This is great! The one thing I'd say is that the market is rife with non-mainstream brands. As an example "Beelink" [0] and "Minisforum" [1] are very commonly referred to and have a lot of great models, but they're not well represented here and often times offer better value depending on what the buyer is looking for. My recommendation would be to expand the vendors into the popular non-mainstream brands. Easy ask, but harder to execute on your side - so I get it.
Also, AMD is crushing this market - but AMD is pretty under-represented here. There are also some great N-series Intel machines that are highly popular and you can get on AliExpress [2]. Or even more US focused brands under this umbrella like Protecli [3]
> The one thing I'd say is that the market is rife with non-mainstream brands.
Brands in the far east are quite different and less important than in western markets; to me it seems there are say 5 manufacturers that build OEM products that 30 will relabel with their brand and put into their box, then give to 1000 sellers, each one running like 30 shops on Aliexpress, Ebay and Amazon.
Numbers are totally made up of course, the point is that the name isn't that important over there as the very same product can be (and often is) rebranded in many different ways.
Might be nitpicking, but that's a $600 piece of equipment. Most people think of mini-pcs as low cost system. Yes, beelink makes very good product. They actually listen to consumers. They iterate fast and release product lines very fast. I just worry about long term support.
Don’t forget the dual Thunderbolt/USB 4.0 ports which can also do point-to-point networking at about 40Gbps. Planning on building a 3 node Proxmox cluster using TB as the fabric for Ceph and cluster traffic.
Exactly this. I'm stuck on Intel QuickSync for home media and local NVR. The N200 is also packaged up nice for home firewall / edge compute. I'm running Proxmox on one with hardware passthru of NICs for OpnSense firewalling. Supports 32GB of RAM and allows for a ton of containers or LXC on the edge.
I have a Beelink and the build quality is impressively good, but my word their website is terrible. They recently redesigned it and it somehow actually got worse.
They make no attempt to explain the difference between the various model names, leaving to you go through them one by one until you figure things out. It's so bad.
Had good experiences with a few beelinks, but recently picked up a minisforum and have had a bunch of weird BIOS issues (and their BIOS is a really bizarre custom UEFI thing).
Waiting to RMA now, but I've seen a lot of similar "weird BIOS bugs" after searching for help on my issue.
I took a risk on a Beelink and so far it's been the best piece of hardware I've owned. Affordable, quiet, reliable, excellent performance, versatile for development & light gaming.
I did a thorough audit for bloat- spam- & mal-ware due to their reputation, and it came up much cleaner IMO than my HP.
Given that they compete in price with Raspberry pi with far more capability, everyone should have one.
The daily driver I am using to write this post is a Beelink with Linux installed. Very happy with it. Switched out the original 128GB SSD with a 1TB SSD. FFMPEG and light gaming run fine. My only minor regret is not starting with more memory, but I could probably switch that if I was motivated enough.
I've got both Beelink and Minisforum units running Linux as daily drivers. Great platform for my kids to learn Linux on as the hardware is well supported. Also great for SFF gaming rigs and platform emulation - especially with the graphics horsepower native to the newer AMD procs.
But, yes - smart to just max these systems out right away. Most easily support 64GB which is more than enough for almost all use cases. I'm hoping that AMD continues to develop for optimizing local model usage. Currently that's the only area that Apple's Unified architecture really shines over these. If I could run reasonably sized models on these that would open a number of additional use cases.
I use a Beelink N100 as a local Docker Compose host for various doodads, inc. and esp. smart home software. I am blown away by what a high-quality value it is. My only complaint is that it defaults to stay off after a power loss, and the setting to reverse that is confusing in the BIOS - quite the nit pick.
It’s interesting to me how when a Chinese company makes a great product at a great price they get accused of being too incompetent to rip their customers off with customer-hostile features like their Western brand counterparts.
But when Western companies load up their hardware with spyware and adware they are smart and savvy at business.
Isn’t this a little bit backwards? The correct statement is that Dell and HP too incompetent to make money off their computers without spying on their customers.
Maybe at some point we have to just drop the dogwhistling and admit that the Chinese hardware market is a dynamic, competitive market that seems to focus on delivering useful products to their customers rather than trying to make public shareholders happy by squeezing every last time out of them to the edge of their tolerance for such inconveniences.
It's not as overt as I describe it. It's often a subtle bias.
A great example in my own life: people have expressed concern to me when I tell them how I own a Chinese robot vacuum that can map my house. They think it's Chinese spyware.
And yet, iRobot, an American company now owned by Amazon, was the one caught in a privacy and data collection scandal related to test units that leaked interior photos of homes. [1]
It is! I manage a bunch of these running Proxmox with virtualized firewall and edge compute via containers and LXC. Great platforms for the job and can manage them effectively via Tailscale without having to open anything up or leverage legacy VPN.
You run proxmox on protecli? What firewall are you using? I'm always afraid of mixing different stack on my firewall (OpnSense) because of potential cascade failure.
I don't mix stacks that way because I tend to use OpenBSD for firewalls and I think it's a really bad idea to run my FW on the same physical box as my VM infrastructure, but I'm an old skool infosec wonk and we have ideas kids these days find antiquated & weird. But if you want to run with scissors most all the major virtualization stuff runs fine on a Protecli and so should anything that runs on top of them.
I've been loving the recent attention to mini PCs here. I've had hobby projects put off for a while as I tried to find the best R-Pi clone, only to buy one and struggle just to get it to boot. Then I pick up a used mini PC on ebay for like $42 shipped, power cord and everything and even a 500gb SSD. Now I have a server running at home and am actually working on projects again, oddly for probably less than what a Pi clone costs after you buy enough accessories to use it.
difference might be that a Raspberry Pi consumes < 10W.
An old PC draws easily 5-10 times more energy.
Depending on your location, the yearly cost of running a Pi is around ~10$. The big machine then 50-100$.
So energy wise, a small power efficient machine might be more expensive but the running cost could be lower.
Here's examples of idle power consumption of second hand mini-pc's i've tested, running Ubuntu, measured from the wall:
Dell Wyse 5070 with Pentium Silver J5005 ~ 5W
Fujitsu Futro S940 with J5005 as well ~ 7W
Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro with i5-10500t ~ 12W with two SSD's
In comparison, my Ryzen 7 server build consumes about 22W idle (before I added GPU), has 4x SSD and 4x RAM sticks. I like raspberry pi, but for most purposes an used mini-pc is a better choice.
Talking about building a server with a Zero 2 W is a bit of a stretch. I have some running as airplay and Spotify connect clients + some environmental sensors but much more would be pushing it...
No where in the thread was the "building a server" use case defined - the subject was always-on costs. That said, an RPi Zero works perfectly fine as a pihole (DHCP + DNS server), WireGuard node, a git mirror (running Forgejo), and many more use cases that are not CPU-bound.
