GMKtec NucBox G3 Plus

What owners say

Five reviewers had the N150 G3 Plus, and the most thorough of them tells you to check the BIOS first: it ships on the Balanced profile, which held the chip to 10 W and 2.9 GHz until he switched to High Performance, and GMKtec support gives owners the same advice. The cost is heat, and the reviewers do not agree how much. Jeff Geerling's unit arrived with dried-out paste and a dead power adapter, and settled around 75 °C with some throttling; another lab on the Performance profile saw 80 to 90 °C with spikes to 105 °C; a home-lab reviewer found it stayed cool. Noise is less disputed — about 37 dB(A) at most, and quieter than the N100 G3 by two accounts — although Geerling's fan went to full speed in every benchmark. It draws 9 to 14 W at idle and up to about 30 W under load. The traps are small but real: the two front USB-A ports run at USB 2.0 speed, not 10 Gbit/s; the second M.2 slot takes only 2242 SATA drives; and the single DDR4 slot means single-channel memory, which one analyst blames for its multi-threaded results trailing the older N100. The Intel 2.5GbE port lets ESXi and Proxmox install, and Ubuntu 24.04 had no graphics driver until kernel 6.12.

For whom

A small Proxmox, ESXi or Home Assistant box, or a Plex server under Linux, for someone happy to change one BIOS setting.

Not for

Owners of the N100 G3 — the upgrade is small — and anyone who needs fast front USB ports or dual-channel memory.

Our own summary of 7 published sources, reviewed Sep 23, 2026. We have not tested this Mini PC ourselves; the sources are listed under About this data.