MSI Cubi ZAI 8M

A solid and unassuming mini PC that's particularly well suited to offices thanks to MSI's UK-based support

- TIM DANTON

When it comes to mini PCs, MSI isn't here to pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap, but to target professionals who want to know their systems have UK-based support if something goes wrong; small businesses are a key target. That's one reason why MSI will never offer the cut-price deals of Beelink, Geekom or Minisforum. I couldn't exactly match the spec on offer in my review unit - a Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, 16GB of DDR-5600 RAM and a 1TB Gen4 SSD - because MSI's rivals are more generous with RAM, but you can expect to pay around £600 for this amount of power from each of those companies.

Why pay the premium for MSI? Primarily for an easy life. It's often unclear which version of Windows you're buying with other mini PCs, and where the licence was sourced from, but here you know you're using a genuine, UK licence of Windows 11 Pro - that alone will take up a chunk of the price. Next is the local support, with MSI having a UK office and a Warwickshire-based service partner to draw upon if something goes wrong. All of which means a quicker fix than sending a mini PC back to Hong Kong or China if the motherboard fails, and it's good to see that the one-year warranty can be extended by three months if you register the device. The final reassurance comes from MSI's vigorous reliability testing, with the promise of 246,000 hours of mean time between failures for 24/7 workloads.