Obviously, Raspberry Pis, SFF boxes, workstations and rack mounted servers all occupy different niches (with some overlap). Anyone confidently stating that one could fully replace anther with no context of the workloads is wrong.
The OP of the comment you answered was pretty much talking about how he uses his mini PC as a server and doing projects on it... and ofc a zero can do everything but at what speed? IOPS is disturbingly slow. I like the Zero for what it is but it's just not a good server fit.
I mean, I do projects on mine too. Without OP describing what the projects are; you're assuming they are CPU-bound.
Speaking of my projects - the RPi is perfectly capable of working as a web crawler (at a page rate that may surprise you) as well as a media download client & transcoder (again, simultaneously transcoding a number of streams that may surprise you).
Yes, the pi is perfectly fine for many projects, and in fact I have a couple of old pi's (even the original pi 1!) running tasks, such as listening sensors over bluetooth, pihole as DNS server etc.
The reason I prefer mini-pc's over pi is the x86 architecture and possibility to add more RAM. For maximum flexibility, I mostly run my self-hosted services inside virtual machines that I manage with Proxmox, and pi isn't ideal for that. Admittedly I found even the mini-pc's too limited due to lack of space/pcie slots for a GPU, and ended up with a custom desktop build. That allows me to experiment with stuff like self-hosted AI, and game remotely. Support for ECC RAM and more SSD's was a big plus too.
So, indeed it all depends on what and how much you want to do with the machines.
It's fine that it's enough for you and I applaud you. I was also not only talking about CPU but also IOPs some of us have more demand on what we call a server. I don't understand how you can be so defensive about a piece of hardware it's actually rather concerning and my zero w 2 does have problems with FullHD streams with high bitrates. It doesn't even have the io bandwidth to push more than one stream.
Add an SD card to that cost as well as an ethernet adapter, maybe wifi too? I'm not trying to bash on the Pi as option in all cases, just trying to note that in some cases, particularly hosting local services, it's likely not the simplest choice. Uses where I can see needing a Pi over a miniPC? Maybe 4k video playback, I'm not sure how well these x86 systems from 2011 can do that while some Pi's IIRC have onboard hardware for h265 decoding.
The RPi zero 2 is nowhere near powerful enough to be used for multiple purposes as any of the above machines.
It could probably run a single-task relatively well, like PiHole or something, but otherwise it's in a completely different performance category. Like an order of magnitude.
So 6W idle for J5005 would put it on the same level of efficiency.
You're right, the RPi zero 2's CPU is slower - but that doesn't matter for non-interactive tasks. I don't care that my cloud backup export cron job runs 5 minutes (or hours) longer on the Pi than on a Nuc; I only care it happens daily. For the CPU-/GPU-heavy workloads, the RPi Zero W is works as an orchestrator for the > 10W computer: powering it on and off as needed.
As others have said, this needs to be qualified. My HP Elitedesk 800 G2 SFF qualifies as "old" I think, yet it draws 14-15W at idle, measured at the outlet.
It has an i5-6500, 32 GB RAM, 2 SATA SSDs and a 4-port i350 NIC (all ports up). Idle means OpnSense and HomeAssistant running inside KVM on top of whatever kernel version was current in Arch at the time, but with no traffic.
Does the raspberry pi draw 1-3W only? It should be noted that old pcs like these can be had extremely cheap, so the difference in price should take this into account. Moreover, if you need extensions of any kind (NICs, drives), getting them running at all on a PI is somewhat more involved than on a standard PC.
> Gen 8 delivers the idle power much more honestly
What do you mean by this?
> In either case, USFF is an order of magnitude less energy than desktop so it's still a win most of the time.
Doesn't it depend on the actual CPU used? I have an HP Elitedesk Mini (which is basically a small laptop without a screen — the equivalent of the ThinkCentres mentioned in this thread) and the CPU is an i5-8500 IIRC. I don't think this particular configuration would draw much less power than a "regular" desktop / SFF, aside maybe from the RAM (it uses SO-DIMM). I've never bothered to measure its idle power draw, and don't have any comparable "full desktop" to compare.
I don't know if HP or Lenovo have models with laptop-class CPUs in this form factor, but I image that would be an actual improvement on the power draw. I did see however Chinese brands on Amazon sell models with those kinds of CPUs.
Typo in my first sentence about the Gen 8. it should be "Gen 8 cpu's in a USFF appear to deliver lower idle power usage and lower high end power usage than Gen 6/7."
You're correct that some of these machines have desktop CPUs, what I discovered was they also have different classes of desktop CPUs.
The m920q/m920s appear to have differnet power usages an possibly different cpus, or at least they're configured different.
Additionally, if you look up the Gen 6/7/8 power usage for the cpu itself, you can see the idle and total is different as well.
The trick is Lenovo is far from the best priced USFF in this category for the same thing.
When I bought Lenovo, I wanted to try out Proxmox, had no interest in fighting with installation or drivers, an just picked something that had flawless installation... that has since improved with other manufacturers.
The tool from OP here is really cool - I'd probably add some from the spreadsheet I had built out but I haven't had to buy many more of these once I figured it out. Load them up with ram, a few ssds, a UPS and they're pretty solid.
It's a fair point but as others have noted, these mini PCs can be very power efficient. I still need to hook up a meter to mine to see what the wattage is but I'm sure it's far below a typical desktop PC.
Agreed. Related, disappointingly, the new pi5s don’t have much in the way of running in a lower power state. I gather it’s mainly the cpu, but my new pi5 runs hot doing a whole lot of nothing. Cooling solution is pretty much required. I am very content with perf, but it actually brings too much juice to the table for the tiny apps im running. Sure, another soc would be a better fit power wise, but the ecosystem keeps me locked in!
You might consider a pi 5. I'm using it after I installed the NVMe top mount hat. (Where I loaded Raspberry OS.) It really speeds everything up!
BTW, I'm using a M.2 2280 drive, even though the hat is designed for shorter drives. (I just tied mine down.) I installed it over the CPU fan and it works great.
I have a little Intel i5 behind me all year long, and I don't notice any effect on the temperature of this (small) room. 12 watts is not a lot of heat to be dumping.
This is really small fry compared to other HVAC efficiency concerns, and definitely not an issue outside of summertime temps in most locales.
My Threadripper on the other hand - I had to move that into the crawlspace as it was: a) loud as hell, and b) basically a space heater that also does useful compute. 160w idle, ~280w full tilt - that thing is very noticable.
I've switched to a minipc as my main computer. I'll never go back. Went from a 16 core monster to whatever 4 cores this thing has and it's just as nice.
Not who you are replying to, but likely: 1) heat 2) fan noise 3) power consumption.
I recently (8 months ago) replaced my 10 year-old laptop. The only reason I retired it was because the display was starting to go.
