Blackview MP50 Review: A Tiny, Cheap Mini-PC for Everyday Tasks

If your computing is Word, Excel, a browser and Netflix, you do not need a powerful PC — and that is exactly the pitch of the Blackview MP50, a beer-mat-sized mini-PC running Windows 11 Pro for around £250. Independent testing set out to find whether it copes with everyday tasks or frustrates at every click. This review is based on that laboratory test, not our own hands-on trial.

The MP50's appeal starts with its size: at 3.7 x 10 x 10cm and just 267 grams it is barely larger than a stack of beer mats, an unobtrusive little black box with an LED that tucks behind a monitor or under a desk on its VESA mount. It is also very quiet — 0.5 sone during office and web use, 1 sone under load, audible only in a silent room — and remarkably frugal, drawing about 18 watts normally and no more than 28 at full tilt. For an always-on machine, that efficiency is a genuine plus.

Under the lid sits an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U, an entry-level processor with four cores running up to 2.1GHz, or 3.7GHz in short boosts, paired with Radeon Vega graphics and 16GB of memory. In use, the test found it reliable but sluggish: it handles office work, web apps, email and streaming, but everything feels laboured, with windows opening after a pause and app-switching that asks for patience. It does not run so much as stroll, and loading larger files while several programs are open can bring it close to a standstill. Gaming is simply out of reach. Anyone wanting real power in the same small form factor should see our GMKtec EVO-X2 review, while a full desktop is covered in our best gaming PCs guide.

The 438GB of usable storage sits on a slow SATA SSD, and it shows: the test measured just 43 MB/s writing and 34 MB/s reading to external drives. Anyone regularly moving photos, videos or backups will watch the progress bar crawl — a 90-minute film can take around two hours to transfer. For a machine otherwise pitched at light duties, it is the clearest bottleneck.

Connectivity is a strong point. The front carries two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports and a 3.5mm headset jack; the rear adds two slower USB 2.0 ports, wired LAN and power, plus HDMI and DisplayPort for driving two monitors at once. Wireless is present but dated — Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.1 — and there is no card reader, USB-C or Thunderbolt. A button-release flap on top gives easy access to the SSD and RAM, though with no spare slots, upgrading means replacing what is already fitted rather than adding to it. The processor itself is a fixed part, unlike the socketed processors in our best desktop CPUs guide.

The Blackview MP50 is an honest budget machine that does what it promises and little more. It is tiny, quiet, efficient and generously connected, and it reliably handles everyday office, web and media tasks. But the entry-level processor makes it feel sluggish, the SATA SSD is slow for file transfers, gaming is off the table and the Wi-Fi is a generation behind. For a cheap, unobtrusive second PC or a simple home-office box for undemanding work, it earns its keep — just do not expect it to hurry.