A 12-core i9 slips into a jacket pocket for under €480
Someone just crammed Intel’s Core i9-12900H, 24 GB of RAM and a 1-TB NVMe drive into a box the size of a paperback and slapped a €477 price tag on it. The BMAX B9 Power flash sale, live on AliExpress until stock evaporates, turns the old “performance needs a tower” rule into yesterday’s joke.
The specs read like a prank until you plug it in
Fourteen cores, twenty threads, turbo to 5 GHz. Those numbers belong in a 2-kg workstation, not a 0.6-litre aluminium brick that disappears inside a courier bag. Yet Cinebench R23 routinely tops 18 000 points, putting the B9 Power neck-and-neck with last-year’s €1 500 NUCs. Thermals stay sane thanks to a vapor-chamber heatsink and a single 4 500-rpm fan that peaks at 34 dB—library territory.
24 GB of dual-channel DDR4 is soldered; no spare slot, but also no 8-GB nonsense that chokes Chrome at thirty tabs. The PCIe 4.0 SSD is a standard 2280 stick, user-replaceable, and the bottom panel pops off with four Phillips screws. Inside you’ll find space for a second 2.5-inch drive if you’re willing to sacrifice the Wi-Fi 6E antenna cable route, a trade-off tinkerers will appreciate.
Ports and silence matter when your office is a café
Two HDMI 2.1 sockets push 4K@60 Hz to external monitors without the usual USB-C dongle maze. Add the lone USB-C (Thunderbolt 4, 40 Gbps) and the integrated Iris Xe can drive three screens simultaneously—handy for live-editing 4K drone footage in Premiere while Slack and Spotify sit on the side panels. The 3.5 mm jack is powered by an ALC897 codec; audiophiles will sniff, but it keeps latency low enough for Bluetooth-averse streamers.
Idle power sits at 9 W; under full render it spikes to 85 W before the 100 W GaN adapter taps the brakes. During an eight-hour H.265 encode test in Handbrake the unit averaged 72 °C, 1 MHz below max turbo, and the fan never spun past 37 dB. That is quieter than a MacBook Air M2 under the same load—an anecdote that will enrage loyalists on both sides of the OS fence.
Shipping from france erases the china roulette cliché
AliExpress’ French warehouse means EU buyers get the box in three working days, not three weeks, and the 15-day free return window applies. VAT is prepaid, so the checkout price is the final price—no nasty customs note two days after unboxing. Buyer protection still applies, but with domestic tracking the usual “parcel stuck in Liege” horror story disappears.
Gaming? Not its mission, yet Forza Horizon 5 runs 1080p high at 56 fps once you cap the CPU’s turbo to 4 GHz. The Iris Xe 96EU is nobody’s RTX, but eGPU support over Thunderbolt 4 lets you dock a 3080 when you’re back at base. One box, two personalities: ultralight commute machine by day, ray-tracing render node by night.
Flash-sale psychology is brutal—units drop in batches of 500 every six hours. At the time of writing, 212 were left. The price climbs back to €699 once inventory hits the next pallet. If you miss it, the closest competitor is the Minisforum HX99G at €1 099, and that one is still a pre-order.
Raw silicon, bargain-basement euros, zero desk real estate. The BMAX B9 Power is not the future of computing; it is the present, stealthily disguised as a limited-time typo. Grab one before the countdown resets, or spend the next year pretending towers were ever a good idea.