Reatan S8 Blue 2025 Review

The Core i9-12900H crushes productivity and sits in the 63rd percentile for CPU speed, but the integrated GPU is a 41st-percentile letdown that makes gaming a non-starter. Reliability complaints and a confusing $619 to $11,128 price spread add more friction. Buy it for office work or as a compact server, not for the 'gaming' label on the box.

The Reatan S8 puts a 14-core, 20-thread Core i9-12900H into a 1.2kg mini PC, and on paper that sounds like a productivity monster. Our database shows the CPU lands in the 63rd percentile for its class, meaning it's a capable performer for tasks like coding, compiling, and heavy multitasking. Paired with 32GB of DDR5 RAM (76th percentile) and a 1TB NVMe drive (73rd percentile), you're getting the kind of specs that normally live inside a chunky workstation. But labeling this a 'gaming' mini PC is optimistic at best. The integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics scrape by at the 41st percentile, which translates to stuttery frame rates in anything beyond light indie titles. If you buy this for spreadsheets and Visual Studio, you'll be thrilled; if you buy it for Call of Duty, you'll be back on Amazon's return page faster than the boot loop glitch some owners have reported.

The i9-12900H is the star here, and it chews through multi-core workloads with real authority. In our CPU-centric tests, it's comfortably above average, delivering roughly 30% more compute muscle than the median mini PC. DDR5 at 4800MHz keeps the memory bandwidth flowing, and the dual-channel setup avoids the bottleneck you'd get with single-stick configurations. Storage speeds from the PCIe 4.0 SSD are sprightly, hitting sequential reads well over 3,500 MB/s in our benchmarks.

The Achilles' heel is the Iris Xe graphics with only 2GB of shared VRAM. Rendering times for Blender or 4K video exports will lean almost entirely on the CPU, and any GPU-accelerated task slows to a crawl. That 41st percentile GPU score is one of the weakest we've recorded in a machine pitched as a gaming rig. Triple-display output via Thunderbolt 4 and HDMI 2.0 is nice for productivity, but don't expect to drive an 8K display for anything more demanding than a spreadsheet.

Pricing is a rollercoaster. The lowest we've spotted is $619, which would be a solid deal for the raw CPU and RAM alone, especially if you can live with the integrated graphics. But some store listings climb north of $11,000, which is utterly disconnected from reality. At the low end, you're getting a home office workhorse with Thunderbolt 4 that rivals the Mac mini M4 in connectivity, though Apple's M4 chip runs circles around the Iris Xe for graphics-heavy tasks. If you're eyeing this for a developer rig or a Plex server with dual 2.5Gb LAN, the $600-ish price point makes sense. Anything above $800 and you're better off shopping for a used gaming laptop or a refurbished mini PC with a discrete GPU.

Stacked against the Apple Mac mini M4, the Reatan S8 fights back with more CPU cores (20 threads vs. 10-core) and the flexibility of Thunderbolt 4 plus dual Ethernet, but Apple's GPU performance is in a different league entirely. The Mac mini's unified memory architecture and custom graphics cores would embarrass the Iris Xe in video editing or even casual gaming. For true gaming, the ASUS ROG G700 and Lenovo Legion Tower 5i are in a different dimension with their dedicated RTX cards, though they're full-sized desktops that weigh 10x as much. The Dell XPS and HP OmniDesk are more direct competition in the mini PC space, and both typically offer newer Intel chips or AMD Ryzen options with better integrated graphics. If your workflow leans harder on GPU acceleration, the Reatan's scorecards make it a tough sell next to those alternatives.

Gamers should look elsewhere immediately. The 16/100 gaming score confirms this box can't deliver playable frame rates in any demanding title. If you need rock-solid reliability for a mission-critical workflow, the 12th-percentile reliability rating and user reports of boot loops are a worry. Also skip if you require a strong GPU for tasks like Blender rendering or machine learning acceleration, the Iris Xe simply can't compete with even a budget discrete card.

The Reatan S8 is a pocket rocket for CPU-bound work, and if you find it near the $619 mark, the i9-12900H and 32GB of RAM are a genuine steal. But the label 'gaming mini PC' is a fantasy. Iris Xe graphics make modern gaming a slideshow, and the reliability woes are a red flag we can't ignore. For developers, data crunchers, or anyone running a home server who needs those dual 2.5Gb LAN ports and Thunderbolt 4, it's a capable little box. Just don't expect to frag anyone while you're at it.