Ladies and gentlemen, on my right, costing $322.98 and most popular new Windows PC at Amazon is the Kamrui Essenx E2.
Its challenger is the Bosgame E5 11 Pro, a lightweight PC that punches above its weight and costs only $263.49.
Let’s see who is the better (best?). Remember that you need to be a Prime member in order to benefit from these prices. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial here.
E5 11 Pro mini PC: was $309.99 now $263.49
AMD Ryzen 5300U | 16GB DDR4 | 512GB
The newcomer upstart set to take the crown from Amazon’s best-selling $300 Windows PC.View Deal
Essenx E2 mini PC: was $379.99 now $322.98
AMD Ryzen 5 3500U | 16GB DDR4 | 256GB SSD
This Windows mini PC from Kamrui is a popular pick in the $300-ish budget category. View Deal
Performance
On paper, the Bosgame bosses the Kamrui around (excuse the pun). The Ryzen 5 3500U is no match for the Ryzen 3 5300U. Both have four cores but the latter uses a newer architecture and achieves better performance both in single thread (+17%) and multi thread (+26%).
The 5300U also runs cooler despite having a faster clock speed, which should translate into a quieter work environment. Same conclusion for the integrated Radeon video subsystem: the GPU used by the 5300U (RX Vega 6) is faster than the RX Vega 8 on the 3500U. So despite the Ryzen 3 moniker, the 5300U inside the Bosgame is a comfortable winner here.
Storage and memory
Both offer 16GB of RAM, one can assume two 8GB DDR4 memory modules for improved performance. The 5300U uses DDR4-3200 as opposed to DDR4-2666 for the 3500U, a marginal improvement in transfer rates that should help with performance.
On the storage side, Bosgame has twice the capacity (512GB vs 256GB) compared to its rival. Both use PCIe 3.0 which is fast enough for casual computing (whatever that means these days).
Both mini PCs also have an additional SSD slot. A legacy SATA one for the Kamrui and a PCIe one for the other contender. The E5 11 Pro emerges as victorious once again.
Ports and connectivity
Kamrui’s mini PC uses an older platform so I am not surprised that it can only handle two 4K monitors. It doesn’t have any Type-C connector as well and two of its USB ports use obsolete USB 2.0 tech. As for connectivity, you’ve got a Gigabit LAN port and an unknown variety of wireless connection which I assume is WiFi-5 as a worst case scenario.
The E5 11 Pro fares much better; it has one extra Type-C connector that allows it to support three 4K monitors, two 2.5Gb LAN connectors. That said, you still get WiFi-5 and those pesky USB 2.0 ports. There could only ever be one winner and that’s the Bosgame.
Anything else?
Both come with old school barrel chargers (not ideal) and have VESA ports. Both run on Windows although Bosgame uses Windows 11 Pro and is Linux/Ubuntu compatible as well, great for dual booting.
And the winner is?
No photo finish on that one. There’s no reason why anyone should buy the Kamrui Essenx E2 over the E5 11 Pro. The latter is not only a genuinely far superior product, it is also way cheaper, by almost 20% (nearly $60).
