If a small, quiet PC for office use is what you require, Cloudgate's C5 could be what you're looking for. It has enough performance for most use cases, can be specced according to your needs, and makes upgradging down the line easy.
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Design
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Performance
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Value
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Features
Despite what you’ll see in marketing material, most folks don’t need a PC with huge amounts of grunt. Gamers and graphic designers will be the first to jump at the chance to validate spending R50,000 or more on a laptop or PC that supports ray tracing or will shave two minutes off their rendering time but those are niche cases.
If all you need is a tool that will open a web browser, Excel spreadsheet, or Word document, spending more than R10,000 can be a tough sell. That also applies when you need a PC for other things, like a home media server, a point of sale, or displaying digital signage.
The Cloudgate C5 is one such tool that we’ve been using for a few weeks. Not only does it cost less than R10,000, but it also has a few nifty features up its sleeve that add to its value. It also doesn’t hurt that this device is locally made.
It might be a size thing
Mini PCs have been around for ages so it’s not like Cloudgate is reinventing the wheel here. You will probably be familiar with the Intel Nuc or Mac Mini from Apple. Similarly, the Cloudgate C5 is an unassuming little black box that holds all the bits you need for a capable PC. Minus things like the screen, keyboard, and mouse.
There are plenty of ports to plug those into, however. You get:
- 4x USB-A 3.0
- 1x USB-C
- 2x HDMI
- 1x VGA
Along with those, there are also ports for the included power adapter, Gigabit Ethernet, a 3.5mm stereo audio jack, and a slot for securing it with a Kensington lock. For wireless connectivity, there’s a PCIe Wi-Fi card inside and support for Bluetooth (although it’s only Bluetooth 4.0; we’re up to 5.4 currently).
The added benefit of using a small form-factor PC like the Cloudgate C5 is it comes with a bracket and all the screws you need to mount it behind your screen or tuck it away out of sight. That will save you valuable desk space, or at the very least not get in the way of your feet.
Shrunken PC innards
The Cloudgate C5 is built around an 11th-gen Intel Core i5-1135G7. This four-core, eight-thread CPU features a modest 28W TDP (thermal design power) which means it will be sipping power from the mains instead of chugging. It’s from 2020 so it’s getting a bit long in the tooth but we didn’t particularly notice its age during our testing – more on that later.
It can be specced with 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of DDR4 RAM and 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of SSD storage. There are two SODIMM slots for RAM and two M.2 slots so you also have the option to upgrade later on. When that time comes, you’ll find those slots are easily accessible via a two-screw panel on the bottom. It might seem like a small thing but spare a thought for the IT guy who has to service a whole office or school computer lab of these things.
The i5-1135G7 sits squarely in the middle of the performance road and we saw as much during our benchmarks. It will have no issues dealing with most office-related tasks, accounting or bookkeeping software, and high-quality video streaming, and will even manage some light gaming or creative work. Don’t expect too much though.
While it managed to hit a semi-stable 60fps in vanilla Minecraft with default settings, we don’t recommend this for gamers unless you’re outsourcing performance to a cloud somewhere through GeForce Now. The Cloudgate C5 is marketed towards business customers, developers, schools and universities. But the fact that it will run Windows or Linux means that hobbyists could find use for it as well. If you’re not going to need Windows then you won’t have to worry about paying for a licence you’ll never use.
On the odd occasion that you find yourself dealing with a particularly large spreadsheet or you decide to crank up the render distance in Minecraft, you might not be able to tell you’re red-lining the Cloudgate C5. There is a large heat sink inside doing its best to pull heat away from the CPU so it can keep doing its thing. There is also a ‘high-performance’ fan to go with the heat sink, apparently. But we only found that out from the website. We assumed it was fanless as we heard nary a peep during our stress tests.
Cloudgate C5 verdict
Let’s be honest, having bells and whistles in your tech can be great. But those don’t matter as much when you’re outfitting a small business. In that case, anything that brings the price down is as good as any bell or whistle. The Cloudgate C5 offers enough performance as a workstation PC, complemented by its small footprint and silent operation, to warrant consideration. The discounts when buying in bulk and the local support only help to make its case.
Visit Cloudgate’s website to get a quote on the specs and quantity you need.
