I agree and already got two minipcs I selfhost a lot of stuff now. I just now realized it is basically the future Gabe Newell predicted and wanted to make with Steam Machines [1], but he was wrong by targeting gamers and a little too early (perhaps?). Maybe they will succeed precisely because of this revolution.
I got soooo tired setting up a gaming system for parties on my projector. There are so many various problems and tweaks, gamepads disconnecting if you put a hand between the gamepad and the pc/playstation etc. BSODs on windows, driver problems and stupid obscure things varying from pc to pc. I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations. I am too old to debug this stuff to play a game for so little time, I would rather not. I didn't really believe in steam machines at the time, but now I sort of do, especially with game streaming and local LLMs that might be hosted there now.
Valves big misstep with the Steam Machines was that they expected developers to port their games over to Linux natively, on their own dime. Needless to say that didn't end up happening at any significant scale, so when they resurrected SteamOS they refocused on Windows binary compatibility through Proton instead.
Valve launched Steam Machines with their own OS and started shipping a version of Steam on Linux with predictable library versions. At the same time, they started working with the Wine project and shipping things which is now called Proton but is actually the cumulative results of their own patches.
This paved the way for the success of the Steam Deck when adequate material became available.
I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.
>I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.
I’ve written before about how I think the Steam Deck is one of the best v1 products in recent memory, in large part because Valve learned so much (and so well) from the failures of the Steam Machines.
I don’t know if I would call it a misstep, but it was absolutely a failure. And a brutal one. Valve should be lauded for taking the right lessons from that failure and investing in Proton and doing the compatibility work themselves rather than expecting devs to do it (Apple is the only company that consistently gets developers to rebuild for their platform, and even game developers won’t do that), but we shouldn’t let the fact that it wound up on the right path years later diminish the fact that the original strategy —- if not the devices or idea itself —- was hugely flawed.
I have a Steam Machine, one of the Alienware ones. You're completely correct. SteamOS as shipped on those machines sucked. The controllers sucked. The PC hardware wasn't bad and could play games alright but the experience sucked. I made it into a Linux desktop I used for years and it worked much better for that than as a dedicated games console. But the SteamDeck very plainly incorporated lessons learned from Steam Machines.
But all the update you like in your SteamDeck also came to the Steam Machines plus nice remote play on your local network. You couldn’t see because you stopped using it as an actual Steam Machine. I personally deeply disagree about the controller too.
Personally, for such an early and unlikely product, I don’t view it as a failure at all. They ironed everything they had to using the platform as a stepping stone.
First of all they can make it easier option for OEMs go for Windows/XBox handhelds and thus push SteamDeck out of market, by making it a niche device only a minority cares about, netbooks attack plan style, which they are starting now.
They can also introduce Windows/DirectX APIs that Proton will have a hard time copying, by requiring additional hardware or subsystem features not easily copyable.
They can let their legal team have some fun.
Finally, companies don't last forever, and I am betting as the 2nd most valuable company in the planet, Microsoft will outlive Steam's current management and eventually deal with the problem in another way.
> First of all they can make it easier option for OEMs go for Windows/XBox handhelds and thus push SteamDeck out of market, by making it a niche device only a minority cares about, netbooks attack plan style, which they are starting now.
Steamdeck is already a niche device, and they have direct competition since years now. Optimizing the software and interface won't probably make it much worse for Valve.
> They can also introduce Windows/DirectX APIs that Proton will have a hard time copying, by requiring additional hardware or subsystem features not easily copyable.
Seems unrealistic that games will adapt a new restricted API, which at the same will be a longterm hazzle for Wine/Proton, and will survive that court-battles. At best, it's just some annoying money-sink, with Microsoft playing on time to make it worse for everyone without gaining any real advantage.
> Finally, companies don't last forever, and I am betting as the 2nd most valuable company in the planet, Microsoft will outlive Steam's current management and eventually deal with the problem in another way.
That's actually realistic, but there is also the chance that valve will be outliving Windows and has to battle with whatever will follow.
I don't think reducing the price of Windows for OEMs will do much as the SteamDeck uses Arch Linux specifically for better control of the software/updates than relying on Microsoft.
They can try making Proton's job more difficult, but I'd expect that major changes to the APIs would prevent a lot of existing games from working on Windows.
Legally, I don't think they've got a leg to stand on.
Basically Valve are doing with Steam OS and Proton against Windows, the same thing that Google did with Chrome against Internet Explorer. Microsoft's usual tactic with Embrace Extend Extinguish isn't working with Edge, as Chrome just has great development velocity and market entrenchment and distribution. Crossing my fingers that Valve will pull off the same thing. In the gaming market Valve have great distribution and they are strong developers, so maybe.
I'm glad they are. There's probably a sizeable market for a console that runs PC games smoothly at 1080. And could double as a PC. If they get it to the size of an XBox Series S or smaller, I would probably get one.
That's a dream come true... provided they fix multi-accounts and game visibility/accessibility in the Steam UI.
I already have a Steam Deck that I can't let my kids touch, which is stupid. I can't hook something like this up in a shared space of any kind without improved parental controls, including ability to toggle visibility of game library entries, and (ideally, but not strictly necessary) the ability to say "do not show this user's entire library to anyone else on this machine, or on the network, nobody with a different login"
I had never thought of multiuser (or the lack of) with SteamOS and the Deck. That would be quite the problem with kids.
I wonder if a stopgap solution would be something like Bazzite on the Deck. Then you could have true multiuser while retaining the Deck's ease of use. But I could see other problems.
I'm sure you've probably already tried this or something similar. I just couldn't resist thinking out loud. It's an interesting problem.
I’m honestly skeptical of the utility of the Fremont as the specs currently appear. Seems like not enough horsepower compared to the competitor consoles - the Steam Deck was so good because price to performance to battery life is still hard to beat and only now encroached by the Switch 2, it simply didn’t have a console like competitor.
Video drivers & hardware are a plague on both Windows and Linux. Hell, adding a discrete video card to the config was even a way to increase your odds of serious problems with a Mac by a large multiple, back in the Intel Mac days. Any complaint-session online by Mac owners tended to be dominated by folks rocking non-Intel video chips in their MacBook.
The biggest problem with making a "gaming" miniPC is new games being very unotpomized, but other than that the hardware is already there, I'd wager that we'll probably see a new Steam Machine within the next 3-5 years.
I just set up mine in one day, setting *arrs and Jellyfin and voila i got streaming service better than all payed streaming services combined and no ads.
I would honestly love a steam machine like thing that I could just plug into my laptop. I'm carrying my laptop around anyway, if I could plug in a small gaming system and have the laptop act as the input/output that would be ideal.
I liked the idea of type-c GPUs but there are so many problems again that it's just useless. It also should be something better than just a GPU tho, have HDMI eARC etc.
> I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations.
How so? A console is literally a gaming PC.
I can see the point of “need multiple consoles because game X isn’t on console Y” or “I’d like to play an RTS/MMO that isn’t on a console” but since you mentioned gamepads that point mostly dies.
I also haven’t ever had a PS5 or Switch controller lose link from a console because someone walks or stands between myself and the console.
Consoles are walled gardens, while PC is an open park. On a proper PC, you can choose anything from everything, while consoles are very restricted in terms of software and ability. I mean, think about modding, running other software besides the game (browser, (voice-)chat, etc.), having special hardware like a mouse, keyboard, capture-card, a second screen... Consoles are again slowly those things, but it's still not the same as a proper Gaming-PC.
One big part's the library. I can still play Steam games I bought when the Gamecube was current. My Gamecube games do not work on the Switch. My Dreamcast games certainly don't! The library for the PC is enormous and generally you don't have to re-buy old games to keep playing them, even after major hardware upgrades. Hell I got like a few hundred games on Itch.io years ago for so little money they may as well have been free, and sure they're mostly short "jank" games and art games and stuff, but that's still games and I like them! You can't get that kind of thing (with that kind of "OMG I may never even get through all these..." magnitude, I don't mean jank or art games, both exist on consoles, even if they're not well represented) on a console.
To do anything similar with consoles, you need, like... a dozen consoles, or more, with keeping that number down requiring putting a lot of money and time into careful curation and selection. A single PC does the trick, though.
Another's longevity & archiving (not unrelated to the library thing, but not exactly the same thing). The PC is my platform of last resort for console game archiving. Consoles don't really fill this role at all. Even a "hacked" console (if it's hackable) is on borrowed time. The hardware dies, and eventually the only ones left are in museums or crazy-expensive private collections. Meanwhile I play freeware PC games I downloaded in the 1990s, sometimes, like the exact same binary (to the degree it's "the same", which it isn't, but I just mean I didn't have to go download it again) that's been shuffled from one disk to another ever since. They're not gone. And thanks to PCs, neither are old console games (this is a state of affairs that's on life support, for newer consoles, but not quite dead yet)
Another's the controls. I don't really want a console at my desk (and there's gonna be a PC regardless, so that's nothing extra) because I definitely want one on my TV, and I don't want two of the same console. I don't really want to use a mouse & keyboard on my couch, I've done it, the best solutions I've found take up a bunch of space, look bad, and are still a worse experience than a desk. Some games that I love, I have no interest in playing them if it's not with a mouse and keyboard (and for plenty of others, a controller is better! I like tons of games that are best played with a controller, but for some, it's mouse & keyboard or I'll simply not play them).
Another factor's modding. I've gotten hundreds of extra hours out of games I've bought, thanks to mods. 50+% of my time in the Half Life and Source engines has been in total conversion mods. I'd probably only have put about a quarter as many hours into Morrowind or Skyrim as I have, without mods. I never touched the base game of Rome: Total War again after I discovered the Europa Barbarorum mod, which I sunk probably a hundred or more hours into. All for free, and you don't get that on consoles, the closest you get are things like level designers, sometimes, in LittleBigPlanet or what have you... and those all die when the game servers die.
FWIW I have... a lot of consoles, I don't hate them or anything, and these days most (90%?) of my gaming is on consoles. But they're not a gaming PC.
(Really, if gaming PCs were more-stable, less-janky, and didn't have such a hard time consistently pairing with and juggling multiple BlueTooth controllers [even the SteamDeck fails to live up to "real" consoles, on any of those fronts] I'd probably not bother with consoles at all, but that's such a crippling issue for PC hardware that instead I have a bunch of consoles, and have even re-bought games 3 or 4 times just for the convenience of being able to play them on one of the small set of real consoles currently connected to my TV)
I have a homelab which is a zimaboard, a dumb netgear switch, and six mini-pc's (5560U/16GB/500GB).
The zimaboard runs pfsense & an nginx reverse proxy, then all six of the mini-pcs run proxmox. 4 mini-pcs run k8s clusters (talos) and the other two run home services and selected one-offs (home-assistant, plex, bookstack, build-tools, gitea, origin servers for a subset of projects).
It was a lot easier to set up than I had expected. Its was still a massive PITA though. I got what I wanted out of it work-wise, and its a nice little novelty.
I've been thinking about ditching most of it for a while; I like the idea in the article about breaking it up - move one under the TV, one into the office, one under the stairs, and the remaining 3 + zimaboard I'm tempted to sell. I'd keep running proxmox on them, but I wouldn't link them up. The key thing that needs to happen for this to make sense is using something like cloudflare to route domains.
The part I never sorted properly was storage. It has 3TB of storage, but getting that storage into k8s for proper dynamic allocation without giving random nodes CPU perf issues was a too-long-for-one-session task which meant it never got finished. I was tempted to add a NAS, but most NAS's are horrid.