So I bought a second-hand workstation-class laptop with 6 beefy CPU cores and kinda wish I hadn't. Overall I want to like it but the battery life is abysmal, it makes a lot of heat even when fairly idle, and is a bit heavy due to the large heatsink inside. (And that's without a dedicated GPU.)
If I had to do it over again, I would trade it for one with a weaker but more power-efficient CPU.
This is neat, although I have a word of caution (even if it might be a bit obvious): it's possible to find good deals, but you should be aware of power usage. There are modern mini PCs, such as those with Intel N100 processors, that are very cheap and consume very few watts while being useful for many purposes. I personally bought a brand-new CHUWI LarkBox X, and it's been great. It cost around 100 EUR on a deal. If however power usage isn't an issue for you and you don't care about other misc stuff (noise levels etc) then you can disregard this.
I wouldn't automatically prefer any random N100 mini PC over a nice second hand enterprise mini PC.
In home server use cases, mini PCs stay idle the vast majority of their runtime. So it's idle power consumption that is the most useful metric to look into. The N100 can have great idle performance in theory, but most data I can find about N100 boxes is them idling in the 12W-15W range. This is something that older enterprise mini desktops have no trouble matching or beating [1]. Especially since roughly the Skylake era (Intel 6th gen), idle power consumption for enterprise PCs has been excellent - but even before then it wasn't bad.
Enterprise vendors like Dell/HP/Lenovo have always optimized for TCO and actually usually use quite high quality power supply circuitry, whereas most N100 mini PCs tend to be built with cheaper components and not as optimized for low power usage for the whole system.
[1]: I recommend reviewing Serve The Home's TinyMiniMicro project, which often finds the smallest enterprise PC form factors to idle at 8 to 13W, even older ones. Newer systems can get below 7W! https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
One can also do things like undervolting to reduce the power draw even more. Modern BIOSs can give a lot of freedom for underclocking/volting, not just pushing things to consume more power.
Power usage on these mini pcs is actually pretty decent.
I have a bunch of SFF computers (Dell 7060, HP 600 G4, etc) with i7-8700 or similar CPUs. They all idle around 12 watts.
Most of the mini pcs use the T version of the processors, which are usually 35w TDP.
Power usage will definitely be higher than an N100 (65W TDP vs 6W), but they're a lot more versatile since you're getting more than double the performance, 2-3x the threads, and an iGPU that can do things like transcoding for plex and accelerate ML models for Frigate/Scrypted.
Can it do that while also running 4 drives in a ZFS RAID array? I've been thinking about building such a system but haven't decided on the CPU yet, so I'm afraid of getting something too underpowered.
In `top` you won't notice a difference in cpu utilization for the transcoding work with an intel iGPU (as long as transcoding is being handled by it, of course).
The N100 is definitely powerful enough run a ZFS RAID array. Depending on what all you'd like to run, it might be enough. Check it out with cpubenchmark's compare feature!
I used a Celeron G4900 (also has an iGPU) as a plex server for years, and it's half as powerful as an N100. The celeron is a fairly slow processor, but for plex it was enough since the iGPU did the heavy lifting.
Very interesting, thanks! What about adding a few other server tasks, like automated backups, and running Immich (Google Photos clone)? I'm seeing a lot of conflicting information online, with some people swearing by the N100 as a home server capable of these tasks, and others saying it's just too slow and something like a Celeron 13100 is needed. Since I can't exactly build a system, and then return the motherboard/CPU if it's too slow, I'm a little afraid of under-speccing it. My goal is to have a 3-5 drive system with ZFS, and use it for NAS, Jellyfin (with 4K transcodes, because of subtitles; probably never more than 1 movie at a time though), Immich photos, and backups.
You're definitely limiting your upside with an N100, but it might be enough like I said. It'll work, it's just a matter of how fast it'll be with everything you put on it.
I'd highly recommend joining the serverbuilds dot net discord. They also have a forum with pre-specced NAS build configurations, complete with pricing. People there are very helpful and will give realistic advice.
I think Jellyfin beats Plex on 4k transcoding (tonemapping?) with the iGPU, but fwiw I do not transcode 4k and add subtitles to them just fine. I use an nvidia shield, which direct plays 4k content with the added subtitles. Hearing about transcoding 4k content just to add subtitles is news to me.
I think HTPC hardware transcoding is basically the sweet spot use case for the N100. Its less good compared to alternatives for pushing the game emulation performance.
Does anyone have any useful rules-of-thumb or heuristics for balancing this trade off of upfront cost v.s. power cost? e.g. how much does an N100 cost to run for a year v.s. say a i5-2400s (the CPU for the first row on the linked site)?
I used to calculate costs of lightbulbs: 1 Watt running the whole year, at 0,28 eurocent/kWh costs 1 Euro per year. Until someone corrected me and it turned out that every 1 Watt 24/7 will be 2 Euro per year.
In the US electric power might be cheaper. And if it's running only part of the time, you should adjust the calculation.
My desktop/server runs 24/7, so I prefer having a CPU with 65W TDP over one that is 125W TDP. That might run up to 120 Euro per year difference for me (if it would be running at 100% CPU).
Real world energy use is nothing like what you see on spec sheets. And not just because manufacturers differ in how they compute TPD. And TPD is also not a good indicator for energy use at (near) idle. With underclocking/volting in the BIOS you can get a beefier CPU to outperform smaller CPUs per watt. Because CPUs get really inefficient as they use more power undervolted or capped high TPD chips might be much more power efficient in the real world than their low TPD counterparts.
My NUC13 with i3 has a nominal 15w TDP, but while idling on a KDE desktop with a browser open to reuters (1 tab) it hovers around 3 - 4w (5% CPU usage). If there's REALLY nothing going on (no desktop even) it's 1.0 - 1.3w (1% CPU usage).
Edit: I should note that there's no fan drawing power because I put it in an Akasa passively cooled case.
I tried to find this out myself. All I could find easily was the TDP of different processors. But I'm not sure if it's a good measure of how much power it will use.
I went down this rabbit hole earlier this year. Best I came up with was to calculate the TDP at max for the whole year. Full TDP is unrealistic, but it gets us a worst-case "max running cost" . Energy for me is roughly $0.12/kWh, so the yearly max running cost for a 35W TDP is $36.79, 65W is $68.33, and the 95W would be $99.86.
I ended up going with a HP EliteDesk 800 G5 Mini I5-9500T (35W) off of Ebay for $100 and it does the stuff I need it to do just fine. According to my current monthly power usage graph, it's averaged 7W which accounts for $0.61 of this month's power bill.
No, sadly the TDP tells us every little about the idle power cost, which might be where you spend most of your time depending on the workload.
Just from tweaking my laptop, I’ve noticed that when it is really idle (or I’ve intentionally put it in a low frequency mode), the big power drains are the wireless interfaces (don’t forget bluetooth) and the screen (OLED helps as long as the screen is mostly black). Gotta tweak the whole thing.
