 395 processor, with 8 or 16 primary cores, respectively. And it maxes out at 128GB of LPDDR5X memory and 4TB of storage (double M.2 2TB). All that power is surprisingly reasonable in terms of price, with the base model going for $1,600 while the upgraded version is $2,000.

That said, this isn’t Corsair’s usual desktop fare aimed at enthusiast gamers. While the Radeon 8050S or 8060S GPUs are pretty powerful for integrated chips, they’re still, well, integrated, and so won’t even compete with mid-range discrete cards. You also won’t be able to upgrade the laptop-based CPU, though that crazy powerhouse will last you quite a while before you’d even want to.

Corsair

Rather, this thing is designed as a tiny and relatively cheap AI workstation. All that RAM can be dynamically split between CPU and GPU for cranking up local large language models, among other AI applications. The open-source Jan AI and AMD’s own Amuse interface for Stable Diffusion are called out on the promotional page. With this, Corsair is competing with other small workstation machines, like HP’s Z2 Mini G1a, which uses the same Ryzen chips and integrated graphics.

While I love the tiny physical design, I have to say that the rear panel is a little underwhelming, with cooling vents crowding out relatively few I/O options. You get single HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C, triple USB-A at various speeds, a headphone jack. On the front you get two more USB-A, one more USB-C, another headphone jack and… an SD card slot. Huh.

Corsair says the AI Workstation 300 is available immediately, but less than a day after its launch the US storefront is showing both models as backordered. It looks like plenty of people want this thing.