Pretty awesome tbh. The talosctl CLI is amazing and the exposed health utilities are great. If you need anything special its pretty easy to add a patch file for the underlying system (e.g. networking).
Initially I needed a lab to practice deploying & upgrading & disrupting on-prem talos linux for k8s, and design benchmarks around it. So 4 machines does that. The zimaboard in front with pfsense (which is a PITA by itself) and nginx is a good way to make it pick-up-and move (ie. internal networking config). For <£2k the set up is very cheap for what is being tested. It meant I didn't have to go and sit on the other side of a security checkpoint for most of the work. It was cool to keep around as its trivial to make the lab guests unable to see my home network and vice-versa.
Now I often have the 4 k8s hosts off. But use them maybe once a month.
It's not a PITA at all. I followed a few youtube videos and had Proxmox up and running and was a little shocked that the inter node/server settings were largely point and click.
> So you mean to tell me you’ve been using your torch to take a shit this last week because your light bulbs don’t work without the PC you watch Netflix on?
This made me laugh. I’ve currently got a home assistant controlled floor standing light in my bathroom because all the old school switch ones in ceiling are dead and landlord is being well a classic landlord
In fairness, note that in some countries (like mine) there are tighter regulations for electrical circuitry in rooms with baths and showers, which require work in that sort of area (problems with the pull switch, a joint box, or the ceiling rose, for example) to be done or at least overseen by a qualified electrician. They're known as "Part P" in the United Kingdom.
That said, bringing in a mains-powered non-IP-rated portable floor standing lamp because the ceiling mounted one is broken is definitely not the intended outcome of such safety standards.
Don't forget to earth all your water pipes to ground, and only use sockets that are water-rated to resist biblical floods.
I remember being intrigued by a big 40 x 40 cm plastic box on the outside wall of the cabin we were staying at in the UK. Opening the movable front-flap revealed 1 (one) 220V power socket, protected on all sides with enough rubber and plastic to seal a submarine hatch. I had absolutely no doubt it fully complied with all the norms of health and safety..
You are thinking of section 250.104 of NFPA 70, the National Electrical Code published by the U.S.A. National Fire Protection Association. (-:
BS 7671 (IEE Wiring Regs) does not require bonding of the pipework if the mains (service) pipes and the internal (installation) piping are both plastic.
Not OP, but I'm in a similar situation: I have a two-way switched pair of lights on my stairwell, one light at the base, one at the top. The one at the top does not work. We've tried replacing the bulb, we've tried fiddling with the cable for it (it's a suspended lamp). It hasn't worked since we moved in. We've told the landlord twice, he said he'd call his guy, his guy hasn't shown up.
I would like to have a light in my stairs. It's hard to see at night in the winter. My solutions is going to be to spin up home assistant, a zigbee base, and some fairy lights on a 'smart' switch.
I could learn the skills to troubleshoot why the electrical connection is (apparently) bad to the lamp, but given that said connection is in the walls, my DIY skills are trash, and I'm scared of electricity, I'm gonna do the project that's more fun and lines up with some stuff I wanted to do anyway.
I have no idea why the lamp doesn't work, especially because the fixture at the base of the stairs does, but the landlord insists it worked before we moved in.
- the two-way switched lights may have never worked as intended. So no matter what you do with the endpoints it may never work.
- doing it yourself is a waste of time and money. You'll learn nothing of value and will toss it all in the end.
-Proper solution is to hire a certified electrician who is familiar with two-way lights to fix/replace the current wiring.
If you rent, pay the electrician and send the bill to the landlord. Keep a copy. If landlord hasn't paid by the time you move out, bill him for the price. If he stiffs you, sue him in small claims court - he'll pay or you'll win.
Cheapest fix: run an extension cord with a bulb to the upstairs light, turn it on and leave it on all the time. Electricity is cheap, bulbs efficient. Having a light on inside keeps burglars away, esp. bathroom lights (according to Malcolm X).
If it wasn't suspended in the air I would say give it a go, household wiring isn't like some movie style electrocution hazard and is fairly easy to test for live. If you are dry and not grounded even if you get shocked it would hurt and singe some skin but would be freak accident to die from and you should have the breaker off anyways.
But with it up the top of a set of stairs and in the air requiring a ladder or something to stand on I wouldn't recommend it for a first time because if you did get shocked, not knowing what is coming (and possibly even if you did), you would jerk or jump away and possibly fall down the stairs which is way worse.
I'm in the UK that has more reliance on ring circuits i.e. electrically its a chain of devices. So depending on details one fault can take out all the lights in a room
>Your landlord isn't changing your bulbs?
They're just taking their time.
Normally I'd just replace bulbs myself but this is a bit more complicated cause its hooked into other devices as well and i can't even tell what is broken
Ring mains are parallel, not series. Which means that more than one thing going out is a clue to where the fault is, and an indicator that the job is definitely per the regs one for a qualified electrician. Conversely, only one device going out points the other way. Although IP-rated fittings inside one of the zones is still a qualified electrician job.
But bringing a mains powered non-IP-rated portable substitute into the room in the interim is a truly terrible idea. The regs also specify that there's a minimum distance that stuff should have from baths, sinks, showers, cisterns, and whatnot; and that they should not be reachable at all by a wet human being.
It likely means the OP has poor handyman skills and wisely has chosen not to learn by him/her self due to safety hazard. After all, these circuits are usually ~110 volts and there is almost always an unintended ground nearby (a water or gas pipe, a wet bathtub, etc.).
I have no idea what the specific situation is, but in my old rental, the ceiling lights weren't traditional bulbs -- they were custom dome fixtures with non-replaceable lighting elements. When mine went out, I had to wait for my landlord to buy a replacement.
Sadly yes, b/c even the simplest things can go wrong quickly. E.g. people sometimes change light bulbs w/o turning off the power. Have you ever experienced a dead (or good, for that matter) bulb coming apart as you twist it out of the socket? Would you trust a naive person to properly handle that situation?
You are conflating naive and a barely functional human being.
If someone doesn't know what the electricity zaps and couldn't think two steps ahead then they definitely should be anywhere near a power circuits, operating a car or be allowed to vote.
EDIT: of course it should had been 'shouldn't be anywhere' but it's even better, so I leave it as is.
Can I now take it as confirmation from the two of you (justsomehnguy and micromacrofoot) that at least half of Americans who vote should not be allowed to vote?
If so, this may be the first time an important political question has been resolved without a light bulb turning on (figurative or otherwise).
That may be so, but what you say doesn't answer my question: can they unscrew a lightbulb that is literally falling apart as they unscrew it?
ANSWER:
If the power is off, they likely will remove the glass bulb (one piece), examine the situation and then unscrew the metal bulb base (second piece) and finally, remove any stray material in the (unpowered) socket.
If the power is on, the correct answer is "No, they likely cannot unscrew the bulb. Instead they will likely short the circuit, blow a breaker/fuse and put themselves in a situation where they must call in someone more knowledgeable, (or worse)."
OP here - no just dealing with UK ring circuits where the lights are wired inline with non-light devices. And since I'm renting I'm not here to do handyman work. Lightbulbs I do ofc replace myself.
For a small price (probably less than the cost of a "home assistant controlled floor standing lamp") you could buy parts to repair the bathroom lighting?
Better yet, pay someone to do it (and maybe show you the hows and the hazards). Then you could be living like a true American.
And without risking the "standing lamp" falling into your bathtub!
The bulb could have been $15 and the lamp $10 for a grand total of $25. Good luck having someone come out for that much. Good luck buying tools and parts to do the fix for that much.
it's the landlord's responsibility, you're a sucker if you pay a dime to fix what they own... especially considering the unfamiliarity with previous work and safety risks involved
no, the landlord should fix their property in a timely manner or they should sell it to someone that will
a $20 lamp you get to keep is smarter and safer than fixing someone else's property doing unlicensed electrical work at your own cost and without their permission... why does this even have to be explained?
Are you from the US? The overwhelming likely fixes to "my bathroom light won't work" are not work that would require skilled electrical work or a permit. The cost is also not likely to be more than a floor lamp, and the tenant can also keep the fixture when they leave.
Also many jurisdictions (willing to bet covering a huge plurality of Americans) would let you subtract the cost of necessary repairs from your rent.
I have repurposed retired laptops for my tech lab at home. They no longer keep up with the current software bloat for wife and kids usage, but make reasonable linux servers. Currently serving up 3 databases on one, kafka and networking on another and services/applications on a third. They take up very little space under my desk.
I want one for gaming , that is silent, provides high end graphics, and takes little space ( Mac mini or studio size ideally ). I’m essentially willing to pay extra for a specced up gaming console.
I still haven’t been able to find something that fits the bill - the hardest part to get information on is noise, since most people don’t seem to care about it or just play with headphones. I understand that such a product is hard to build, with a direct tension between power, space and noise.
What has never been clear to me is whether such a market even exists and I’d tend to say no, even if the market seems to be changing rapidly with amd apus ( we’re far from a 5080 , but it seems to be a step in the right direction ).
IMHO it's basically impossible to build such a PC. The small size plus high thermal load of a modern GPU means it cannot be cooled quietly. Intel's line of NUCs had some gaming models back in the day (e.g. Skull Canyon), but the graphics were the Intel midrange GPU and they had tiny noisy fans. Anything approaching Nvidia 4070 or 5070 series and you've got up to 300 more watts TBP heating up the system on top of the CPU etc.
My last small form factor gaming PC was an Origin Chronos. It was great but it was definitely not quiet. The larger Origins offer liquid cooling but I'm guessing it can't be done in that small form factor.
The new APU from AMD can makes it come true. Its iGPU is on par with rtx4060 laptop, which is far from 4070 desktop, but should be enough for 1080p gaming and light 2k gaming.
The Ryzen Max+ 395 is in the ballpark of a RTX 4060 (but I believe it's starts to massively fall behind when ray tracing is enabled). It's an iGPU so I would imagine noise is greatly reduced (though probably not silent) compared to machines with dGPUs. However, that's going to cost roughly $2000 so it won't be cheap and will be vastly outperformed by a $2000 desktop pc.
While the 395 is very cool I do feel that the next generation will be an enormous step forward if AMD integrates FSR 4 in their APUs. Neutral network based upscaling makes a huge difference since you can get away with far lower (real) rendering resolutions and don't need any (expensive) anti-aliasing solutions anymore.
There's a bunch of demos on YouTube of people upscaling from as low as 360p and while not pretty, it's definitely serviceable. It might be worth the wait if you're budget constraint or patient!
That would be neat. But sadly thermodynamics gets in the way. I did see a minipc where the graphics card was being cooled by a liquid cooler that had the cooler unit under the desk but its not really a "mini" pc at that point, its a disaggregated pc with separate compute and cooling :-).
Yes, it exists. Ryzen mini-PCs with an M780 can run many 5-year old AAA titles (with caveats) and most indie games at 60fps. We use a 7840HS one as a Steam box, and stream the games to our iPads or the living room Apple TV (because, well, nothing you will find will ever be truly quiet when playing games).
But that was around $700 a couple of years back on sale, and these days you are looking at $1000+ (with 20-50% increments if you need a better GPU or multiple NVMe slots), plus the new Ryzen AI chipsets command an additional premium.
I’d give it 2-3 years for things to settle down and discrete GPUs to be come a thing of the past.
When I was thinking about this k came to the conclusion you need a high specced mini pc, route out oculink from it and run an external GPU. For daily you'll have a powerful CPU with a decent igpu, and gaming will go to the external dgpu.
