At first glance, this Newegg-sourced $99 AMD Ryzen 3 mini PC with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD looks like the bargain of the century. After all, Ryzen CPUs are very well regarded amongst the hardware enthusiast community, getting rave reviews and one would expect this one to follow the trend.

But don’t get fooled. The AMD Ryzen 3 3250U is a very basic dual-core CPU, one of the slowest Ryzen processors in the market, delivering half the performance of Intel N97 and N100 rivals, that a bit more.

And while it has enough ports for the average user, its abysmal compute capabilities means that I will thoroughly discourage anyone from purchasing it unless their needs very specifically demand an ultra cheap platform that could be used for say, digital signage or as a Karaoke machine (it has separate audio inputs).

So this is a textbook case of false economy. Check out these four other mini PCs instead or if you want to explore other options, we have a dedicated Black Friday mini PC deals page.