You can now buy the Rmatamini P99s from Newegg, the most powerful computer under $300, for as little as $209, just in time for Amazon Prime Day.
It’s one of the most controversial PC deals of 2026 and is available again after a 3-month hiatus – and although its sticker price is $239, purchase two $115 gift cards for $200, totalling $230, and pay the extra $9 on the side, making this is an unbeatable offer.
The P99S is the Marmite of PC, as divisive as it is absurdly cheap. A mini PC with 16 cores, 16GB RAM and a discrete GPU for just over $200. Heck, you can’t even find a new computer for that price.
The caveat is, of course, that you can live with its quirks: it runs on an old operating system, is likely to be noisy, and is sold by a new seller with barely any feedback. After-sales warranty is also a big unknown.
The P99S is powered by an Intel Xeon E5-2698v3 CPU, a 16-core processor launched 12 (yes 12) years ago and is not supported by Windows 11. In a shocking development, though, it does come with that OS rather than Windows 10.
As Steve Clark, our hardware editor, said when I told him about the deal, ‘it’s bonkers’.
In terms of absolute firepower, this processor is about 3x faster than rivals like the N100 that populates mini PCs in the same price range. According to the popular CPU Benchmark site, it is slightly slower than the Apple M3 (8-core) CPU and faster than the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS.
That’s on multitasking. Single-thread performance is however closer to entry-level CPUs like the Intel Core 3 N350 (about 1,900 points) and using far more power, which translates into a much, much higher power dissipation (135W vs 7w).
In other words, it will be quite loud under load as you cannot dissipate the heat generated by this CPU without a high-speed fan and a big heat sink.
The P99S uses a recycled server CPU as the original price of this part was around $3,200 at launch. It can be found on various auction sites for 1/100th of the price.
Another trick that Rmatamini used to reach this price point is swapping DDR5 for much cheaper DDR3. There’s 16GB DDR3 and while it’s not explicitly mentioned, I posit that the P99S uses two 8GB modules in dual-channel mode to get a performance boost.
Yet another surprise is an Nvidia GTS 450 GPU with 2GB onboard memory. It’s an unsupported, slow video card but will be sufficient office use cases.
Despite what the product picture shows, I don’t think it will come with three full-size DisplayPort connectors. Instead, expect a HDMI one and a pair of obsolete DVI-D. I don’t think you will be able to run a higher-than-1080p monitor on it.
The rest of the specification is what I’d expect from a mini PC in this price range: a 256GB SSD, Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.2, a Gigabit LAN connector and seven USB ports including a Type-C one in the front.
Note that it has chubby external antennae and an integrated 450W power supply unit (see the video below).
And I still can’t believe that all the components are housed in a casing that’s only 210 x 210 x 142mm (under six liters).
So here’s my honest opinion.
The P99S is a performance beast with absolutely no rival under $300 with the added benefit of being able to swap your graphics card in the future and upgrade the RAM. But if you expect to game on it or want something a bit less space-hungry, look elsewhere and either make compromises or budget more.
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desire.athow@futurenet.com (Desire Athow)