Otherwise you're stuck with lower performing gpus, as normal ram at least in its current state won't be able to approach the bandwidth necessary to keep up with a full fat high end gpu. And nobody is making mini pcs that work like laptops with normal dgpus so you're stuck with igpus with the normal solutions
I can recommend ETAPRIME on YouTube. They go through various mini/budget builds, and test new hardware. I agree with the noise benchmark, however. I bought a budget AMD card last year and it was loud af. Promptly swapped it out for a 4060 and have been happy since.
I keep a Legion Go in my media center. There's a USB-C hub connected to power, HDMI, and peripherals when I want to play docked. Or I can unplug one cable and play handheld.
The kickstand means it takes up very little space in a cabinet. It does have a fan, but it's great for what it is.
I have a beelink gti14 with the ex pro docking station with a 4090 mounted on it. Basically a gaming PC on mini-itx-ish form factor. The loudest thing is of course the graphics card. It does the job as a gaming PC alright.
Linus the Tech Tip man has all his gaming PCs in a rack in his basement and runs a specific kind of KVM to the gaming room. I think it was a fiber connection?
You are going to be limited by your GPU, I think. The power and heat requirements for a high end GPU are going to be hard to fit into a small enough form factor.
Silent, high-end graphics and small form factor is not possible. You can pick at most two of the three. (Silent and high-end-graphics is still difficult.)
if you don't mind single cable out of your console then your wish can be implemented with a powerful as you need gaming machine in another room. Or in the same with some noise canceling cover and/or watercooling.
- Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc)
- can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstalling and reconfiguring OS's, services and software).
- less supported over time (I can still download driver upgrades in some cases, and find solutions if I run into something unexpected as the vendor is still in business and supporting the legacy model).
Full sized machines aren't difficult to build, and I've had great luck with second hand enterprise-targeted parts (eg. for a long time years back, used Mellanox Infiniband cards were dirt cheap on eBay because universities were upgrading to later generations, they were an order of magnitude faster than NIC's available at competing price points at the time, and as a bonus had lower latency). Older Areca RAID cards were great for SATA drives, easily upgradeable to new models, and I still have a few kicking around in production today.
Meanwhile neighbors have thrown out piles of ewaste and wasted time after their commodity junk failed unexpectedly.
Sometimes size matters, tho. I came into MiniPCs from a Raspberry Pi solution. Our Pi's had to display multiple videos onscreen and weren't fast enough (I think the standard at the time was RP4), so we switched the critical ones to MiniPCs but they had to be small & light enough to hang off the back of a VESA mount on a TV suspended above a gym floor.
I've found the Pi video decoder chips pretty weak, but still usable. I've got a Pi 2 displaying a 4x720p stream perfectly fine. Would struggle with anything more.
You can also run a single storage box and then just pop over network (10gbe, thunderbolt, etc). One big box of spinning rust and tons of cheap compute.
Most folks are running proxmox and your OS installs are automated. Use ansible. I like docker swarm on top of a fleet of cattle vms on proxmox.
I'm thinking of a beefy mini-PC + USB-C 8+ hard drive enclosure.
I feel like I rarely upgraded anything except GPU and storage. And GPU's are not needed for a server.
Enclosure means easy storage upgrade and I can always reattach the enclosure to another machine quickly. Might even install OS on the enclosure, then the whole setup will survive compute upgrades until the predominant architecture changes.
Exactly this. I don't even have a nice multi-drive enclosure, just a small swarm of toaster-style dual-drive holders. They're absurdly cheap. (Alas one of the recent purchases was maybe too cheap: wont let me adjust the various drive spin down/power savings settings. But this is a first for me, and they've all been very cheap).
Unfortunately a lot of the mini-PCs skimp on USB ports. AMD's FL1 form-factor mobile "socket" has 4x 10Gbps + 1x 40Gbps USB-C ports on the SoC, but many of the designs often only have ~2x usb3 class ports and rarely the USB4 port at all. I'd really appreciate these mini-PC's exposing more of the chip's usb! Definitely something to shop for.
With USB4, there's also the added benefit of having host-to-host interfaces: it's short range but 40Gbps host-to-host is real nice to have (in practice it's often half or less this speed alas).
Upgradability is over-rated, when costs are low. A Minisforum 795S7 can be had for $400, and has dual ("only" PCIe 4.0) SSD slots and a 16-core 7945HX Zen4. It's mobile-on-desktop (MoDT): I can't ever replace the CPU, but I suspect this crazy cheap system is going to have a long long life before I feel the need to upgrade it. Replacing it whole when the time comes seems not a concern. RAM and SSD are separate and can be moved out if desired.
There are a lot of NAS case you can find in China(Taobao), they are cheap(usually $40 for case with 4 hotswappable 3.4 drive. They use mini ITX motherboard and flex 1U PSU
I considered that, but it doesn't make sense price-wise. You can get the storage bays for very little along with your compute, certainly cheaper than separate hard drive enclosures.
The Aoostar top one actually looks pretty good for what it provides (sus really, $700 for a NAS with 2x2.5G E and 2x10 SFP). But still, the compute options are very limited.
I tend to want to keep storage (NAS) separate from compute and databases, in the form of I never want to touch or think about this so I can spend my time on other things.
Having a couple of pre-built nas' from QNAP or Synology can go a long way to getting one's feet wet to learn what they offer that we sometimes learn the hard way about.
It makes sense since the cost of computing has come down, but it's funny to see the cyclical nature of it all.
The web was run on beefy SPARC and NeXT workstations until Google came along and sharded it out onto cheap off-the-shelf hardware. Then containerization/virtualization started replicating individual machines as VMs to try to give you root-access control on timeshared hardware. Now computing is cheap, and the OP is advocating for "just make each container its own device."
Have seen hundred of chinese ones fail. More than half failed between 1 and 3 years.
As stated by others, issues are mainly and very commonly with the power stage / power management of the mainboard. Also, soldering quality issues leading to failures.
Far less issues with good brands like Dell and HP (had a few hundred of desktop mini g2/3/4). Even tinys from Lenovo do perform quite well compared to their entry level laptops (also quite bad). Industrial computers form factor are also generally quite good but quite expensive, even second hand ones.
Currently don't have enough feddback on the Asus ones nor enough volume to draw conclusions, but so far they performed well with minimal issue, even with models back from i3/i5 8th gen series.
I have the opposite experience as you. I have seena lot of failed Dell and HP mini desktops, but all the Beelinks and Minisforum PCs have been very reliable.
I recently did a 180 in my homelab. I had been getting better and better equipment, enterprise level, and I found that it took a lot mroe work and was a lot less fun than doing things the way I used to, which had been maximize small low cost systems. I enjoyed the jank, and going enterprise equipment eliminated jank. So I sold all the high end stuff and went back to miniPCs. My main VM host now is a Lenovo P3 Ultra with lots of RAM and storage, and I have a handful of other Dell Optiplex 3090 machines and a bunch of Raspberry Pis to run everything from. I enjoy it more, it's actually more stable, less expensive, quieter, and cheaper.
Minisforum is also one of many mini-pc vendors that basically doesn't release bios updates. They might release a couple early on, to try to get systems stable, but after that don't expect any bios updates. AMD will release plenty of updates, & you'll be stuck on whatever it was your system came with.
Different kind of support concern from yours, but also noteworthy. Really unfortunate.
I still have an old HP EliteDesk (i5-8600t) that is my one reliable 24/7 system, still runs fine. Also no bios updates, so I guess there's that. Mini-PCs to me started more as a way to buy cast-off business gear, these small affordable small business systems, even cheaper second hand. It's amazing and great seeing this new market rise up to make interesting mini-pc's, and the value is often still pretty good, but it's a very different character from where the trend started.
I’d be very surprised if your EliteDesk never got any BIOS updates. In my experience, business grade PCs from the major vendors (Dell/HP/Lenovo) usually have a pretty solid software support lifecycle.
If it’s an EliteDesk G2 Mini, the last BIOS update was released in May 2024.
You're totally right! Small distinction: my unit is smaller than the Mini (a weird in between size), it's the 1-liter-ish DM 35W.
I thought it would be moot, because I vaguely remember HP starting to require support contracts for bios updates. But I guess that only applies to HP Enterprise gear? Yuck, what a pox.
Reddit threads suggest MOSFET problems are common among mini PCs. Any ideas?
This is especially frustrating because I have an ancient dell optiplex and dell precision with i3-2100 and i3-5xx that still work. I occasionally need to open the box to reseat the ram for whatever reason after a power failure but by an large these machines are over ten years old!
What about MiniPCs that support serial console or network connectivity for BIOS / UEFI access? When I looked for a new router, I couldn't find any of the usual "cheap" suspects that supported that. As well, most didn't have anything better than 1 GBit network ports.
I ended up going with a more expensive mini-PC style vendor, but I was surprised there didn't seem to be a ton of competitors.
Thanks. I'm surprised as I thought Gigabyte were a well known brand (previously bought their motherboards which seemed great). I've bought a few no-name minipcs and the only issue that I've encountered was when a supplied SSD stopped working.
having had quite a bunch of MiniPCs, mostly from reputable brands (Intel NUC series back when Intel had those, then Gigabyte Brix series, then some cheapo china ones), I have moved away from those, because every single one of them (independently of the brand) ended up dying spuriously not long after warranty end and in any case far sooner than any µATX desktop would (in fact I've very rarely had any of the latter die; they usually live far beyond their phase out / replacement)
Even without wanting to attribute that to any malicious planned obsolescence, my impression is that the very small size of mini PCs makes it almost impossible for the manufacturer to ensure proper thermal management for keeping all components constantly at a temperature low enough for device longevity.
I thought to have bought a reputable Gigabyte Brix last year, in the end it travelled two times to support, could only boot from USB regardless of the OS, and eventually with all these travelling around and trying to get the SSD connection to work, it died.
> "... Intel NUC ..., then Gigabyte Brix series, then some cheapo china ones ..."
That's the mistake. Secondhand Dell, HP, or Lenovo mini PCs would probably have served better. They're cheap when second hand and the ones I've had have lasted a decade because the big OEMs are experienced in building office PCs.
I bought a cheap Beelink mini pc to tinker around with. It didn't take long before something went wrong. It still technically works, but I can't simply reboot it anymore. I have to unplug the power, let it sit for 10-20 seconds, plug it back in and then boot. It's too annoying, so it's basically trash at this point. I tried a new PS, but that didn't help. I assume there is a bad capacitor in there or something.
I've had great luck with Mac minis over the years. I've had many of them. I'll probably go that route in the future if needed.
I know there are better quality x86 options out there, but the prices go up fast, and I find them hard to justify for what I'd be doing with it. The Mac is really price competitive, which makes it even harder to justify those other options.
As an alternative experience report: I have two beelink mini s12s, and administer another one that lives under my mom's tv. All work fine (though I wouldn't be bothered by your issue as much — I reboot maybe once every few months?).
The latest project I had for it was to host a radio station. I got a home FM transmitter and was going to load the Beelink full of music, set it to shuffle, and stick it in a corner for years. Then I could tune any radio in my home to the broadcasted station and have quick and easy music synced all over my house without and “smart” stuff. A $20 transistor radio would do the job. There were a lot of reboots during setup, and then after about 4 days the OS (mint) locked up and I needed another reboot. I think that happened a time or two after that, and I just gave up.
The whole idea was that I wanted it to be a simple flick of the switch, or turn of a knob, to play some music. The “smart” stuff and apps have more friction than I’d like when I just want some background noise. The random lockups and reboot issues created a different kind of friction.
A few old G4 Mac minis just came back into my possession. Maybe I’ll just use one of those. My main issue there is memories of old iTunes getting caught in a loop when shuffling. Do it do long and it starts to essentially play the same playlist it generated on repeat. But maybe for this I won’t care, that’s how most radio stations seem to operate anyway, and I’d have the power to force it to mix things up.
