The Ace Magician AD03 N95 mini-pc is limited in regards to the performance it offers, but when you consider the price, it is a fairly solid system depending on the circumstance. For most office use cases, it will prove more than adequate; it also has plenty of USB ports to handle your connectivity needs. As a system for basic tasks, email, work, web browsing, etc., I found no discernible faults. If you are working with larger data sets in Excel or want to do video or photo editing, I would recommend something more powerful, but for daily tasks, it's a damn good system. The tests are in line with expectations, and considering that this system only draws 8 to 22 Watts in Idle or Load, offers some serious performance for how little power it uses. In fact, I never once encountered any form of thermal throttling either, with the CPU remaining between 2.6 and 3.4 GHz in all tasks, which is a combination of the 15 Watt TDP along with a decent heatsink and fan.

In regards to build quality and design choices, things are less cut and dry. Build quality alone is good, with the system being well designed from a chassis, I/O, and cooling perspective. Especially when it comes to cooling as the CPU, which typically idled at 40-41 °C with load temps sitting between 50-55 °C with a peak of 65°C when stressed via the AIDA64 stress test. Surprisingly, while temperatures were well below the thermal throttle point noise levels were not bad either. At idle the system would make no noticeable noise to at most a whisper (35-40 dBA) with peak noise readings hitting just 46 dBA at 6 inches (15 cm) under extreme load. Where things fall apart in some respects is upgradeability. The N95 processor only supports a maximum of 16 GB of memory and is limited to single channel by design. Therefore you cannot improve memory capacity beyond what it already has, but at least you can replace it should a stick die, which is a plus. Meanwhile, your storage options are entirely SATA based with no NVMe support. In the future, if you want to add a higher capacity M.2 SSD, you are limited to SATA options that are less ubiquitous than their NVMe counterparts. Then there is the BIOS, which is heavily limited beyond some fan profile customization.

Considering the target market for this system, gaming was never going to be amazing by any stretch of the imagination. However, for a cheap emulation box, it may find some fans. While it did manage to play some PS2 titles, they required compromises most would likely want to avoid, such as running 480p with no upscaling in PCSX2 to maintain frame rates. This is heavily game-dependent, Suikoden 4 ran fine at 720p without any issues, but Metal Gear Solid 3 ran pretty terribly even at the Native PS2 resolution. While that title is hard to run even on higher-end systems and can prove problematic, it stuttered a lot here. Other titles I tested included Kessen, which ran fine, along with Onimusha, which also performed decently well. So what does that mean? If you wanted a cheap system to emulate PS1 / N64 or older titles, it would do that just fine, while allowing access to modern conveniences. But when it comes to the PS2 era and newer, it will be a bit more troublesome.

Overall the Ace Magician AD03 N95 is a solid mini-PC for daily tasks with a highly attractive price. Add in a plethora of USB ports, the ability to handle 4K 60 Hz video playback along with plenty of memory out of the box to be useful, and you have a tremendous, inexpensive system for daily tasks, office work, or for Grandma to check Facebook and recipes with. As such, I do consider it a great value in this particular configuration.