We were quite impressed with Adata's first foray into gaming PCs, which began a few months ago with the XPG Xenia 15. Adata has followed that up with a new XPG Gaia to try their hand at mini-PCs.

Gaia is based on Intel's NUC 9 Extreme Kit, or what is known as the Ghost Canyon. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it may be a bit uninspiring as an entry-level desktop for adata.

Catering to "gamers, esports pros, and tech enthusiasts," Adata appears to have simply taken a Ghost Canyon NUC, stuffed its own brand of memory and storage inside, and stuck an XPG logo on the front. As a result, the compact 5-liter PC should run relatively fast out of the box, but gamers, esports pros, and tech enthusiasts will definitely want to add a discrete GPU. [The Core i9 9980HK processor is a relatively powerful 8-core/16-thread chip with a base clock of 2.4GHz, boost clock of 5GHz, and 16MB of L3 cache. It also provides graphics thanks to Intel's UHD 630 GPU (24 execution units, 350 MHz to 1,25 GHz clock speeds), which is fine for playing low-load games like League of Legends, but not for graphics-intensive titles. (Notebookcheck has more details on benchmarks).

One of the best things about the Ghost Canyon NUC is that it can accommodate discrete graphics cards up to 202mm (7.95") in length, like the Asus Dual GeForce RTX 2070 Mini OC Edition There are also graphics cards specifically designed with the Ghost Canyon NUC in mind, such as the Asus Dual GeForce RTX 2070 Mini OC Edition.

As for what comes with Gaia, in addition to the 9980HK CPU, Adata has 32GB (2x16GB) of DDR4-3200 "sort" RAM (no doubt in-house) and an XPG SX8200 Pro SSD. Adata does not mention capacity, so it is likely that there are multiple SKUs with different storage allocations.

The system also boasts Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Thunderbolt 3 connectivity and is powered by a 500W PSU with 80 Plus Platinum certification.

We have contacted Adata for pricing and availability and will update this article as soon as we hear back.