Been running a variety of them (+SBCs) for years, but recently decided it's time for a full sized build too. For stuff like setting up virtualized k8s cluster via terraform my oldish minipc style setup was struggling noticeably with deploying lots of VMs in parallel.
So either buy one of these new very fancy minipc (ms-01 etc) or DIY. End up landing on 2nd hand AM4 hardware but with 2nd hand enterprise SSDs and optanes. And that's been perfect. Competent at virtualization (5700X) and the hybrid enterprise ssd/optane array will take endless punishment.
That said not abandoning the minipcs & SBCs. 3 raspberries for HA k8s controlplane, low power minipc to keep home assistant and adguard live 24/7 etc.
Cheap and replacable. I found this wasteful. You said "I don’t worry about this too much: they are fully solid state machines, running on low power and low-ish temperatures, thus making their rate of degradation much slower than some beefy machine churning 24/7". How coyld this be measured vs just wishful thinking?
You can get MFF Dell/HP/Lenovo refurbs from Microcenter (and elsewhere) for 200-300 USD. Typically 9th or 10th gen i5 processors and 16 or 32 GB of RAM. You can fit them into 10 inch racks you can 3d-print (often with matching 3d printed brackets for a proper fit). We've been using them to replace some of our utility servers that we pay way too much for in the cloud (obviously that's a trade off of dollars for being concerned with security/management). We're treating them like cattle, deploying via K3S.
Intel chips dominate this space (with a far better price per GHz ratio than ARM or RISC-V); sad to see their slow downfall. Agree with others that you need active cooling to avoid premature burnout.
Back in 2022 I bought a 'case' of discarded NUC machines that some business had scrapped for $100 (it was like 35 computers in there) Roughly 1/3 had WiFi, none had storage (it had been removed before scrapping). Mix of CPU ranges but I keep finding uses for them. Hard to keep the ones powered up, up to date.
If anyone has a good orchestration system for minipcs sitting on a network in terms of patching etc would love a pointer.
Yes indeed, I'm running Proxmox on an Asus NUC Pro... thing. Can't remember the exact name.
I initially was recommended a "Minisforum" thing, which I did buy, but it absolutely hated Debian for reasons I don't understand. It would boot, but not reboot, so you'd have to power cycle it every time. Not practical.
The Asus also came with its own issues - it only supports one stick of RAM unless you do a BIOS update, so you have to be careful not to put both sticks in until after the update. Slightly crazy.
Unfortunately the article doesn’t really explain what is a MiniPC. Is it any small SoC system? Is there a specific size or price point? Is it these Ali express things?
Price can vary significantly from under $200 for an Intel N150-based system all the way up to Ryzen AI Max+ 395 systems costing $2000.
A lot of the mini PC makers have gotten pretty legitimate recent years, and some makers like Minisform can even charge a bit of a premium based on their brand name. More "traditional" hardware makers like Asus and ASRock also sell Mini PCs. And of course Apple is also a significant player in the Mini PC world with the Mac Mini. So definitely not just an Ali express thing - although Mini PCs can certainly be purchased there as well.
These refurbished 1L "tiny" desktops from big vendors like Lenovo, HP, and Dell are also popular with the Mini PC server crowd. https://a.co/d/g1mgUnl
IMO the Framework Desktop is too large to be considered a Mini PC due to its 4.5L case size. I'd call it a Mini-ITX tower.
It looks nice, though. I'm impressed they were able to get 11W idle power consumption with a 400W power supply (most mini pcs have much smaller power supplies, which are supposed to be more efficient with smaller loads). [1]
Used ThinkPads from eBay, especially the smaller models from the X-Series, can make surprisingly cost effective "MiniPCs".
If you need multiple devices, as mentioned in the article, you can even stack the laptops and build a small tower of "MiniPCs" all with different purposes.
Another advantage is that they already come with a built-in screen and keyboard allowing for quick debugging, without needing to connect external peripherals.
> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W.
I've been trying to optimize my desktop's power consumption. At the beginning of the year I put the kill-a-watt on it and was shocked to see it was using 115W idle! I got it to 90W pretty quickly with some minor Linux tuning but was still pretty unhappy to see so much idle load. Recently though, I've got it idling at 57W, which makes me feel much better about it (although more than I'd want for a 24/7 load). 5700X cpu and RDNA4 9070XT video card.
Dialing down unnecessary cooling helped more than I would have guessed. Under-volting the GPU -30mV may have helped but I'm not sure. Adjusting every governor I could find to powersave helps of course, and doesn't feel noticeably different. A lot I think is just that the new tuned daemon is way way way better at it's job than previous solutions like tlp was. I did have some problems with my Crucial P3+ NVMe drive not liking "powersupersave" PCIe Active State Power Management (aspm), but most improvements were a kernel setting away, and tuned really seemed to do .
One of the thing I really love about modern computing is that I can just dial in power consumption under load. With the new RDNA4 video card, I was seeing 450W power consumption when gaming. But I can open CoreCtrl and tell it, no, use 70W, and for surprisingly little FPS hit my system is now down to ~155W. (Still looking for more control in Linux for the CPU!)
It is lovely that there are all these mini-PC's, many of which will idle at ~10W! But definitely worth noting that power consumption on desktop is much more configurable than it used to be.
I basically did the same thing for my recent SFF PC build. I underclocked the max clock speed of the CPU in the BIOS and set the max wattage to 65. I then set the power limit of the GPU to 70. The fans barely run even when gaming and it stays nice and cool, not affecting the room temperature during the summor.
Is it the GPUs that are causing this? Even a very powerful PC need not draw much at true idle. The trick is getting to to a "true idle" which can be inhibited by lots of unexpected situations and broken hardware. One very common issue is that Realtek NICs prevent deep sleep states because either they are broken or their Linux driver is broken. Any kind of ethernet is worse than wifi in terms of energy consumption. Keeping a display attached to the box can greatly increase power consumption and might not be needed on a server. I have a fairly power Alder Lake-based server with 3 NVMe SSDs and 12 SATA devices, that draws < 15W from the wall when it's on but inactive.
These look like fun technology, but I don’t even know what the use cases would be anymore. I don’t need something to control my lights: I have an actual light switch for that. I don’t have endless terabytes of media that I need to serve within my household, so I just don’t know anymore what I would use this stuff for. Twenty or thirty years ago, I loved having a home lab, but these days I’m just not sure what I would do with it.
It's definitely not something for everybody, and I suspect not really a "revolution" outwith the dedicated enthusiasts segment of the population. (-:
If one wasn't likely to have a rack of desktop PCs at home, one probably will be hard pressed to have a reason for a collection of mini PCs.
On the other hand, there are a few more use cases than just over-egging a light switch or being a big file server. One can replaced dedicated hardware such as network gateways/routers, and do self-hosting, for examples.
There are RaspberryPi systems that one can get with extra Ethernet ports that can be set up to do application gatewaying and routing with general-purpose operating systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, and such. And obviously filtering HTTP/other proxies incorporating spam/advertising/malware blockers are a well-known use case.
There are oddball mini PCs in some parts of the world with loads of serial ports, useful as terminal hosts if one has a lot of systems with no disploy/HIDs. (I saw one mentioned on the FediVerse the other day. It turned out that it was an old Russian point-of-sale system, with 6 serial ports.) More of a use case for someone who already has lots of PCs (with serial ports), of course.
But yes, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone is Kitboga with a server farm in xyr garage running speech synthesis engines and language models to call scammers. (-:
On the gripping hand, I swapped out someone's under-the-desk tower for a mini PC years ago simply for space reasons.
I set up one to run Frigate [1] to detect motion over my several security cameras and send me notification emails with still images and video clips attached. It works well, and I hate the idea of sending my private videos to the cloud for processing with usual security camera setups.
The thing is that once lights are computer programmed, you can program them. For example I had made a program to stop playing music after I leave home because I hated to put the music off and then walk out, but I also didn't want the music to play all day while I was out.
As much as I like the idea of miniPCs my biggest issue is that almost everything in miniPCs are soldered down, if you could replace the RAM/CPU/Storage I'd have zero with them. But for now, I'm skeptical in that the current push for miniPCs are a clandestine way to get more technical people onboard with unrepairable devices.
Worth noting the AMD APUs dont have ram soldered on a board cannot be replaced even with soldering. The ram is inside the chip and is shared between the cpu/gpu.
Huh, I paid $270 for a Minisforum UM350 w/ 16GB, 500GB. The RAM was replaceable and last year I upgraded it to 32GB. I swapped out the included M.2 for a 1TB, and then added a second 1TB M.2. All fully supported as-is.
MiniPC's are absolutely fantastic and better yet you can often find ex-government machines for cheap, they use hardly any power, take up minimal space and the majority of people are more than enough for your standard server with Proxmox, Unifi, PiHole, Plex etc
I'm not sure how much I agree with "just buy another host", definitely use cases for that but having one machine running everything works very well
I've been thinking about going this route for my work PC at the office.
Currently I drag my laptop with me back and forth from the office. It's small and light, so not a huge issue. I also use Resilio Sync to sync my data between a few different laptops I use, plus github, and the amount of work which is just in the browser now, I have almost nothing that isn't accessible from anywhere.
The only reason I'd need a laptop at the office is for when I go into a zoom meeting and need a device in one of our breakout rooms.
Sure, I could just use my phone for that, but not quite the right experience.
I never got the point of these, since they’ve always got huge power bricks. I definitely love Mac Minis/Studios and have also built a bunch of custom SFF PCs around cases like the Ghost S1/NCase/Dan Case, etc. I don’t think they’re better than consoles, not even close since Windows is clunky and the Xbox has quick resume and plays 4K Blu-ray’s, but they’re great for keeping your desk organized.
Does anyone have recommendation for a mini PC with min 2 sata ports for two 3.5” HDDs, min 2 NVMe for ssd storage, one ssd or eMMC for OS, and 64GB of RAM, with the ability to power up the HDDs from the miniPC (not requiring external power source)?
The HDDs are installed in a case externally. An external PCIe slot to support those 4 mixed drives via an adapter would work too. I tend to avoid usb HDDs enclosures, since usb connection doesn’t work well with ZFS.
But a two bay NAS is typically maxed out at 16 GB of RAM, see UGREEN or QNAP. The CPUs are also dog slow for non-NAS tasks, like running VMs and containers.
Zimaboards come close. Two sata ports and 1-2 NVMe via PCIe. I heard the board may not be able to power all these drives. RAM is limited to 8-16 GB.
I guess I should separate HDD storage in a proper NAS and use a miniPC for VMs and containers only.
AOOSTAR 2-bay AMD R7 5825U mini PC seems to check the boxes, for an entry-level storage + virtualization miniPC host. The CPU is similar to AMD R7 5800H in a Beelink SER5 Pro miniPC which runs proxmox very well.
It has a cpu with 8C/16T, up to 4.5GHz, and supports max 2x32gb DDR4 3200Mhz RAM, 2x4T PCIe 3.0 M.2 NVMes and 2x2.5G NICs.
Yeah I know, like Beelink 6 NVMe. But NVMe storage is not affordable at high capacities. So, I want two +14 TB HDDs for cold slow storage, and two 4 TB for fast warm storage for VMs, containers, databases, and applications.
I also need a lot of RAM for proxmox VMs and containers. The CPU in my experience need not have many cores. I mean truenas itself virtualized demands 8GB of RAM.
If you want lots of nvme, lots of sata, lots of ram and lots of ability to power drives then you're not looking at a minipc anymore.