The only real way of knowing is to measure it. If you already have a system in place an energy monitoring smart plug can help you calculate the current running costs and help estimate the savings of using a lower-power machine.
When I did this I was surprised by how much - or how little - it cost to run various devices. It's quite addictive.
It's not always accurate because a lower-power machine doing the same task will often need to work at its full power more often, so the savings may be less. For example, a Raspberry Pi 5 may often be more power effecient than a Pi 4, despite drawing more power at full capacity on paper, because it spends less time at full capacity than the Pi 4 does.
On the other hand, when I upgraded my work PC I found it used less power but I also had to run my office heater more often in winter, as the new PC wasn't as efficient at heating the space.
Agreed, an N100 mini PC can be a great deal. They also tend to be smaller. I added a separate Intel filter that includes a lot of N100s. But it might be better to buy those new, not used.
Power consumption is definitely a big deal. I replaced an old PC that I'd been using as an always-on device with a tiny PC (i7-8700T) and it saved a ton of power. Given that power rates in New England are around $0.30/kWh, saving 50 watts means saving $128/year. I went from using around 60 watts to 10 watts at idle (and going from 110 watts under load to 50 watts).
The new computer cost me $240 back in late 2022 (with 32GB of RAM and WiFi) so it'll basically pay for itself in electricity savings - and it's 3x faster than what it replaced.
ServeTheHome has some good reviews: https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/. The tl;dr is just that there's good options from Dell, HP, and Lenovo and the differences are kinda minor, but it's a good source if you care about specific information and teardowns.
It's a great little machine, takes up almost no space, it's almost silent, and it was basically free with the power savings - in fact, once I pass the two year mark, it was cheaper to get the new hardware than to keep running the old.
And you can put Proxmox on it as a hypervisor to run multiple OSs or containers.
For quick math where accuracy isn't very important, at $0.12/kwh it will cost you ~$1.05/year per watt (65w = $68.38/yr), so every watt you save per year is a dollar in your pocket.
Of course, there are ways to reduce the energy usage of a system, a computer rarely has to run at 100% 24/7/365 unless it is very underspecced for your use case, even things as simple as enabling C states and not utilizing all of the PC resources available will save you many dollars a year.
Well, I guess if you make no effort to understand other peoples use case, you can make sweeping generalizations like that. If you need particular features, power consumption, or other factors, a 2-4 gen old used mini might not be the right answer.
Looking at the OP, there's a ton of i5-8500s in the same price range as a new n305 on Amazon (not bargain hunting here, I'm sure you can find either option much cheaper anywhere). Compared to an N305, a i5-8500 has less cores/threads (6), has al least 4x the TPD, and has a significantly worse GPU. And many people want to buy new. But the used i5 is more expandable, and particularly affords more max memory.
This is great, but the prices aren't accurate for the products listed. As an example, I filtered by the cheapest 64GB model, clicked on the link, and found that to actually get the 64GB it was multiple times the cost listed on the site. This was because if ebay's "variant" option, which is often misused by vendors.
I don't know if the ebay API allows you to check for variants to ensure that the price you are listing is the price for the actual variant listed or not?
For reference, I thought I'd outline the baby PCs I use, since we're chatting about baby PCs. Maybe someone will find this useful. I use thinkcentre M92p SFFs for easy server boxes. Some things I like:
- Bountiful
- Cheap -- they can be had for under $100 each
- Pretty powerful considering what you're paying, too!
- Use common desktop parts for the most part
- Accepts low-profile PCIe equipment ( network cards for ethernet, wifi; GPUs )
- Repair & replacement parts are CHEAP
Some things I don't:
- I've had to do some ridiculous things to get them to behave after installing Linux, like tricking the BIOS to deal with UEFI correctly
- It's basically impossible to get a better power supply, so you're limited with how much each one can do. Don't expect anything better than a very low-power, low-profile GPU for example.
- There's not a ton of room in the case, so if you want PCIe stuff you will need low-profile. You can definitely stuff lots of hard drives in there if you work at it, though.
> I've had to do some ridiculous things to get them to behave after installing Linux, like tricking the BIOS to deal with UEFI correctly
I would suggest going for a couple of generations newer - the M92p is from an era before UEFI became really stable. For automated testing of my startup's product we have a testlab of tens of older USFF desktops and the M700/M900/M910 machines are some of my favorites. They're also just before the cut-off for Windows 11 support so they're still available dirt cheap.
Two things to watch out for - the M700 lacks a PCI-E M.2 slot - the internal M.2 slot supports only SATA M.2 drives. Second, the front USB ports failing is a really common failure mode.
Ooo that's _gotta_ be what it is. Just the most bizarre UEFI issues. I luckily found an incantation that works in a pretty general way for M92ps, but had I not I'd have some bricks laying around.
I have some M910q that I am very happy with. UEFI is well supported, I was able to upgrade them to 32gb of RAM, i7 7700t and both a 512gb SSD and NVMe for mirrored storage. Highly recommended. Sure, it would be nice to get something newer than 7th gen, but it's still highly capable, small, quiet and fairly low power usage.
> I've had to do some ridiculous things to get them to behave after installing Linux, like tricking the BIOS to deal with UEFI correctly
Strange. I use Dell Optiplex Micros which are pretty much the same. I’ve never had a problem installing any Linux distros or hypervisors (Proxmox and XCP-NG)
Same experience as you with HP Elitedesks. At work we used to use those for people doing regular office things. I have a few G2s (i5-6500) and they work flawlessly with Linux, including using my own secureboot keys.
I’ve bought 3 used Dells, mostly Optiplexes, over the decades for dedicated hardware for Linux based projects. They always seem like a good deal, and I surprisingly never have problems with them. These are fleet computers that get gently used during business hours that have IT departments that replace computers on a time schedule. Outside of one HDD that didn’t last a year of heavy file traffic I haven’t had really good luck with these machines.
>These are fleet computers that get gently used during business hours that have IT departments that replace computers on a time schedule
Yeah these are the ones I'm buying too. Lot of banks have these for example as an all-in-one docked into a monitor. Sometimes they even have a small amount of Dell warranty left, though I've never ever had a problem with them.
> Sometimes they even have a small amount of Dell warranty left, though I've never ever had a problem with them.
Yes, though technically any add-on warranty coverage or service plans are only available to the registered owner. I bought a couple Dell OptiPlex micros last year that were originally owned by a large organization. They were clearly being resold on eBay by someone who had acquired them in some sort of bulk purchase. Dell has a form you can submit to request that the registration be updated, but it requires you to provide contact information for the original owner. I asked the eBay seller if they for this contact information, but they said they did not. I was able to open a support request with Dell and have their records updated to show me as the owner after showing evidence that I had acquired the machines. This included a photo of them showing their asset tags along with a hand-written note that showed my support case number, as well as a copy of the eBay listings. I believe Dell checked with the original owner (a US federal agency) to verify the machines had been sold.
