Ayaneo has continued to impress me over the last year with its multitude of stellar releases, particularly in the gaming handheld landscape. The company has gone from strength to strength, releasing the Ayaneo 2S, Ayaneo Kun, and then entering the mini PC market with the Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM01. Now we're getting the AM02, a successor that packs a Ryzen 7840HS, up to 32GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of storage.

Like its predecessor, the AM02 is strongly inspired by a retro device, and in this case, it's Nintendo's NES. It has a flap at the front that lifts to reveal a USB-C port, two USB-A ports, and a headphone jack, and the red button on the front lifts that flap up. The white button is the power button, and on the top is a black screen that can show system information on it.

The Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM02 is an excellent mini PC, and one that does even better than the original did. It's got upgraded hardware, it's powered by USB-C, and the HDMI port supports high refresh rates and higher resolutions. It's a massive step-up over the original, and the inclusion of modern hardware especially makes this a significantly more viable piece of hardware than the AM01 for most use cases.

It's absolutely tiny too, which goes a long way for being a genuinely useful mini PC. If you need a computer that's super small and still capable of playing your games, then this is seriously worth a look.

About this review: I received the Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM02 from Ayaneo on February 12th, 2024. The company had no input into the contents of this review.

Pricing & availability

The Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM02 comes in multiple SKUs, differentiated by the RAM and storage available. It starts at $439 for the base model that comes barebones; that is, no drives or RAM included. To get 16GB RAM and 512GB storage costs $529 at the time of writing, and the price scales up from there. It's available internationally through IndieGoGo, though you may need to pay import taxes.

Design and build quality

Solid and recognizable

I personally love the design of the AM02, and it puts a neat spin on the original NES. It has a screen on the front that's admittedly somewhat useless, but a nice selection of ports in a very small form-factor. It has two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, one USB4 USB-C port, one USB-C power port, two Ethernet ports (one is 2.5Gbps), a HDMI 2.0 port, and a DisplayPort 1.4 port. There's a lot of versatility here.

It's made of hard palstic with a shell that covers the front ports, and it's arguably the most inconvenient part of the package. To use the USB-C port or the headphone jack, you need to pop the front on this PC, and you won't be able to close it. It's not a big deal, but I'd prefer if I could keep it closed. Otherwise, big fan of the design, and the screen on the front is interesting, even if somewhat useless. It can show some system information, but it was a bit of a mess to get working, and it's more of a gimmick than anything. I like it, but I don't think most people will care about it after a while.

The TDP out of the box is 28W and can go up to 35W, and it's a pretty low power chip all things considered. I measured a maximum of around 50-60W under load when using this device for its entire power draw, and the plug in the box is capable of supplying up to 100W of power. That's pretty inexpensive to run, making it great for use as a NAS or other device. You get a HDMI cable in the box along with adapters for the plug for any region, making it fantastic for travel, too.

The overall design of the Ayaneo AM02 is one that's unique and loveable while being recognizable. It still feels a bit weird for a company to release products clearly modelled after others, but it looks good and that's a lot of what really counts. You get a ton of stuff in the box for mounting your own drives too, which is a level of attention to detail that I love.

Software and performance

Windows 11 pre-installed

Ayaneo has been making handheld gaming PCs for quite a while, and nearly all of them have used the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. That's the case with this device too (mostly, it's a 7840HS), and it's clear that they're getting comfortable with the same homogenuous hardware requirements of every device released. That was especially evident when the AM01's Ayaspace software was clearly expecting handheld inputs out of the box.

That isn't quite the same here, but this time around I ran into other problems with Ayaspace. It simply wouldn't update, no matter what I did. I eventually found an "AYASpace Update" application in the installation folder for Ayaspace that let me force an update, but otherwise, I couldn't do it through the program itself. This meant that I couldn't interact with the screen on the front as the pre-installed software didn't support it, so that's why upgrading was important.

Thankfully, once upgraded, the front-screen did work, but there aren't exactly many options for it. As well, everytime I switched to the Ayaspace application, it felt like the refresh rate of my screen dropped to 30Hz. Even in the background it seemed to have an impact, so I had to minimize it by clicking the power button on the top right everytime if I wanted to use the computer itself.

Given that this is an early unit, I suspect that Ayaneo will ship units with updated software that doesn't have these problems, but it's still a frustrating experience out of the box. This time i didn't need to update any drivers or do anything manually in that regard like I did with the AM01, so that's a plus. I could play games like Cyberpunk: 2077 and Counter-Strike 2 as well, though obviously not on any high graphics settings.

The performance capabilities of this mini PC are going to be the same as any gaming handheld like the Asus ROG Ally, the Ayaneo 2S, or the Lenovo Legion Go. They all have 7840U-adjacent chips, which is quite similar in capabilities to the 7840HS. I could play Cyberpunk: 2077 in 1080p at around 40 FPS, which is about as good as it gets for these kinds of chips. You're not going to be engaging in any 4K gaming here at high refresh rates, but I don't think anyone expects that.

To be honest, this chip excels at emulation, which leans into Ayaneo's advertising of turning this into a console. Programs like Emudeck can now run on Windows, and it could be a great way to turn one of these into a little gaming console that sits by your television. With it using very little power as well, it could make a great NAS.

Should you buy the Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM02?

You should buy the Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM02 if:

• You want a small PC that's easy to transport
• You want something decently powerful
• You want to build a NAS, home server, or mini console on the cheap

You shouldn't buy the Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM02 if:

• You're worried about aftersales support
• You want to play intensive games

The Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM02 is good for all of the same reasons that the original AM01 was good, except that it's just more powerful. It has a better chip, but all the rest of it is the same. You get 32GB of RAM, you get a terabyte of storage, and you get some decent I/O options that give you a lot of versatility. While the AM01 was the start of a DIY project you could do at home, the AM02 is genuinely a replacement for a PC if you all you do is some web browsing, basic work from home, and maybe some light gaming.

As always with Ayaneo, there are caveats given to those importing their products, as their aftersales support has been considered poor at times. While we've seen companies attack competitors on social media, it's true no matter what that shipping a product all the way back to China if there are problems can, at the very least, be massively inconvenient.

I love this particular product, and I think I'm going to build it up to be an emulation machine sitting by my TV. It's powerful enough to run older games like those on it, and with the looks that it has too, I think it's more than fitting that a NES lookalike could be used to play actual NES games. Ayaneo is doing some cool stuff here, and I like the breath of fresh air that they're putting in the PC space currently.