Would suggest you do the same I did - climb onto ebay and look at the AM4 systems that gamers are dumping. AM4 is aging out of gaming space but for NAS/proxmox duty they're aging like fine wine. Look for one that has is X570 and has bifuraction support on the X16
That link has pretty much all the info I was after. Pity it doesn't reach anywhere close to the theoretical speeds though, but hey at least it's better than 10GbE. :)
MiniPC must either charge from USB-C or have an internal PSU. Those external power bricks are so annoying when you start adding more PCs to the cluster.
That's one of the things the Mac mini has going for it: the built-in PSU. I'm surprised the Chinese manufacturers haven't just ripped off the design of those yet.
I definitely think USB-C would be a pretty good option!
Another option is getting a dedicated power supply. Mean Well makes a HEP-600-20, with 560W of 20V power. You can power quite a cluster off that! It sucks that they don't take 24v: there's so many 24v power supplies, but 19/20V is quite rare!
I have quite handful of hard drives in toaster-style carriers: having a single high efficiency rugged 12V power supply felt better than dealing with a sea of questionable-efficiecy power bricks.
> You can get MiniPCs with 4-6 internal M.2 slots that are great for building a NAS with.
Where can I find that? My current Intel NUC has two M.2 slots and a SATA connection. If I were to relax the definition of a MiniPC to include mini ITX then yes I can find these, but given how the author talks about being all-in-one, I doubt the author is talking about mini ITX builds.
There's been a lot of recent offerings like this. Beelink is a pretty great company so this one is particularly tempting, and the form factor is cute as hell.
One thing to note in this recent trend is that these designs mostly use the Alder Lake-N / "Twin Lake" cores, which are quad low-power E-cores (still adequate). But more critically, there's only 9 lanes PCIe 3.0! And some of those lanes need to go to networking, be it ethernet and/or wifi! Often there'll be 1x PCIe lane per SSD. Given that it's a NAS running maybe dual 2.5Gbit, this isn't catastrophically bad (1x can do 8Gb/s), but conceptually I find it a bit dismaying anyhow.
https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/processor-n150.c4109
If you keep an eye out you can sometimes find 4tb nvme drives for ~$200, so you could build an eye watering 24tb raid0 array in one of those that would saturate a 25gb nic for less than $1,500.
Or make it a 5x1 parity for a smidge of redundancy.
Anyone have recommendations for a particular mini that'll run Fusion 360 acceptably? I know that's generally an app for "main machine" use but I'm curious if any of these have started straying into the performance zone that might make it doable.
Funny enough over the weekend Fusion kept crashing on me, and I have an M3 Max with 36GB of RAM. I've run it on a slightly less machine (but not by much - an Elite Book with a Ryzen processor and 32GB of RAM). Honestly I'm kind of afraid to put it on much less.
Ha, thanks for the data point. I figured it might still be out of reach. I was running it at what could best be described as "sort-of acceptably" (random crashes for seemingly low-lift functions) on a Ryzen 5 desktop with a GeForce 1060 and 32GB RAM.
100% agree. Mini PCs in my opinion are the only modern PCs designed to stay on for decades. Sort of like those old server towers with SCSI drives that still run many legacy online things to this day.
I bought my forever box on impulse, it was only $130 for a whole mini PC! (with my own ram+storage) I thought surely it'll join the group of devices collecting dust... I was very wrong.
Turns out this PC is meant to be the most utilized of all my computers. It basically has been up 24/7 for 7 years and I really have no excuse to upgrade it yet.
While its processor is nothing to look at (even an N100 is a meaningful step up), on paper it roughly matches a Phenom II X4 955 BE CPU, which was my Windows 7 gaming CPU for many years! so it holds a special place in my heart. It was also my entry to the world of self-hosting docker containers which empowered me to replace the paid/enshitified services I depended on before.
Just to adjust the numbers a little, the Pi idles at 2-4W (for similar RAM spec), and the N100/150 are only about 2-4x more performant (with a slight bit less efficiency), for most tasks, in real-world benchmarks.
(Not saying they're not a good value, but you'd have to cherry pick a few benchmarks to say there's 4-10x performance.)
I've had luck replacing Raspberry Pi's with Dell Wyse 5070's. They're not screamers, but they are relatively recent fanless hardware with low idle power draw and plenty of oomph to push every service I self host.
The ewaste problem is not a problem, actually: Consider what you replace in a full tower: The SSD, RAM, Wi-Fi card, power supply. All of these are replaceable in a mini-PC (the power supply is an incredibly standard laptop charger brick usually).
Yeah you can't change the processor or motherboard out, but generally those sit in "new computer" territory anyways.
I've been buying miniPCs since the days of Intel and Microsoft subsidizing shitty Bay Trail compute sticks. Even those were plenty powerful running a bunch of terminals connected to other machines doing hard work. I used to have one stuffed behind my monitor. They're also were laughably bad under Windows but pretty amazing under Linux.
Modern ones with Intel N95 CPUs are actually fairly impressive for the price. The N95 is roughly the equivalent of a Sandy Bridge era i5 which is plenty of power for what I'm using them for. They've also were under $150 IIRC.
My N95 systems have SODIMM slots for RAM and m.2 slots for storage. They're also got two Ethernet ports I set as a bonded interface so they get ~2Gbps to each other (and my NAS) on the same switch.
My unofficial tips:
- Get miniPCs with barrel adapters for power rather than USB. A lot of cheap ones like the old Bay Trail sort used microUSB for power and that's just terrible (sorry Raspberry Pis)
- You'd be surprised at how powerful an N95 or AMD equivalent APU actually is these days. Outside of compiling, 3D rendering, or AI inference such machines are rarely CPU-bound.
- Get black tape to put over stupid lights and front LCD screens that can't be controlled in Linux.
- Avoid Windows on such machines and just go with Linux. Ubuntu and Mint fly on them out of the box, lighter DEs fly even faster. As servers they can host an impressive number of services that aren't compute-bound. Hardware video encoding means even stuff like Jellyfin is really light.
I'm a big fan of mini PCs starting with the (now abandoned) Intel NUCs.
Yes, some have soldered down parts but a lot don't. For ~$500 you can get a decent CPU, 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD and something like a Radeon 780M, which is no desktop GPU but it's surprisingly useful. Some even have Oculink connectors for external GPUs although I'm not sure how many people end up using this.
You will find wildly varying networking connectivity like Wifi 6 vs 7, 1 or 2 Ethernet connectors that can be anything from 1GbE to 10GbE and a wide variety of different USB connectors and speeds.
At $500 I really just don't care if it lasts forever.
You can go more expensive and get a beefier CPU and/or GPU or go cheaper by going cheaper on both.
I'm personally so over assembling PCs. I just want something that works.
Would benefit from one or two small pictures. I guess MiniPC means like a Mac Mini or an Intel NUC?
> You can expect average power draws of 20-50W in usage and 6-12W in idle.
> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W.
Have you measured that? I think my full ATX desktop only idles around 30 watts. (With a bunch of apps running ofc) I took out the GPU to reach that, something was wrong with the power saving, feels like bad drivers.
That said... I'm not totally disagreeing. I have a mini PC running a couple web and P2P services. I'm trying to unburden my ATX so it can shut down at night to save power and do maintenance. And having more computers would shift me away from my "kitten" habits, so I'd abstract over hardware better.
A beelink mini pc will draw about 5w when idle (measured with a watt meter the pc was plugged into). It’s smaller than a NUC (I think!) - it’s slightly bigger than a raspberry pi with a case. Not exactly this model but it cost about us $150.
Intel no longer makes NUCs. Asus bought the rights. But there are lots of other form factors. Search for n100 or n150 minipc and brands like topton and cwwk. More router like than the classic nuc.
This sounds good in principle, but I think it would be helpful to have some real numbers to look at in terms of lifecycle management before deciding.
Are mini-PCs actually more likely to have a shorter lifespan? Does the smaller physical footprint contribute to a smaller ecological footprint than a full-sized machine? Does the smaller energy consumption offset the manufacture footprint in a meaningful way?
Personally, I found that I've been more likely to donate older mini-PCs to local nonprofits who repurpose them than I am full-sized machines, which I tend to keep around for "just in case" parts scavenging that in practice I rarely actually do. Meanwhile, having a lower cost mini-PC available has made me more likely to start out with a low power machine for a dedicated task with them promise I can always replace it with a "real" machine if the need ends up requiring it. To date, though, the mini-PC has always ended up proving to be "enough" and I've never actually needed to replace one for performance reasons.
But this is just anecdotal. Like I said, I'm curious if there's any real data pointing one way or another.
You're right. My response also overlooks PC recycling. I don't know if anyone is making good use of that other than to occasionally repurpose old tech or to cannibalize it for parts, but there may be some reclaimable value there that I'm not accounting for as well.
I've got one of those Minisforum UM790 Pro Ryzen mini PCs and I loved it for the first 8 months -- very fast, worked well -- and then the fan started making noises. Took it apart, tightened things up and cleaned it, and the fix lasted a few days before it started being noisy again.
But the problem is.. custom non-replaceable parts. I realistically don't see a way I'm going to be able to fix the problem so I have to live with the noise. So basically another disposable consumer appliance. But it wasn't cheap.
This is frankly the problem I see with these little things. They're just too custom and the brands not mainstream, with no retail supply chain into Europe or North America to support the product.
I agree and already got two minipcs I selfhost a lot of stuff now. I just now realized it is basically the future Gabe Newell predicted and wanted to make with Steam Machines [1], but he was wrong by targeting gamers and a little too early (perhaps?). Maybe they will succeed precisely because of this revolution.
I got soooo tired setting up a gaming system for parties on my projector. There are so many various problems and tweaks, gamepads disconnecting if you put a hand between the gamepad and the pc/playstation etc. BSODs on windows, driver problems and stupid obscure things varying from pc to pc. I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations. I am too old to debug this stuff to play a game for so little time, I would rather not. I didn't really believe in steam machines at the time, but now I sort of do, especially with game streaming and local LLMs that might be hosted there now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)
Valves big misstep with the Steam Machines was that they expected developers to port their games over to Linux natively, on their own dime. Needless to say that didn't end up happening at any significant scale, so when they resurrected SteamOS they refocused on Windows binary compatibility through Proton instead.
It’s an iterative process.
Valve launched Steam Machines with their own OS and started shipping a version of Steam on Linux with predictable library versions. At the same time, they started working with the Wine project and shipping things which is now called Proton but is actually the cumulative results of their own patches.
This paved the way for the success of the Steam Deck when adequate material became available.
I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.
>I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.
I’ve written before about how I think the Steam Deck is one of the best v1 products in recent memory, in large part because Valve learned so much (and so well) from the failures of the Steam Machines.
I don’t know if I would call it a misstep, but it was absolutely a failure. And a brutal one. Valve should be lauded for taking the right lessons from that failure and investing in Proton and doing the compatibility work themselves rather than expecting devs to do it (Apple is the only company that consistently gets developers to rebuild for their platform, and even game developers won’t do that), but we shouldn’t let the fact that it wound up on the right path years later diminish the fact that the original strategy —- if not the devices or idea itself —- was hugely flawed.
I have a Steam Machine, one of the Alienware ones. You're completely correct. SteamOS as shipped on those machines sucked. The controllers sucked. The PC hardware wasn't bad and could play games alright but the experience sucked. I made it into a Linux desktop I used for years and it worked much better for that than as a dedicated games console. But the SteamDeck very plainly incorporated lessons learned from Steam Machines.