I really want a new motherboard form factor that gets rid of the graphics card slot and assumes integrated graphics. It should also aim to reduce the height of the back panel a little bit. Maybe allow 4 DIMM slots (ECC preferred).
I just upgraded my Mellori-ITX to 64GB RAM and have a 5700G to drop in there. This is possibly the best SFF config you can do in an AM4 socket:
It would be awesome if you included shipping in the total price(or at least for certain countries). I know bookfinder does that, as some people add an extra $100 to several hundred dollars to the price which skews the results.
I think ebay technically frowns upon excessive shipping as some sellers use it to get their items higher in certain search results due to a low base price, but ebay doesn't really apply enforcement to their sellers on these soft violations most of the time.
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It seems some of your filters like "storage type" are must include and when unchecking it all the results disappear, while others like "OS" seem like a filter and when unchecking the results increase.
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I'm not seeing many chromeboxes in the results so maybe they are being filtered out?
Thank you, I have fixed the "OS" filter to be must include.
Chromeboxes don't come up much for the search I'm using. I think I could try a separate search for them.
Regarding shipping, I'm not sure how to include it, since it requires the user's location, which would take this over the API limits. I'm going to add more marketplaces, and maybe product locations. Which country are you shipping to?
Maybe just take an average of shipping costs to a few locations (West coast Us, East coast US, Europe) and filter out anything where the shipping cost is greater than the cost of the product itself.
Or just get a shipping estimate to the same city as the seller is in.
Adding product location would be great! As a resident of the European Union I'm unlikely to order one of these mini PCs from the USA due to import taxes and additional shipping costs.
Thanks for this! I've been meaning to get back into games but only keep a laptop at home and I had no idea that I could make a machine that could capably serve my needs for <£300 (32Gb Win10 i7 6700 with 256gb SSD (!), OK 2nd hand GPU) I spent my younger years always having The Best Machine I CoUlD afFord, but fifteen years later I just want something 'good enough' and it's nice to know I needn't spend over a grand to do so.
Yeah, to be honest, I followed one of these build guides, and got a second hand GPU, and it didn't fit in the case. I tried to "make" it fit with some shears. It died. No surprise. So then I bought a new cheap GPU, and the machine seems to work pretty well. My kids play Minecraft and StepMania on it.
I kind of love it. Convertible to tablet (keyboard folds under.) Runs Android apps, including Disney+, can download Disney+ shows. HDMI out. I believe the HDMI out works for Disney+ which is a surprise and a treat. Runs Linux. I installed Visual Studio Code, .Net Core, etc. Because it's a "Chromebook Plus," it has an App Shortcut to install the Steam Installer. (!!!) I installed Balatro, and the touchscreen works awesome. I installed both Android Minecraft (works well on the built-in screen but for some reason has frame rate problems on the external display?), and also Minecraft Java through the Linux.
Haven't tried too many other Steam games yet. I tried to install Path of Exile, but it seems to completely not work.
Arrgh - I didn't need to go even deeper down the rabbit hole! (I did) That Linus Tech Tips video was useful to me - there are a few of those HP Workstations available cheaply here in the UK, some with better i7 processsors. Thanks!
The Chromebook situation's a bit different over here though - I don't think the market is anywhere near as big as it is over the the States, as I think your educational set up encouraged them a lot, whereas they haven't here.. I think?
Still, plenty of cheap laptops to be had otherwise (I know I'm never going to bother buying a new one again - Second Hand Thinkpads FTW!)
And honestly, don't forget Steam Decks. Refurbished or otherwise. They truly are amazing machines for the price. And a cheap dock to hook up to a TV, keyboard, and mouse. A cheap set of 8bitdo controllers... And you're rocking and rolling.
I'm doing a dual-boot into a 128 GB Steam Deck image I found with... many... retro games on it. The website looked like hot garbage and I had to make an account to have access to download... but... very well made image.
leboncoin.fr in France, subito.it I believe in Italy, in Spain Wallapop.es although wallapop also exist in some of those euro countries, anibis.ch in Switzerland, I am not sure about the rest and I guess they don't have a public api so you would probably have to rely on web scrapping.
Another approach for this if you're in europe (I do not know the market elsewhere) are the quality refurbished resellers (they buy bulk from companies upgrading, refurbish, sell with warranty).
Price might be a bit higher, but eg right now for sub 200 you can get a mini pc with ryzen 2400G and 16GB of RAM, with warranty. That's a great proxmox machine for jellyfin & co.
It's a shame that people need to use this template to design these sorts of eBay search sites though. Seems like it'd be easy enough for eBay to create a tabular view where one could choose fields applicable to their search - the same table that works for mini PCs could work for smartphones or comic books or collectable coins or whatever.
I suspect that doing so wouldn't be great for eBay's business though - the table is sortable, but eBay wants to sell promoted listings that are at the top of pages. And less dense search result views with big photos probably entice people to buy "shiny" things rather than specs.
(it was priced for a more basic spec than in the title. If you played with the configuration the spec in the title came to $219.99. You can make your own determination whether that was as good value)
Stunning value indeed, they got more RAM than my M3 I use for work.
Edit: oh wait there are drop downs to change the specs, subject is max specs but initial price is the min specs. Still good though
For UK shoppers looking for a cheap laptop, the Dell Latitude E7240 is a solid machine [1]. For about £50-£60 delivered you can get a 12.5" machine with a ~4th gen i5, 4-8GB of RAM and an SSD. It's great for Teams/Zoom and the keyboard is very nice to type on.
My personal one has 12GB of RAM (4+8) and two SSDs (there is a spare slot for a half size M.2. inside). You can abuse the hell out of them and they take it.
Gotta throw in a mention of my fav: Odroid H2/3/4(1)
$125ish for an SBC with Intel N/J series CPU, DDR4/DDR5,
up to 32G RAM, SATA, Dual Ethernet etc. I have the old H2+
series and LOVE them :-)
It would be great if the results can be filtered by the CPU generation. I'm specifically interested in replacing my 8th Gen mini PC and won't want to buy anything older than 8th Gen.
Seconded. You can do this on eBay by choosing specific CPU models, but it would be really helpful to filter more broadly. "Intel 8th gen" for sure, but it could also be useful to be able to combine that with, say, "Intel -T series" or "Intel i5".
This is awesome. I used to build a lot of stuff with various single-board computers (Raspberry Pis, etc) but realized I could get way more performance and expandability with these mini PCs if the form factor didn't require it.
One other thing I'd be interested in: not just mini PCs but used office workstations. I realized that many offices were selling old workstations that were often just a few years old with things like dual Xeon chips and 64GB of RAM or more with support for a few hundred GB for only a few hundred $. Things like 2ish generation old HP Z400/Z600/Z800 series. They make for great home lab virtualization machines and can often support 2+ GPUs and a boatload of additional peripherals. I'd love to see something like this that lets you find those as well
I was actually going to make one for workstations, since that is what I thought the best deal was for my home server. Then I did some research, and realized mini pcs are a better deal now. Still might build it though.
