The MSI Cubi Z AI 8M is an affordable mini PC with powerful AMD Radeon graphics – but they really shouldn't have bothered with the speakers

In a quick office straw poll here at ITPro, the most important features of a good Mini PC were determined to be low price, ideally under £500, more ports than you can shake a stick at, and decent graphics performance, which it quickly transpired meant the ability to support some superstitious lunchtime gaming.

Clearly, the good folk at MSI held a similar poll because that's exactly what the new MSI Cubi Z AI 8M is. Available for £475 (£395 ex-VAT) with no less than 6 USB ports and AMD's much-lauded Radeon 780M integrated graphics solution, this could be the most perfectly balanced mini PC of them all.

MSI Cubi Z AI 8M: Design

MSI's Mini PCs have long been fully paid-up members of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of design, being rather anonymous grey metal boxes with rounded corners. In terms of size, the new Cubi Z AI 8M is identical NUC AI+ 2MG at 135 x 132 x 50mm. It's a little heavier, weighing in at 730g rather than 700g, but that doesn't make it any less easy to hide on your desk or hang behind a monitor, for which MSI supplies a VESA bracket.

When it comes to ports, the Cubi Z AI 8M leaves the NUC AI+ 2MG choking in its dust. On the front panel, you'll find on less than four 10Gbps USB-A ports and a 3.5mm audio jack, while around the back, there are two USB-4 ports, two HDMI 2.1 video outputs, dual 2.5G RJ-45 Ethernet jacks, a fifth 10Gbps USB-A, and a single USB-A 2.0 port.

All that's missing is a full-sized DisplayPort video output, but given that both Type-C ports can deliver 4K 60Hz video, that's hardly the end of the world. That makes the Cubi Z AI 8M the perfect box to wire to your network and wire to a NAS box and act as an all-singing, all-dancing USB hub.

One of the USB-C ports supports 100W power delivery, so you can power the Cubi Z AI 8M from a USB-C charger as well as from the bundled rat-and-tail DC power supply. On the right side of the case is a full-sized SD-card reader, arguably more useful than the MicroSD card reader on the NUC AI+, while on the left, there's a Kensington nano slot and a connector for MSI's external power button.

The latter does not come bundled as it does with the NUC AI+, which is a bit of a shame because it lets you place your Mini PC out of sight and mind and not have to grope for it to switch it on.

Getting inside the Cubi Z AI 8M is easy enough once you've undone the four Philips screws that hold the base plate in place, but beware of the two wires that connect the motherboard to the speaker assembly that is fixed to the inside of the base grille, as one of them is a little on the short side.

Once open, there's good access to the two SODIMM slots and the mount for the 2280 SSD. As was the case with the NUC AI+, there is no room for a second SSD.

Wireless communications come courtesy of the Realtek MT7922 card, which supports 6Ghz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Not exactly the bleeding edge in either case, but close enough given the price.

The SSD in our test machine was a Phison unit, and it recorded above-average sequential read and write speeds of 4,762MB/s and 4.359MB/s, respectively.

MSI Cubi Z AI 8M: Specs and Performance

MSI lists three versions of the Cubi Z AI 8M, all the same bar the AMD CPU, which can be either a Ryzen 9 8945HS, Ryzen 7 8845HS, or Ryzen 5 8645HS. All three feature the same Radeon 780M integrated GPU.

At the time of writing, the only model being sold in the UK uses the Ryzen 7 8845HS chip, an 8-core Hawk Point chip using the Zen4 architecture with a maximum clock speed of 5.1GHz.

Hawk Point features AMD's second-generation Ryzen AI technology with an NPU rated at 16 TOPS. That's quite a way shy of the 40 TOPS that Microsoft demands for its CoPilot+ accreditation, but it at least endows the chipset with NPU support for the likes of Da Vinci Resolve.

Our review box also came with two 8GB sticks of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD.

In ITPro's bespoke 4K multi-media Handbrake benchmark, the Cubi Z AI 8M scored 341 points, which puts it ahead of the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V-powered MSI NUC AI+ 2MG, which scored 301 points and is not a million miles behind the 361 scored by the Core Ultra 9 285H-powered Geekom IT15.

In the PCMark 10 benchmark, the Cubi Z AI 8M scored 6,509 compared to the NUC AI+ 2MG's 6,857 and the Geekom IT15's 7,450 points. The Cubi Z's score is, however, comfortably ahead of the 4,945 scored by the Ryzen 5-powered Geekmon A5 and the 6,066 scored by the Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q Gen 4 Tiny, which runs on an Intel Core i7-13700T CPU.

When it comes to graphics performance, the Radeon 780M integrated GPU is capable of delivering speeds in excess of any of the direct Intel iGPU competition.

The Cubi Z AI 8M ran the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling benchmark at 33fps. The NUC AI+ 2MG with Intel Arc 140V graphics ran the same test at 26fps while the Geekmon IT15, using Arc 140T graphics, managed 29fps.

The 780M is also capable of running a wide selection of games. Less demanding 3D titles like the 2016 Doom reboot will run comfortably at over 60fps at FullHD with standard detail settings, and you can get 40fps on Cyberpunk 2077, again at 1,920 x 1,080, as long as you are prepared to turn the lighting and detail levels down as low as they will go.

Given that the Cubi Z AI 8M is amongst the cheapest of all the Mini PCs listed above, but more than holds its own in CPU performance and leads the pack in GPU performance, it's impossible not to conclude that it represents excellent performance-per-£.

Despite its powerful components, the Cubi Z AI 8M demonstrated no thermal issues whatsoever. After two hours of heavy stress testing, the CPU was still running at 95% utilisation and with minimal fan noise.

Fixed to the inside of the base grille is a speaker, but it's borderline useless. Even at maximum volume, it's impossible to hear what's going on unless you are in a completely quiet environment and what sound there is is tinny, brittle and frankly horrible.

Even if you stand the Cubi Z AI 8M on its side, so the speaker is no longer muffled by firing directly at the table top, to get a little more volume, you can't use the box to make Teams or Zoom calls because there's no microphone.

Given how good the in and out audio performance of the NUC AI+ 2MG was, the Cubi Z AI 8M is almost laughably bad in this area.

The reasons we're not marking the Cubi Z down for this failing are that we didn't expect it to have a speaker in the first place, and it was just good enough to alert us to incoming hostiles while playing Doom.

MSI Cubi Z AI 8M: Is it worth it?

At the time of writing, you can pick the Cubi Z AI 8M up for just £475, which is several hundred pounds cheaper than the NUC AI+ 2MG. Given the impressive levels of performance and the plethora of I/O ports, it's impossible not to see the Cubi Z AI 8M as a cracking little bargain.

Granted, we'd have liked to have seen a second SSD slot, and the audio performance is shockingly bad, but given that you get 1TB of storage as standard, and we weren't expecting to find a speaker to begin with, we don't think either is a reason to deprive this impressive new MSI Mini PC of a five-star rating.

MSI Cubi Z AI 8M Specifications