But all the update you like in your SteamDeck also came to the Steam Machines plus nice remote play on your local network. You couldn’t see because you stopped using it as an actual Steam Machine. I personally deeply disagree about the controller too.
Personally, for such an early and unlikely product, I don’t view it as a failure at all. They ironed everything they had to using the platform as a stepping stone.
And this will hit them very hard, the day Microsoft decides they had enough of Proton, they are already slowly waking up for it.
What do you think Microsoft will/can do to sabotage Proton?
First of all they can make it easier option for OEMs go for Windows/XBox handhelds and thus push SteamDeck out of market, by making it a niche device only a minority cares about, netbooks attack plan style, which they are starting now.
They can also introduce Windows/DirectX APIs that Proton will have a hard time copying, by requiring additional hardware or subsystem features not easily copyable.
They can let their legal team have some fun.
Finally, companies don't last forever, and I am betting as the 2nd most valuable company in the planet, Microsoft will outlive Steam's current management and eventually deal with the problem in another way.
> First of all they can make it easier option for OEMs go for Windows/XBox handhelds and thus push SteamDeck out of market, by making it a niche device only a minority cares about, netbooks attack plan style, which they are starting now.
Steamdeck is already a niche device, and they have direct competition since years now. Optimizing the software and interface won't probably make it much worse for Valve.
> They can also introduce Windows/DirectX APIs that Proton will have a hard time copying, by requiring additional hardware or subsystem features not easily copyable.
Seems unrealistic that games will adapt a new restricted API, which at the same will be a longterm hazzle for Wine/Proton, and will survive that court-battles. At best, it's just some annoying money-sink, with Microsoft playing on time to make it worse for everyone without gaining any real advantage.
> Finally, companies don't last forever, and I am betting as the 2nd most valuable company in the planet, Microsoft will outlive Steam's current management and eventually deal with the problem in another way.
That's actually realistic, but there is also the chance that valve will be outliving Windows and has to battle with whatever will follow.
I don't think reducing the price of Windows for OEMs will do much as the SteamDeck uses Arch Linux specifically for better control of the software/updates than relying on Microsoft.
They can try making Proton's job more difficult, but I'd expect that major changes to the APIs would prevent a lot of existing games from working on Windows.
Legally, I don't think they've got a leg to stand on.
I am not speaking about reducing the price of Windows.
Basically Valve are doing with Steam OS and Proton against Windows, the same thing that Google did with Chrome against Internet Explorer. Microsoft's usual tactic with Embrace Extend Extinguish isn't working with Edge, as Chrome just has great development velocity and market entrenchment and distribution. Crossing my fingers that Valve will pull off the same thing. In the gaming market Valve have great distribution and they are strong developers, so maybe.
Looks like they'll be trying out the console / small box form factor again.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Valve-Fremont-Upcoming-console...
I'm glad they are. There's probably a sizeable market for a console that runs PC games smoothly at 1080. And could double as a PC. If they get it to the size of an XBox Series S or smaller, I would probably get one.
That's a dream come true... provided they fix multi-accounts and game visibility/accessibility in the Steam UI.
I already have a Steam Deck that I can't let my kids touch, which is stupid. I can't hook something like this up in a shared space of any kind without improved parental controls, including ability to toggle visibility of game library entries, and (ideally, but not strictly necessary) the ability to say "do not show this user's entire library to anyone else on this machine, or on the network, nobody with a different login"
I had never thought of multiuser (or the lack of) with SteamOS and the Deck. That would be quite the problem with kids.
I wonder if a stopgap solution would be something like Bazzite on the Deck. Then you could have true multiuser while retaining the Deck's ease of use. But I could see other problems.
I'm sure you've probably already tried this or something similar. I just couldn't resist thinking out loud. It's an interesting problem.
Wow that's cool, Gabe is an underrated CEO. Thanks for posting this since I do not follow anything gaming anymore.
I hope they'll fix their rumored team wars inside the company.
I’m honestly skeptical of the utility of the Fremont as the specs currently appear. Seems like not enough horsepower compared to the competitor consoles - the Steam Deck was so good because price to performance to battery life is still hard to beat and only now encroached by the Switch 2, it simply didn’t have a console like competitor.
Video drivers & hardware are a plague on both Windows and Linux. Hell, adding a discrete video card to the config was even a way to increase your odds of serious problems with a Mac by a large multiple, back in the Intel Mac days. Any complaint-session online by Mac owners tended to be dominated by folks rocking non-Intel video chips in their MacBook.
The biggest problem with making a "gaming" miniPC is new games being very unotpomized, but other than that the hardware is already there, I'd wager that we'll probably see a new Steam Machine within the next 3-5 years.
Self-hosting has become orders of magnitude easier and simpler over the past 5-10 years.
I just set up mine in one day, setting *arrs and Jellyfin and voila i got streaming service better than all payed streaming services combined and no ads.
I would honestly love a steam machine like thing that I could just plug into my laptop. I'm carrying my laptop around anyway, if I could plug in a small gaming system and have the laptop act as the input/output that would be ideal.
I liked the idea of type-c GPUs but there are so many problems again that it's just useless. It also should be something better than just a GPU tho, have HDMI eARC etc.
OCuLink is superior for external GPUs and is basically the standard with PCIe 4.0 bandwidth. It works well given a good enough eGPU and power supply.
yeah I don't want an egpu, I want a complete gaming device that I can use my laptop as a peripheral for
> I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations.
How so? A console is literally a gaming PC.
I can see the point of “need multiple consoles because game X isn’t on console Y” or “I’d like to play an RTS/MMO that isn’t on a console” but since you mentioned gamepads that point mostly dies.
I also haven’t ever had a PS5 or Switch controller lose link from a console because someone walks or stands between myself and the console.
> How so? A console is literally a gaming PC.
Consoles are walled gardens, while PC is an open park. On a proper PC, you can choose anything from everything, while consoles are very restricted in terms of software and ability. I mean, think about modding, running other software besides the game (browser, (voice-)chat, etc.), having special hardware like a mouse, keyboard, capture-card, a second screen... Consoles are again slowly those things, but it's still not the same as a proper Gaming-PC.
PCs are different for a few reasons, for me.
One big part's the library. I can still play Steam games I bought when the Gamecube was current. My Gamecube games do not work on the Switch. My Dreamcast games certainly don't! The library for the PC is enormous and generally you don't have to re-buy old games to keep playing them, even after major hardware upgrades. Hell I got like a few hundred games on Itch.io years ago for so little money they may as well have been free, and sure they're mostly short "jank" games and art games and stuff, but that's still games and I like them! You can't get that kind of thing (with that kind of "OMG I may never even get through all these..." magnitude, I don't mean jank or art games, both exist on consoles, even if they're not well represented) on a console.
To do anything similar with consoles, you need, like... a dozen consoles, or more, with keeping that number down requiring putting a lot of money and time into careful curation and selection. A single PC does the trick, though.
Another's longevity & archiving (not unrelated to the library thing, but not exactly the same thing). The PC is my platform of last resort for console game archiving. Consoles don't really fill this role at all. Even a "hacked" console (if it's hackable) is on borrowed time. The hardware dies, and eventually the only ones left are in museums or crazy-expensive private collections. Meanwhile I play freeware PC games I downloaded in the 1990s, sometimes, like the exact same binary (to the degree it's "the same", which it isn't, but I just mean I didn't have to go download it again) that's been shuffled from one disk to another ever since. They're not gone. And thanks to PCs, neither are old console games (this is a state of affairs that's on life support, for newer consoles, but not quite dead yet)
Another's the controls. I don't really want a console at my desk (and there's gonna be a PC regardless, so that's nothing extra) because I definitely want one on my TV, and I don't want two of the same console. I don't really want to use a mouse & keyboard on my couch, I've done it, the best solutions I've found take up a bunch of space, look bad, and are still a worse experience than a desk. Some games that I love, I have no interest in playing them if it's not with a mouse and keyboard (and for plenty of others, a controller is better! I like tons of games that are best played with a controller, but for some, it's mouse & keyboard or I'll simply not play them).
Another factor's modding. I've gotten hundreds of extra hours out of games I've bought, thanks to mods. 50+% of my time in the Half Life and Source engines has been in total conversion mods. I'd probably only have put about a quarter as many hours into Morrowind or Skyrim as I have, without mods. I never touched the base game of Rome: Total War again after I discovered the Europa Barbarorum mod, which I sunk probably a hundred or more hours into. All for free, and you don't get that on consoles, the closest you get are things like level designers, sometimes, in LittleBigPlanet or what have you... and those all die when the game servers die.
FWIW I have... a lot of consoles, I don't hate them or anything, and these days most (90%?) of my gaming is on consoles. But they're not a gaming PC.
(Really, if gaming PCs were more-stable, less-janky, and didn't have such a hard time consistently pairing with and juggling multiple BlueTooth controllers [even the SteamDeck fails to live up to "real" consoles, on any of those fronts] I'd probably not bother with consoles at all, but that's such a crippling issue for PC hardware that instead I have a bunch of consoles, and have even re-bought games 3 or 4 times just for the convenience of being able to play them on one of the small set of real consoles currently connected to my TV)
I have a homelab which is a zimaboard, a dumb netgear switch, and six mini-pc's (5560U/16GB/500GB).
The zimaboard runs pfsense & an nginx reverse proxy, then all six of the mini-pcs run proxmox. 4 mini-pcs run k8s clusters (talos) and the other two run home services and selected one-offs (home-assistant, plex, bookstack, build-tools, gitea, origin servers for a subset of projects).
It was a lot easier to set up than I had expected. Its was still a massive PITA though. I got what I wanted out of it work-wise, and its a nice little novelty.
I've been thinking about ditching most of it for a while; I like the idea in the article about breaking it up - move one under the TV, one into the office, one under the stairs, and the remaining 3 + zimaboard I'm tempted to sell. I'd keep running proxmox on them, but I wouldn't link them up. The key thing that needs to happen for this to make sense is using something like cloudflare to route domains.
The part I never sorted properly was storage. It has 3TB of storage, but getting that storage into k8s for proper dynamic allocation without giving random nodes CPU perf issues was a too-long-for-one-session task which meant it never got finished. I was tempted to add a NAS, but most NAS's are horrid.
I've never heard of Talos until now, but it looks interesting. How was it to work with?
Pretty awesome tbh. The talosctl CLI is amazing and the exposed health utilities are great. If you need anything special its pretty easy to add a patch file for the underlying system (e.g. networking).
This does sound like a massive PITA. what is the point of it? What are you using it for?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/s92fk7/my_wife_is_...
A man can turn the means into the purpose.
yeah that is exactly what came after the work use case
Initially I needed a lab to practice deploying & upgrading & disrupting on-prem talos linux for k8s, and design benchmarks around it. So 4 machines does that. The zimaboard in front with pfsense (which is a PITA by itself) and nginx is a good way to make it pick-up-and move (ie. internal networking config). For <£2k the set up is very cheap for what is being tested. It meant I didn't have to go and sit on the other side of a security checkpoint for most of the work. It was cool to keep around as its trivial to make the lab guests unable to see my home network and vice-versa.
Now I often have the 4 k8s hosts off. But use them maybe once a month.
It's not a PITA at all. I followed a few youtube videos and had Proxmox up and running and was a little shocked that the inter node/server settings were largely point and click.
What were the underlying storage needs?
Ceph ebds are pretty easy and can offer good resilience but definitely have some performance issues in a standard homelab.
Something dumb like smb/nfs actually can work quite well if your workload doesn't mind it.
Rclone volumes work quite well for some cases not served by obvious other solutions but you have general FUSE limitations.