Add a location filter otherwise it's completely useless from outside USA.
I clicked on a $30 Ebay link and the shipping price is US $542.06 UPS Worldwide Saver
Would it be possible to add a column with some kind of CPU score - for those of us who don't keep up on PC CPU advancements, it's hard to tell if an i3 5th gen is faster or slower than an i5 3rd gen
I did plan this, but upon getting the data, found it too difficult for the initial version. There's no standard for CPU (or most fields actually), so sellers write it in a variety of ways. But it could be done, after I compile a dataset of cpu > benchmarks.
I like passmark / cpubenchmark.net to get a good ballpark idea of CPU performance, because it covers a wide range of CPUs, and because it has both single-core and multi-core scores.
I would love to see something like this but being able to sort on price/performance ratio (f.e. based on a CPU performance index in comparison to the price).
What I'd really like to see is the curve! There's usually two "sweet spots", right? The minimum you should spend, and what you should expect at that point, and the point of diminishing returns, and what you should expect there.
This is great —- my world has mostly been Mac laptops and cloud servers for the last 15 years, and recently decided I wanted a physical server in my office to use as a dev box.
I ended picking up a 5 year old Dell Optiplex SFF on eBay for $75. I added a few sticks of RAM and a new SSD, installed Ubuntu server, and it’s been great. Super fun and easy to pop open and work on.
I sort of want to start grabbing these for anyone I know who needs a basic computer.
A bit meta but nice job on the site design. Dense but very readable, filter controls are clear and with a minimum of unnecessary decoration. I wish more people still designed websites like this. Reminds me a bit of McMaster-Carr.
Lenovo ThinkCentre M Series (minis) are an absolute sleeper and way better value than Raspbery Pis. I run one in my home network closet with a bunch of docker containers on for home networking, crawler projects that need to run from a non-datacenter IP address, homelab experiments, etc.
Cost me $100 'used' (open box), SSD, decent RAM and even a copy of Windows I didn't need. Install *nix, run it headless, good to go.
You can go cheaper but at a certain point who cares if it's $80 for an unknown brand or $100 for Lenovo, etc.
Small form factor, it can tuck in with wherever you store your router, or buy an aftermarket rack kit if you run rackmount network components like I do. OR 3D print one https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4769452
Eg https://www.ebay.com/itm/186591932407 - this is a great project server that can probably run tons of docker containers (depending on what you are doing).
Just know that Lenovo has set up a bootlock on these systems if a non-branded wifi card is detected in them. If you're just plugging in an ethernet cable and tossing it in a closet, you're fine, but upgrades are very limited.
I've recently bought this Intel N100 mini pc https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005006727722225.html and it's amazing. It even came with win11 preinstalled, an unexpected surprise for me. 16G RAM and 512G SSD for 100 euros, great deal.
Very coincidental with this post as I just started looking into creating a home server for the first time and decided that mini PCs were sufficient for my use case (originally was going with Small Form Factor).
Just bought a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro from this website for <300AUD. I heard they were pretty decent for used PCs. The price difference isn't too far off from the USD equivalent here.
Being able to filter by CPU (and model i.e. optiplex 3010 or whatever) would be useful here. I'm looking for a sff that has 13th gen intel cpu, supports 64gb ram as an example.
Many of the Dell/HP mini PCs with Intel i5 or higher are vPro, because they were used in corporate environments, but it looks like this is rarely part of the eBay item description. Thanks for checking.
vPro devices support Intel TXT (DRTM) to verify firmware integrity on each boot, based on user/OS policy. TXT can be used with QubesOS ("Anti Evil Maid"), Windows Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) or upcoming Linux Secure Launch in mainline Linux. vPro also supports optional remote KVM/serial management over LAN with Intel AMT, which could be considered a feature or anti-feature, depending on use case.
A lot of these are not what I would call "mini," but I like the idea.
Is it a static list of manufacturers/models? If so, I feel like it would be worth putting that on GitHub so that the community can help maintain it. For example, I know there many fanless PCs on the market but the site is only showing me three and they are all fairly expensive.
Any plans to add websites besides eBay? When I am hunting down a SFF PC for a project, I generally try to at least look over what is on offer from AliExpress, NewEgg (clearance), Dell Refurbished, Lenovo Refurbished, Microcenter, and a variety of websites for second-hand business IT recyclers.
I still didn't move my main PC to a mini one because it's not that old and I don't feel like relegating it under a table, but migrating everything else to mini PCs (music, servers, firewalls, media players, ...) was the best choice ever; even the FreeBSD based NAS runs wonderfully on one of these small boxes. Unless one needs specific interfacing capabilities (GPIOs for instance) or serious performance which would need optimized airflow that only a bigger case could allow, the Mini PC form factor wins almost everywhere.
Great site, I'd love if it also took data from EU countries Ebay sites too, as buying from the US from here would inflate costs too much when adding overseas shipping and taxes.
I like your prototype, and people are already giving fantastic hints to make this even better; information about the geographic location of the offer would be my priority (EU).
This is particularly useful from an environmental point of view - all these machines can serve a good purpose for decades to come. Mini PCs use less energy, and every used machine re-used means one PC less built, saving minerals and energy.
I recently installed a DELL Micro-PC, which I intended as an X11-Terminal.
It turns out that it's also a fine machine for most local work like editing and email (except machine learning and heavy development work), so more beefy machines can stay off.
Been using a Beelink SER6 Mini PC, AMD Ryzen 5 6600H, 16GB DDR and 500GB NVME for the last year or so with PopOS as my daily driver and loving it. With a portable monitor makes remote work great for $351 and $100 for the monitor!
I have a beelink, have had no problems except the original SSD in mine failed suddenly in <1 year. I'd recommend anyone getting a beelink to swap out their SSD with a crucial, kingston, samsung brand etc before putting the pc to use.
The main place I wanted a small PC is in my entertainment stand.
I tried using such a PC in my living room as a media console. My plan was to use steam's 'Big Picture Mode's along with an Xbox controller to give a console like experience.
Instead of buying console games, I would get access to my extensive steam library. Games not on steam can be manually added to the steam launcher.
In practice, I ran into enough problems to abandon the idea. The controller experience didn't have enough support. A Bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo helped but eventually I just went back to using a Chromecast.
You should have a filter for processor, feel the difference between ones like N100 and usual low end Intel processors is huge. Might be cool to list them with benchmarks too for people who don’t want to do research.
Very nice! Would be nice to filter by NVMe as well. Also, one of the listings didn't come with a power adapter which was some custom lenovo thing. Finally, you totally should include your affiliate link.
I'm waiting for next year, when the prices for old (intel 6th gen and below) mini-pc are expected to plummet, due to Windows 10 becoming obsolete. It would be sad to see them becoming e-waste, but hopefully some of us will grab them as they make great linux-based home servers.
