Amazing and affordable Mini PC
I don’t often write reviews but this Mini PC has excellent specifications for the price. If all you want is a decent every day mini desktop PC, this could be it. It runs Windows 11 Pro very well, comes without any bloatware (other than what you get with Windows) and MeLe have lots of tutorials and support videos on YouTube.

This PC is very capable of office tasks, email, web browsing and video streaming/playing back 4K HDR video (just let it buffer for a few seconds first). Videos online suggest you can even game on it although I have’t tried that yet.

The only thing to consider before buying is where you will be using it in relation to your router as the wifi inside is only great if you are within a few metres of the router. Mine is about 8m away down the hall and the built-in wifi is so slow that I have had to plug in a USB wifi adapter. My mobile phone, laptop and other devices all connect to the network fine at the same location, so I can only think that the internal wifi is not very powerful.

All in all, for the price I paid (it was on sale, so not full price) I am very happy with it.

Almost stellar product - big improvement over the Q3C and worth the upgrade
There are a few minor quibbles hence a 4 stars, although it’s more of a 4 stars at this price to be fair and the price has dropped a further 5 since buying it. I’ve also mentioned and compared against the Q3C I have in this review that uses the slower intel chip.

Let’s get the quibbles out the way early and why not 5 stars. Mele – why not sell a 16GB option without the additional 256GB SSD that I’ll replace anyway and simply collect dust? Not sure if the power envelope of keeping it below a max 24 watts power draw has resulted in one of the USB ports being downgraded to USB2 but it’s annoying, but nice to find one of the USB3 ports having 10GB transfer rates and 2 proper HDMI ports on the back this time around so a more balanced unit in terms of ports. Another possibility is double the hight of the heatsink on top to help passive cooling. And finally couldn’t you have also given both USB C ports the same ability, or at the very least allowed a USBC hard drive to attach to one while the other is getting power from and displaying to a monitor and ditch that USB2 port if you must, or just ditch the second USBC charge only port and give 3 USB ports able to give 10GB/sec transfer rates.

As I say minor quibbles and a big improvement over the 3QC even so.

While I like the Quieter 3C, there was 2 big issues I had with it.

It gets hot (and I mean significantly hot although it still worked when the room temp was averaging 25 degrees over the summer) but would be seriously thermal throttling and running under 2Ghz when pushed. Happy to report both using the microSD card reader and an added SSD didn’t suffer as a consequence when the unit gets hot and I’m sure the QC4 will be no different. The other was performance it was no better than a 2 core 4 threaded intel 5th gen i5 laptop at best, dropping to a 3rd gen i5 modelled laptop when seriously thermal throttled, becoming painfully slow, even if does have more graphics grunt.

The QC4, by comparison, should be no worse than 5th gen i5 laptop when seriously thermal throttled in a 30 degree C environment I’d guess, keep the room temp in check and you have something significantly better if your happy to tweak the CPU power setting and run a USB fan across it to keep it cool — 4th Gen intel i5 35W desktop power with more graphics performance.

Happy to report at default optimised BIOS settings the newer Q4C is 20% faster than the Q3C, while using slightly less power and above generates much less heat so more headroom before thermal throttling — Running Cinebench R20 had the unit very slightly warm scoring an average of 780 on 3 runs, the older unit scored 550 and becomes a nice handwarmer for several minutes afterwards on just a single run. Change the BIOS settings and increase the CPU wattage to 12.5W (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56VG5RqF5tQ by RobTech for details how and how the more expensive unit fairs) and it’s scoring 1090 on the same benchmark (I had a standard N100 with DDR5 RAM, fan cooled, pulling far more wattage, significant BIOS tweaking to get it there — and that maxed at about 1070, typically scoring 1040 on average with the same benchmarking software!), but boy CPU temp for this Q4C model was in the mid 80 degrees C on a single run of Cinebench R20 at that setting you’d need oven gloves to handle it afterwards – never had the Q3C run that hot in a far warmer room than last night. Personally I’m going to run it at the default optimised settings myself I was just curious, although I may try tinkering wattage settings to the CPU to get an extra 5-10% more performance at the expense of heat in the cooler months of the year.

One thing I did notice using the same 30W folding USB C plug I have, is that the QC4 used 12Volts, rather than a much higher 20Volts that the QC3 pulled although it does have an SSD installed, but I have windows running from the eMMC chip, with the SSD used for storage which may have exacerbated the heat issue a bit and wattage usage. I’m a bit wary of using the supplied power supply for it (but I’m sure it’s fine — I just like a more compact folding charger) and being USBC powered you can choose something else or run of a power bank that can deliver 30Watts to be on the safe side.