> So you mean to tell me you’ve been using your torch to take a shit this last week because your light bulbs don’t work without the PC you watch Netflix on?
This made me laugh. I’ve currently got a home assistant controlled floor standing light in my bathroom because all the old school switch ones in ceiling are dead and landlord is being well a classic landlord
What does a "dead light" mean in this context? Your landlord isn't changing your bulbs?
I've mostly lived in 100+ year old homes with old janky wiring and have never had a light fixture die, just bulbs.
In fairness, note that in some countries (like mine) there are tighter regulations for electrical circuitry in rooms with baths and showers, which require work in that sort of area (problems with the pull switch, a joint box, or the ceiling rose, for example) to be done or at least overseen by a qualified electrician. They're known as "Part P" in the United Kingdom.
* https://gov.uk/government/publications/electrical-safety-app...
That said, bringing in a mains-powered non-IP-rated portable floor standing lamp because the ceiling mounted one is broken is definitely not the intended outcome of such safety standards.
> in the United Kingdom
Don't forget to earth all your water pipes to ground, and only use sockets that are water-rated to resist biblical floods.
I remember being intrigued by a big 40 x 40 cm plastic box on the outside wall of the cabin we were staying at in the UK. Opening the movable front-flap revealed 1 (one) 220V power socket, protected on all sides with enough rubber and plastic to seal a submarine hatch. I had absolutely no doubt it fully complied with all the norms of health and safety..
You are thinking of section 250.104 of NFPA 70, the National Electrical Code published by the U.S.A. National Fire Protection Association. (-:
BS 7671 (IEE Wiring Regs) does not require bonding of the pipework if the mains (service) pipes and the internal (installation) piping are both plastic.
Not OP, but I'm in a similar situation: I have a two-way switched pair of lights on my stairwell, one light at the base, one at the top. The one at the top does not work. We've tried replacing the bulb, we've tried fiddling with the cable for it (it's a suspended lamp). It hasn't worked since we moved in. We've told the landlord twice, he said he'd call his guy, his guy hasn't shown up.
I would like to have a light in my stairs. It's hard to see at night in the winter. My solutions is going to be to spin up home assistant, a zigbee base, and some fairy lights on a 'smart' switch.
I could learn the skills to troubleshoot why the electrical connection is (apparently) bad to the lamp, but given that said connection is in the walls, my DIY skills are trash, and I'm scared of electricity, I'm gonna do the project that's more fun and lines up with some stuff I wanted to do anyway.
I have no idea why the lamp doesn't work, especially because the fixture at the base of the stairs does, but the landlord insists it worked before we moved in.
Been there, seen that. Some notes:
- the two-way switched lights may have never worked as intended. So no matter what you do with the endpoints it may never work.
- doing it yourself is a waste of time and money. You'll learn nothing of value and will toss it all in the end.
-Proper solution is to hire a certified electrician who is familiar with two-way lights to fix/replace the current wiring.
If you rent, pay the electrician and send the bill to the landlord. Keep a copy. If landlord hasn't paid by the time you move out, bill him for the price. If he stiffs you, sue him in small claims court - he'll pay or you'll win.
Cheapest fix: run an extension cord with a bulb to the upstairs light, turn it on and leave it on all the time. Electricity is cheap, bulbs efficient. Having a light on inside keeps burglars away, esp. bathroom lights (according to Malcolm X).
> turn it on and leave it on all the time
Or just get a motion activated one.
They have their own shenanigans, but...
If it wasn't suspended in the air I would say give it a go, household wiring isn't like some movie style electrocution hazard and is fairly easy to test for live. If you are dry and not grounded even if you get shocked it would hurt and singe some skin but would be freak accident to die from and you should have the breaker off anyways.
But with it up the top of a set of stairs and in the air requiring a ladder or something to stand on I wouldn't recommend it for a first time because if you did get shocked, not knowing what is coming (and possibly even if you did), you would jerk or jump away and possibly fall down the stairs which is way worse.
>What does a "dead light" mean in this context?
I'm in the UK that has more reliance on ring circuits i.e. electrically its a chain of devices. So depending on details one fault can take out all the lights in a room
>Your landlord isn't changing your bulbs?
They're just taking their time.
Normally I'd just replace bulbs myself but this is a bit more complicated cause its hooked into other devices as well and i can't even tell what is broken
Ring mains are parallel, not series. Which means that more than one thing going out is a clue to where the fault is, and an indicator that the job is definitely per the regs one for a qualified electrician. Conversely, only one device going out points the other way. Although IP-rated fittings inside one of the zones is still a qualified electrician job.
But bringing a mains powered non-IP-rated portable substitute into the room in the interim is a truly terrible idea. The regs also specify that there's a minimum distance that stuff should have from baths, sinks, showers, cisterns, and whatnot; and that they should not be reachable at all by a wet human being.
I'll wave this at you:
* https://electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/guidance/safety-around-...
And you in turn wave this at your landlord:
* https://electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/guidance/advice-for-you...
It likely means the OP has poor handyman skills and wisely has chosen not to learn by him/her self due to safety hazard. After all, these circuits are usually ~110 volts and there is almost always an unintended ground nearby (a water or gas pipe, a wet bathtub, etc.).
Learn how to change a lightbulb? Is that a handyman level skill?
I have no idea what the specific situation is, but in my old rental, the ceiling lights weren't traditional bulbs -- they were custom dome fixtures with non-replaceable lighting elements. When mine went out, I had to wait for my landlord to buy a replacement.
Sadly yes, b/c even the simplest things can go wrong quickly. E.g. people sometimes change light bulbs w/o turning off the power. Have you ever experienced a dead (or good, for that matter) bulb coming apart as you twist it out of the socket? Would you trust a naive person to properly handle that situation?
With power off(easy case)?
With power on(difficult)?
You are conflating naive and a barely functional human being.
If someone doesn't know what the electricity zaps and couldn't think two steps ahead then they definitely should be anywhere near a power circuits, operating a car or be allowed to vote.
EDIT: of course it should had been 'shouldn't be anywhere' but it's even better, so I leave it as is.
you've just excluded at least half of america from voting, however smart you think most people are... the reality is significantly worse
Can I now take it as confirmation from the two of you (justsomehnguy and micromacrofoot) that at least half of Americans who vote should not be allowed to vote?
If so, this may be the first time an important political question has been resolved without a light bulb turning on (figurative or otherwise).
Does the name R. Heinlein rings any bells?
Not what I would support it made that way...
If they can set up a light with home assistant they can screw in a lightbulb. Come on.
That may be so, but what you say doesn't answer my question: can they unscrew a lightbulb that is literally falling apart as they unscrew it?
ANSWER:
If the power is off, they likely will remove the glass bulb (one piece), examine the situation and then unscrew the metal bulb base (second piece) and finally, remove any stray material in the (unpowered) socket.
If the power is on, the correct answer is "No, they likely cannot unscrew the bulb. Instead they will likely short the circuit, blow a breaker/fuse and put themselves in a situation where they must call in someone more knowledgeable, (or worse)."
I’m sorry the light bulb presents difficulty for you
>It likely means the OP has poor handyman skills
OP here - no just dealing with UK ring circuits where the lights are wired inline with non-light devices. And since I'm renting I'm not here to do handyman work. Lightbulbs I do ofc replace myself.
For a small price (probably less than the cost of a "home assistant controlled floor standing lamp") you could buy parts to repair the bathroom lighting?
Better yet, pay someone to do it (and maybe show you the hows and the hazards). Then you could be living like a true American.
And without risking the "standing lamp" falling into your bathtub!
The bulb could have been $15 and the lamp $10 for a grand total of $25. Good luck having someone come out for that much. Good luck buying tools and parts to do the fix for that much.
it's the landlord's responsibility, you're a sucker if you pay a dime to fix what they own... especially considering the unfamiliarity with previous work and safety risks involved
yeah agreed that tenants should buy smart appliances to replace non-functioning fixtures instead!
no, the landlord should fix their property in a timely manner or they should sell it to someone that will
a $20 lamp you get to keep is smarter and safer than fixing someone else's property doing unlicensed electrical work at your own cost and without their permission... why does this even have to be explained?
>unlicensed electrical work
Are you from the US? The overwhelming likely fixes to "my bathroom light won't work" are not work that would require skilled electrical work or a permit. The cost is also not likely to be more than a floor lamp, and the tenant can also keep the fixture when they leave.
Also many jurisdictions (willing to bet covering a huge plurality of Americans) would let you subtract the cost of necessary repairs from your rent.
I'm glad you've only ever worked with pleasant landlords who don't have dangerous electrical work in their apartments, but this is not my experience
Plugging a floor lamp into a bathroom electrical socket is going to reduce your danger?
code requires a GFCI socket in a bathroom, which if functioning would be safer than mucking around in an unknown wall receptacle, but YMMV
You're trusting that someone will follow the law about one receptacle, but expecting them to not follow the law about another nearby receptacle?
gfci will do you the courtesy of flipping instead of killing you
I have repurposed retired laptops for my tech lab at home. They no longer keep up with the current software bloat for wife and kids usage, but make reasonable linux servers. Currently serving up 3 databases on one, kafka and networking on another and services/applications on a third. They take up very little space under my desk.
Just for curious, why would you need 3 databases ?
A good way to keep the laptops operating as well. It reminds me I have a few old macbooks with decent specs that should be at least running.
I want one for gaming , that is silent, provides high end graphics, and takes little space ( Mac mini or studio size ideally ). I’m essentially willing to pay extra for a specced up gaming console.
I still haven’t been able to find something that fits the bill - the hardest part to get information on is noise, since most people don’t seem to care about it or just play with headphones. I understand that such a product is hard to build, with a direct tension between power, space and noise.
What has never been clear to me is whether such a market even exists and I’d tend to say no, even if the market seems to be changing rapidly with amd apus ( we’re far from a 5080 , but it seems to be a step in the right direction ).
I've tried this.
My best solution by far turned out to be long cables going through the wall to a pc in the next room over.
When I was younger, I had a KVM in my bedroom going through the wall to two computers under the sink in my bathroom. lol. But it worked. silence.
Second best recently was a zotac magnus. More for compact though than noise. Bought a noctua replacement fan. works well with headphones.
I do have a silent/fanless zotac server. It works well, but it does fileserving, not cpu-intensive anything.
IMHO it's basically impossible to build such a PC. The small size plus high thermal load of a modern GPU means it cannot be cooled quietly. Intel's line of NUCs had some gaming models back in the day (e.g. Skull Canyon), but the graphics were the Intel midrange GPU and they had tiny noisy fans. Anything approaching Nvidia 4070 or 5070 series and you've got up to 300 more watts TBP heating up the system on top of the CPU etc.
My last small form factor gaming PC was an Origin Chronos. It was great but it was definitely not quiet. The larger Origins offer liquid cooling but I'm guessing it can't be done in that small form factor.
The new APU from AMD can makes it come true. Its iGPU is on par with rtx4060 laptop, which is far from 4070 desktop, but should be enough for 1080p gaming and light 2k gaming.
This is what I would expect from a steam machine – not a RX 7600S.
Depends on what you mean by "high end graphics"
The Ryzen Max+ 395 is in the ballpark of a RTX 4060 (but I believe it's starts to massively fall behind when ray tracing is enabled). It's an iGPU so I would imagine noise is greatly reduced (though probably not silent) compared to machines with dGPUs. However, that's going to cost roughly $2000 so it won't be cheap and will be vastly outperformed by a $2000 desktop pc.