Also, I have bought a lot of mini-pc and those with Intel 6th gen CPU seems to offer the best bang for bucks, at least for my needs. (I don't really need powerful system, since I"m mostly using them for dedicated obs streaming or light video encoding or homeassistant).
On the website itself, "OS" "Included" and "Not Included" is strange. I don't see that I need "Not Included", unchecking "Included" should show you everything but instead it shows you nothing. I don't see the value of "no os included" verses a copy of Windows that I will overwrite.
A lot of these things are pretty great for general use, home server, game emulation and htpc duties. From the N100 at the relatively inexpensive, to the Ryzen 8000 series at the mid-range with top tier cpu capabilities and decent igpu to the relatively high end monsters.
Except for gaming duties, if someone wants a desktop experience, monitor, kb, mouse then mini pcs are awesome.
> I would like to add power usage, noise levels, PCIe slots but that data is hard to find.
Maybe you can use an LLM to extract that data from reviews?
Anyway, I'd like to know if I can use the system for a home cinema, so it should be able to decode 4k resolution in real time (and shouldn't be too noisy). It would be nice if there was a checkbox for that usecase.
> What would the requirements for your decoding be?
Well, it should just play 4k content from various sources (and so various formats), using Vlc.
> Reviews aren't common due to many listings having 1 item in stock.
I suppose you could use a (Google) search to find reviews elsewhere on the internet, based on the product name. Then feed them to ChatGPT, and ask it to summarize various things and build a JSON structure out of its findings. Maybe ChatGPT can even do the search for you.
This is really neat! I would love to see something similar for laptops. I bought a used Lenovo T80s (8th generation i5 CPU / 8GB of RAM / 256GB SSD) for 150$cad on eBay to work on my product (web app) and it is working flawlessly with Debian.
Maybe consider adding Fujitsu as a manufacturer. At least here in Europe they're fairly common in business environments so get tossed on ebay quite frequently. I've had very good experience with their stuff over the past decade.
I had a laptop running Windows for 12 years as my home server, hidden in a closet. It ran a couple of c# apps as a service and was an ftp server as well. Last month I decided to buy a raspberry pi (4B 2GB) to scratch multiple itches (arm processor, linux, low power consumption) and it replaced the server without a hitch, and better than I thought!
No weird splash screens from windows after updates, 2GB is vast for me when running headless, dotnet apps ported with minimal effort, and the list goes on.
Only downside is the USB can only power one external 2.5" hdd, and I didn't want to add a powered usb hub.
This is really nice, and I just did this analysis myself.
It seems like the tool is missing some of the better deals, like Optiplex 3070 with 9th gen i5s for ~$100, entire working system included (this is what I ended up buying).
I believe I looked up common machines with good prices, then searched for those individually, which obviously isn't going to work very well for this tool.
A filter for "has a PCI-E slot" might be interesting. I can see a popular use case being "advanced home router" and that means adding a few 2.5/5/10GbE sockets.
This is only of limited usefulness if you want to buy a new mini PC (rather than specifically a used unit from eBay). For example, many current fanless models are not listed. Just searching for “fanless mini pc” on Amazon.com gives many more (and some cheaper) results.
This might be a task for an LLM-supported scraper looking at a number of online marketplaces, retailers, and manufacturer sites. Then, conversely, you could link to matching eBay listings. It would also need a mechanism for users to submit spec corrections.
The eBay sellers who do the customization/price thing makes some of your price results misleading/unreliable as the price will be more on those than the base you have listed.
I found that to happen sometimes, so I marked customizable listings. But I think I was able to parse most of them to show the specs for the selected variation, not the parent or the title.
A CPU arch filter would be useful (I've been on the lookout for an ARM based one), as would the ability to choose a different eBay region (I'm in the UK). Nice work though!
A friend of mine has a few Dell Kace M300's which they run Linux on. Would that kind of thing be what you're looking for? It was originally an asset management appliance for businesses.
Wo-we's AMD A9 miniPC is $79 USD new, has 8GB RAM, a 128GB M.2, and a Win10 license. I've been running one as a geostationary satellite ground station for close to a year now and it's great! It also doesn't have the heating issues that the Raspberry Pi 3+ I replaced it with did.
https://www.wo-we.com/collections/mini-pc
Cant recommend anything based on intel N100 enough. Power draw is about 13w but absolutely excellent performance. Bought several "Firebat" ones from AliExpress
I had largely written off eBay some years ago after some bad experiences -- but this tool just showed me some pretty insane deals on custom PC builds over there.. Neat.
That's very cool. I ultimately concluded that those mystery brand Chinese fanless mini pcs from Amazon (essentially laptop hardware in a tiny enclosure) offer a better deal. Minimal power usage, fast networking, real USB-C, and NVMe drive support. Old hardware is bulky, makes noise, and outputs too much heat. Even the truly tiny mini pcs -- the kind that fit in your back pocket -- are fast enough for a NAS or TV media player.
It reminds me of when I got my own web "server"; I purchased it (for ~50€) after reading this post[0] back in 2017. The optiplex fx160 is still running to this day.
It would be nice to see which if any of these support coreboot. There's a big hole that was left behind when PC Engines left the market for a reasonably open low power x86 system that runs coreboot and has a much lower possibility of baked in back doors while sporting the sort of hardware that you can just plug in and leave alone for years on end.
Neat! I'd love a column for external disk I/O type. I've been trying to build a NAS on a new N100 miniPC but am foiled by the fact that the devices all only have USB ports for I/O. And USB is not reliable enough to run ZFS with a heavy load (kernel errors). I'd love to have something with eSATA or some sort of PCI option.
Given how dominant AMD-based options are from a new machine standpoint (you can get a pretty good 5000-series U-grade processor for less than $250 on Amazon) I’m kind of surprised by the lack of AMD options on the list. This is a useful idea though, but I wonder if the lack of AMD may be hinting at some variable that hasn’t been considered?
Most used PCs for sale started off as business machines. They usually buy from the big brands that can provide enterprise warranty support and volume discounts. AMD released Ryzen in 2017. Add up the time for AMD to convince Dell/HP/Lenovo to design, qualify, and release an AMD model. Add the time for significant uptake into the market. Finally add three years for the AMD PCs to get retired from office use.
Yet the website here seems to only show less than 100. I’m saying its method of organizing the data is not accounting for the fact that there are thousands of AMD mini PCs for sale on eBay.
Site is currently timing out. If it's actually static, stick it behind free Cloudflare. But still - nice idea, thanks for the Show HN.
Does anyone know what the right searchplace is for media storage PCs? I'm considering getting something in this area that's a bit more sophisticated than a NAS but not a huge project to maintain.
I have been looking into mini pcs. The niche I want is a USB c powered hand sized pc. I have only found two on Amazon so far, one has a small screen and another close to the size of a small dock. But they are both underpowered with Celeron processors.