Use cases:

You need a bit of general “windows” computing power on say a boat, tent, hill side with a portal monitor all charged through a power bank and 2 capable USBC cables. Not all Intel N100 power micro PCs can power of USBC, it’s a rare exception and certainly not this small; backing up photos & video from your phone and/or camera while on holiday where you have an HDMI input on a TV you can use (or brought with you along with a games console, TV stick to entertain the kids in an evening and the bigger kid and don’t want also a laptop) and are happy to taking a wireless keyboard and touchpad combo with you as well; something that can reliably run days on very low power acting as a file server (this can take an extra 4TB SSD, I’d recommend the Crucial P4 plus 4TB model if interested ) — mele are industry leaders in this regard for low power 24 hour computing – I had the 3QC running almost 4 days solid wiping numerous external SATA SSDs throughout the day and night without issue, the 4QC will be the same; as an emulation box, or running virtual machines (although I’d strongly recommend the 16GB model for that) I couldn’t run the original doom on a windows 2000 Pro VM Box with flawless sound on the Q3C it had garbled the sound and stuttered badly with slow frame rates, the Q4C I’m hopeful should be able to do that task flawless (I need to check). Will happily playback 4K 60Hz video without dropping frames and allow you to do something else on another screen within reason, compose an email, make notes. The QC3 is at its limit just managing the video playback aspect, don’t even think of adding an extra screen FHD on top of a 4K screen with a Q3C as it will drop a couple of frames with just that second FHD screen attached more so if you do anything else.

If you’re not sure whether to get the QC3 or QC4 — for an extra 20-40 it’s more than worth the extra.

I’d ignore the overclock 3C, the QC4 has far more advantages, including much faster and smaller, unless you need to use over 16GB of RAM in which case get the overclock 4C instead

The final option you may be given is the overclock 4C — I’m not sure I can recommend on paper except if you need 32Gb of RAM or have an existing 32GB 3200Ghz DDR4 RAM chip that you want to use instead of the supplied RAM for the 8GB model and save a bit of cash, and above all need a little bit more performance, use a lot more power and fan noise to boot.

Alas, why did you do it Mele, you opted for the higher wattage intel N95 chip option, given it a slower DDR4 RAM slot and limited the CPU temp to 18W due to the fan capacity. Personally a missed opportunity if you ask me, as I’m sure an N100 chip ran at 12.5W with a DDR5 RAM slot would have given slightly higher performance to make no odds with much lower fan noise and allowed the device to work better fanless as an extra option, although at a slower performance to the 4QC owing to that model having better passive heatsink capabilities. Alternatively Mele why didn’t you use the intel N97 or N200 chip instead for the overclock 4C and provided a bit more tangible performance difference (justifiably charging us an extra 30 for an N200 chip option), or is there an overclock 5C, even Q5C in the works with an N200 chip I wonder (just to slightly annoy me) and say 5 USB3 ports? It needs the 5 USB3 ports (2 being USBC variety).

Mele have listened and provided 2 different 4C options — silent and overclocked, and spent the time getting the product right rather than rushing it to market with poorly optimised BIOS settings that other manufacturers have done, in a far more pocketable device, with USBC power delivery, lower wattage and a full sized NVMe or SATA if you must SSD. Yes they cost a little more than the competition but also provide a far more compelling option rather than a rebadged OEM model that all behave and look the same.

Love mini PCs... And this is the bes
Already have a Mele “stick” PC. This is its big brother. The same footprint as a 2.5″ portable HDD (but thinner), still has room for an m.2 slot to add your own SSD and massively improve drive performance over the eMMC it comes with. Most stick PCs are powered using a standard 5V USB supply… This one uses a 12V 2A supply which gives it the oomph to power four USB3 slots (and an SSD). Dual HDMI sockets, Ethernet socket (in addition to Wi-Fi 6) and a headphone out socket. MeLe have even managed to squeeze in a microSD slot. All wrapped up in a reassuringly solid shell, and a VESA bracket if you want to attach it to a monitor. Windows 11 pro is pre-installed without any bloatware. Once Windows has been cloned onto an SSD, the BIOS allows the SSD to become the boot drive… The built in drive can even be disabled in the BIOS (kept as an offline recovery drive). Handles all the usual apps without any issues (MS office, firefox, krita, etc.) Along with streaming video services at 4K (Prime, Disney+). Even light gaming isn’t beyond it, but nothing more demanding than GTA3 or Angry Birds 2. Does get VERY hot if put under sustained load, but never slows down or becomes unstable. The sensors aren’t easily accessible to Windows but GPU-Z can report on CPU temperature… Tops out at c. 83C under full load, dropping to 53C if lying flat or 43C when stood on its end (in a vertical laptop stand) when idling.