MSI Cubi 5 12M-444US 2022, Core i5-1235U, 8GB, 500GB SSD, Black

The Cubi 5 12M is a tiny, well-connected mini PC that handles everyday office work and streaming without breaking a sweat. The 8GB of RAM and mid-tier CPU hold it back for anything demanding. Worth it if you value desk space and Thunderbolt 4 over raw performance.

The i5-1235U is a 10-core chip with a mix of performance and efficiency cores, and for basic tasks it's fine. Word docs, spreadsheets, video calls, and 4K streaming all run without much drama. The Iris Xe integrated graphics can even push an 8K display over Thunderbolt 4, which is neat for a box this small. But 8GB of single-channel DDR4 holds everything back. Open a dozen Chrome tabs plus Slack and you'll feel the system reaching for the SSD as a crutch. Storage is a 500GB NVMe drive, which is snappy but sits in the lower third of our rankings. Gaming is essentially a non-starter, our data puts it at 9 out of 100. This is not a machine you buy for frame rates.

Stacked against the competition, the Cubi 5 occupies an odd lane. The Lenovo Legion 90YA003GUS and HP Omen 45L are gaming towers that obliterate it in raw performance, but they're massive and power-hungry by comparison. The Apple Mac Studio M5 Max is in a completely different performance universe, though it costs far more and runs macOS. The ASUS ROG GM700 and Dell Tower Plus EBT2250 both offer more RAM and stronger CPUs for similar or less money, but again, they're full-size desktops. The Cubi's real competition isn't these towers, it's other mini PCs, and against those it holds its own on connectivity while falling behind on memory and CPU grunt.

Pricing is all over the place. US listings hover around $973 to $987, which is a lot for a machine with 8GB of RAM and integrated graphics. You're paying a premium for the small form factor and Thunderbolt 4, not raw performance. For the same money you could get a much faster traditional desktop, though it would eat up ten times the desk space. If portability and a clean setup are your top priorities, the price is defensible. If you just want the most compute per dollar, it's not.

The MSI Cubi 5 12M is a tiny desktop that tries to do a lot with very little. It packs a 10-core i5-1235U, 8GB of DDR4, and a 500GB NVMe drive into a box roughly the size of a thick paperback. Windows 11 Pro comes preloaded, and you get Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 6E, and enough ports to run three monitors. On paper, that's a solid little workhorse for a desk with limited real estate.

But the spec sheet tells a mixed story. The CPU lands in the bottom third of our database for this category, and 8GB of RAM is near the bottom at the 9th percentile. That's a real constraint in 2025, especially with Windows 11 and a browser full of tabs. This is a machine built for light office work and media streaming, not heavy multitasking.

Skip this if you need more than 8GB of RAM, because you'll hit that ceiling fast with modern workloads. Also skip it if you want to game or run GPU-accelerated creative apps, the integrated graphics just can't keep up. And if you're shopping purely on performance per dollar, a mid-size desktop will give you far more CPU and memory for the same money, assuming you have the desk space for it.

The MSI Cubi 5 12M is for people who want a clean, quiet, space-saving Windows machine for email, web browsing, office apps, and media playback. It's genuinely good at that. The Thunderbolt 4 port and triple display support make it a surprisingly flexible little hub for a home office. But if you need to run virtual machines, edit video, or keep fifty browser tabs alive, the 8GB RAM ceiling will frustrate you fast. Buy it for the form factor, not the firepower.