I just need something that i can take from one desk to another that carry docking stations.
I wanted to recommend Minisforum, as I have a um560, that is powered through usb-c. But that is not available anymore... So those kind of machines exist...
You could get a frame.work laptop in an external case, slightly larger than hand-sized, though.
In addition to minisforum, there is mele. Mele makes celeron based usb c powered mini pcs. Quite compact. Serves as a good thin client. And lightweight business pc.
Ideas are circulating in my head for a custom solution.
Core count is something I would add to the table.
These mini PC are good for hobbyists, they are cheaper, stable, faster and easier to maintain than Arm SBCs I have get four of them since pandemic.
I can’t wait to see what happen when hyperscaler retire their A100s/H100s.
I wonder if this is kind of a semi-panic selling because of Windows 10 supposedly going away next October 2025? (Except MS holding us hostage for a yearly fee!)
Fantastic gathering of used PC's, but buyer beware, there are a lot of options that are worth studying before purchasing.
The question of "how well?" is mostly down to the fact that some GPUs and wifi chips have substandard support due to their manufacturers' refusal to document their driver interfaces.
This is an awesome site. It would be awesome to also have the shipping location to the buttons so it would be easier to narrow down the shipping price.
What a great idea! I love checking DiskPrices; the structure does lend well to mini-PCs (another interest of mine). Bookmarking this for my next shouldn't-grab-this-but-price-is-too-good impulse buy.
Wishlist: please allow filtering by Intel / AMD CPUs and Intel / NVIDIA / AMD GPUs. It's IMO important to know how many open drivers can the buyer use on Linux / BSD.
This is wonderful i'll be using this a lot.
Would be great to see a filter for Tiny vs Mini as well as CPU. AMD/Intel and i3 i7 i9, etc, maybe even generation, etc
Nice. Could you please add also the postal costs to the sort?
My very first trial showed me a 38$ PC with 500$ postal cost. I'm located in Europe, but still ???
This is super cool! Now if only my ISP would give me a static IP address so I could expose port 51820 on one of these things and life would be perfect.
Think about it this way: Will the user "lose their place" on your page if they click a link and go back? Will the user lose any filtering or search options? If the answer is yes to either, open in a new tab. I personally make this determination all the time, especially on social media after I've scrolled a lot and don't want my "progress" to be lost.
Opening in a new tab has become some kind of standard UX. Regardless of that, for this kind of site it would be very useful for product spec comparison.
I think not forcing links to open in a new tab is the right call.
However, the point about losing one's place is a valid one, and I agree with the other commenter that said it would be good to encode the state in the URL to solve that.
Depends on what "a little NAS" means to you, and what interfaces you need. But in general, most any PC made in the last 20 years would work for as simple and small storage server.
I love it. But its been a bit of a "secret" that office PCs that are 3 years old are still very very good. I hope tech bros dont ruin this. Also lol at power consumption voes.
There are some refurbers that will take office PCs and put a modern-ish GPU, upgrade the PSU etc. That said, Mini PCs don't offer PCIe expansion most of the time, so a GPU upgrade isn't an option. Less appealing compared to new options.
You can get some relatively high end Mini PCs... I mean, around $600 you can get what would be a $2k laptop (minus screen/kb/touchpad). And current gen laptop CPU/iGPU are better than desktop just a few years ago.
oooo, this is useful! It's a pain trying to search for these kinds of things manually, and it would be nice to get a whole stack of the kind of lenovo I have haha. Just need the UK region support :P
Is this for the CPU column? That's actually one I spent the least time on, since there was so much variation with how sellers entered processors. I'll take a look at it, thanks.
Why is PC BIOS still such an absolute shit show?
Seemingly similar products from the same brand will have wildly different BIOS options and functions.
Want to auto power on? Good luck with support for that being documented anywhere, and even if it is documented, the odds that the actual unit supports it is 50/50 at best it seems.
Want to customize boot options? You may or may not get the options you need.
Fan speed controls, clocking options. Every unit seemingly has been shipped with its own unique set of BIOS options supported, no two are ever the same.
I've been using a $35 rpi4 for years, it's been a significantly better experience and cost ($0 after initial purchase) than any abstracted PaaS/IaaS I ever tried, and performance is significantly better than the free or hobby tiers. With no need for regional deploys or to have devs contributing from all over, there's not a huge need for cloud. Also kinda nice knowing all my customer data and other PI is at my house instead of at Google's or Amazon's house. Remember when Twitter and GitHub were storing passwords in plain text for years? So yeah... the peace of mind of knowing a 22 y/o at their first job is not making security decisions with my data and infra! Let alone the fact these companies sell your data including your IP - you agree to it in their terms.
Beyond this stuff, I always found the UX of IaaS like AWS/GCP/etc. to be a nightmare, particularly the IAM experience. Not just navigating their awful dashboard pages, but learning their brand-specific jargon, managing service accounts, staying up-to-date on latest marketing and service breakdowns for every little thing - it quickly takes over your attention (and budget). Not to mention, using IaaS feels like devolving from a modern developer to an early 00s IT specialist. AWS feels less like "infrastructure" and more like a modern take on cPanel but with far less visibility/control over the server.
I digress... in 2021 I copy/pasted my "mono-server" setup from Heroku over to the Pi 4 with vanilla Raspbian and it's been running 24/7/365 ever since. It powers 15+ APIs/backends including a booking engine for a local business in SF, some real-time socket servers for games, and there's both a SQL (postgres) and NoSQL (mongo) server running too. I attached a touch screen that shows the console output in fullscreen, and I velcro it to my wall. It looks like a smartphone charging on my wall or a smart thermostat or something, but it's nice to be able to walk up and see how things are doing. Feels better than checking any dashboard.
I've had to restart it only twice over the years. A couple times it just stopped responding to requests, though didn't appear to be frozen. I could stop it and npm start again but nothing. When this happens, have to fully restart and run IPTABLES stuff again to put it back online. However - that's mere minutes spent each year rather than spending significant time every single day in an IaaS or PaaS.
Thanks for sharing this awesome list, I'm due for an upgrade pretty soon and I am so glad to see so many low cost options. My hope is that more developers get into these mini PCs around the world, and I imagine a future where the Big Cloud providers play a much smaller more specific role (government data, public domain computing) rather than being the de facto platform for hobby/startup projects. Even things like regional deployments and distributed/"serverless" computing can be accomplished with networks and proxying without giving it all away to a major cloud provider.
Also, AMD is crushing this market - but AMD is pretty under-represented here. There are also some great N-series Intel machines that are highly popular and you can get on AliExpress [2]. Or even more US focused brands under this umbrella like Protecli [3]
[0] https://www.bee-link.com/ [1] https://www.minisforum.com/ [2] https://www.servethehome.com/fanless-intel-n200-firewall-and... [3] https://protectli.com/