While the 395 is very cool I do feel that the next generation will be an enormous step forward if AMD integrates FSR 4 in their APUs. Neutral network based upscaling makes a huge difference since you can get away with far lower (real) rendering resolutions and don't need any (expensive) anti-aliasing solutions anymore.
There's a bunch of demos on YouTube of people upscaling from as low as 360p and while not pretty, it's definitely serviceable. It might be worth the wait if you're budget constraint or patient!
That would be neat. But sadly thermodynamics gets in the way. I did see a minipc where the graphics card was being cooled by a liquid cooler that had the cooler unit under the desk but its not really a "mini" pc at that point, its a disaggregated pc with separate compute and cooling :-).
Yes, it exists. Ryzen mini-PCs with an M780 can run many 5-year old AAA titles (with caveats) and most indie games at 60fps. We use a 7840HS one as a Steam box, and stream the games to our iPads or the living room Apple TV (because, well, nothing you will find will ever be truly quiet when playing games).
But that was around $700 a couple of years back on sale, and these days you are looking at $1000+ (with 20-50% increments if you need a better GPU or multiple NVMe slots), plus the new Ryzen AI chipsets command an additional premium.
I’d give it 2-3 years for things to settle down and discrete GPUs to be come a thing of the past.
When I was thinking about this k came to the conclusion you need a high specced mini pc, route out oculink from it and run an external GPU. For daily you'll have a powerful CPU with a decent igpu, and gaming will go to the external dgpu.
Otherwise you're stuck with lower performing gpus, as normal ram at least in its current state won't be able to approach the bandwidth necessary to keep up with a full fat high end gpu. And nobody is making mini pcs that work like laptops with normal dgpus so you're stuck with igpus with the normal solutions
I can recommend ETAPRIME on YouTube. They go through various mini/budget builds, and test new hardware. I agree with the noise benchmark, however. I bought a budget AMD card last year and it was loud af. Promptly swapped it out for a 4060 and have been happy since.
http://move.rupy.se/file/radxa_works.mp4
Radxa CM5 + Waveshare CM4 Nano
Packs a punch at very low power...
You probably need a tiny Nuctua fan on it if you're going to play HL2 on it.
It's ARM so it will take a while for titles to be ported, but studios better realize this is the platform of the future.
Currently game engines are clueless.
I keep a Legion Go in my media center. There's a USB-C hub connected to power, HDMI, and peripherals when I want to play docked. Or I can unplug one cable and play handheld.
The kickstand means it takes up very little space in a cabinet. It does have a fan, but it's great for what it is.
I have a beelink gti14 with the ex pro docking station with a 4090 mounted on it. Basically a gaming PC on mini-itx-ish form factor. The loudest thing is of course the graphics card. It does the job as a gaming PC alright.
Linus the Tech Tip man has all his gaming PCs in a rack in his basement and runs a specific kind of KVM to the gaming room. I think it was a fiber connection?
If you don’t mind to DIY, consider assembling a mini-ITX PC.
You are going to be limited by your GPU, I think. The power and heat requirements for a high end GPU are going to be hard to fit into a small enough form factor.
Silent, high-end graphics and small form factor is not possible. You can pick at most two of the three. (Silent and high-end-graphics is still difficult.)
if you don't mind single cable out of your console then your wish can be implemented with a powerful as you need gaming machine in another room. Or in the same with some noise canceling cover and/or watercooling.
You want mini ITX. The T1 is a good starting point if you want to explore options: https://formdt1.com/
Something like this? https://rog.asus.com/us/desktops/mini-pc/rog-nuc-2025/ No idea about the noise though, and personally I despise the design.
Nintendo Switch
Counterpoints:
- Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc)
- can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstalling and reconfiguring OS's, services and software).
- less supported over time (I can still download driver upgrades in some cases, and find solutions if I run into something unexpected as the vendor is still in business and supporting the legacy model).
Full sized machines aren't difficult to build, and I've had great luck with second hand enterprise-targeted parts (eg. for a long time years back, used Mellanox Infiniband cards were dirt cheap on eBay because universities were upgrading to later generations, they were an order of magnitude faster than NIC's available at competing price points at the time, and as a bonus had lower latency). Older Areca RAID cards were great for SATA drives, easily upgradeable to new models, and I still have a few kicking around in production today.
Meanwhile neighbors have thrown out piles of ewaste and wasted time after their commodity junk failed unexpectedly.
Sometimes size matters, tho. I came into MiniPCs from a Raspberry Pi solution. Our Pi's had to display multiple videos onscreen and weren't fast enough (I think the standard at the time was RP4), so we switched the critical ones to MiniPCs but they had to be small & light enough to hang off the back of a VESA mount on a TV suspended above a gym floor.
I've found the Pi video decoder chips pretty weak, but still usable. I've got a Pi 2 displaying a 4x720p stream perfectly fine. Would struggle with anything more.
Yep, I can't knock the benefits of the small form factor.
Minisforum ms-a2 afaik can hit a lot of those requirements unless you need to fit a big GPU or a lot of spinning rust
Power consumption matters.
You can also run a single storage box and then just pop over network (10gbe, thunderbolt, etc). One big box of spinning rust and tons of cheap compute.
Most folks are running proxmox and your OS installs are automated. Use ansible. I like docker swarm on top of a fleet of cattle vms on proxmox.
I'm thinking of a beefy mini-PC + USB-C 8+ hard drive enclosure.
I feel like I rarely upgraded anything except GPU and storage. And GPU's are not needed for a server.
Enclosure means easy storage upgrade and I can always reattach the enclosure to another machine quickly. Might even install OS on the enclosure, then the whole setup will survive compute upgrades until the predominant architecture changes.
Exactly this. I don't even have a nice multi-drive enclosure, just a small swarm of toaster-style dual-drive holders. They're absurdly cheap. (Alas one of the recent purchases was maybe too cheap: wont let me adjust the various drive spin down/power savings settings. But this is a first for me, and they've all been very cheap).
Unfortunately a lot of the mini-PCs skimp on USB ports. AMD's FL1 form-factor mobile "socket" has 4x 10Gbps + 1x 40Gbps USB-C ports on the SoC, but many of the designs often only have ~2x usb3 class ports and rarely the USB4 port at all. I'd really appreciate these mini-PC's exposing more of the chip's usb! Definitely something to shop for.
With USB4, there's also the added benefit of having host-to-host interfaces: it's short range but 40Gbps host-to-host is real nice to have (in practice it's often half or less this speed alas).
Upgradability is over-rated, when costs are low. A Minisforum 795S7 can be had for $400, and has dual ("only" PCIe 4.0) SSD slots and a 16-core 7945HX Zen4. It's mobile-on-desktop (MoDT): I can't ever replace the CPU, but I suspect this crazy cheap system is going to have a long long life before I feel the need to upgrade it. Replacing it whole when the time comes seems not a concern. RAM and SSD are separate and can be moved out if desired.
There's some with both hard drive bays and fairly powerful CPUs. Aoostar and Ugreen make varying sizes.
The point here is exactly allowing to upgrade compute independently of storage.
There are a lot of NAS case you can find in China(Taobao), they are cheap(usually $40 for case with 4 hotswappable 3.4 drive. They use mini ITX motherboard and flex 1U PSU
I considered that, but it doesn't make sense price-wise. You can get the storage bays for very little along with your compute, certainly cheaper than separate hard drive enclosures.
The Aoostar top one actually looks pretty good for what it provides (sus really, $700 for a NAS with 2x2.5G E and 2x10 SFP). But still, the compute options are very limited.
I just ordered the Ryzen 4 bay Aoostar one the other day to replace my HP microserver gen8. We’ll see when it arrives whether it was sus.
I tend to want to keep storage (NAS) separate from compute and databases, in the form of I never want to touch or think about this so I can spend my time on other things.
Having a couple of pre-built nas' from QNAP or Synology can go a long way to getting one's feet wet to learn what they offer that we sometimes learn the hard way about.
It makes sense since the cost of computing has come down, but it's funny to see the cyclical nature of it all.
The web was run on beefy SPARC and NeXT workstations until Google came along and sharded it out onto cheap off-the-shelf hardware. Then containerization/virtualization started replicating individual machines as VMs to try to give you root-access control on timeshared hardware. Now computing is cheap, and the OP is advocating for "just make each container its own device."
MiniPCs...
Have seen hundred of chinese ones fail. More than half failed between 1 and 3 years.
As stated by others, issues are mainly and very commonly with the power stage / power management of the mainboard. Also, soldering quality issues leading to failures.
Far less issues with good brands like Dell and HP (had a few hundred of desktop mini g2/3/4). Even tinys from Lenovo do perform quite well compared to their entry level laptops (also quite bad). Industrial computers form factor are also generally quite good but quite expensive, even second hand ones.
Currently don't have enough feddback on the Asus ones nor enough volume to draw conclusions, but so far they performed well with minimal issue, even with models back from i3/i5 8th gen series.
I have the opposite experience as you. I have seena lot of failed Dell and HP mini desktops, but all the Beelinks and Minisforum PCs have been very reliable.
Why do you need a throwaway account to say this?
I recently did a 180 in my homelab. I had been getting better and better equipment, enterprise level, and I found that it took a lot mroe work and was a lot less fun than doing things the way I used to, which had been maximize small low cost systems. I enjoyed the jank, and going enterprise equipment eliminated jank. So I sold all the high end stuff and went back to miniPCs. My main VM host now is a Lenovo P3 Ultra with lots of RAM and storage, and I have a handful of other Dell Optiplex 3090 machines and a bunch of Raspberry Pis to run everything from. I enjoy it more, it's actually more stable, less expensive, quieter, and cheaper.
That's a beefy machine, small in dimension not so much in volume or price. Good expansion space though. I'm seeing 2,669 and 3,502 CAD.
True, I got it used for $1400 and added RAM and disk.
My minisforum mini PC died within two years seemingly our of the blue. Support won't return my emails.
Minisforum is also one of many mini-pc vendors that basically doesn't release bios updates. They might release a couple early on, to try to get systems stable, but after that don't expect any bios updates. AMD will release plenty of updates, & you'll be stuck on whatever it was your system came with.
Different kind of support concern from yours, but also noteworthy. Really unfortunate.
I still have an old HP EliteDesk (i5-8600t) that is my one reliable 24/7 system, still runs fine. Also no bios updates, so I guess there's that. Mini-PCs to me started more as a way to buy cast-off business gear, these small affordable small business systems, even cheaper second hand. It's amazing and great seeing this new market rise up to make interesting mini-pc's, and the value is often still pretty good, but it's a very different character from where the trend started.
I’d be very surprised if your EliteDesk never got any BIOS updates. In my experience, business grade PCs from the major vendors (Dell/HP/Lenovo) usually have a pretty solid software support lifecycle.
If it’s an EliteDesk G2 Mini, the last BIOS update was released in May 2024.
You're totally right! Small distinction: my unit is smaller than the Mini (a weird in between size), it's the 1-liter-ish DM 35W.
I thought it would be moot, because I vaguely remember HP starting to require support contracts for bios updates. But I guess that only applies to HP Enterprise gear? Yuck, what a pox.
Are there any mini PC vendors that do provide BIOS updates?
Big players like HP, Dell, Lenovo do.
That’s unfortunately typical for Minisforum. They issue batches of products in a fire-and-forget manner, with hardly any after sales support.
Same issue here. Just no power at all.
Reddit threads suggest MOSFET problems are common among mini PCs. Any ideas?
This is especially frustrating because I have an ancient dell optiplex and dell precision with i3-2100 and i3-5xx that still work. I occasionally need to open the box to reseat the ram for whatever reason after a power failure but by an large these machines are over ten years old!
Mine has been going for about 4 years now, no issues.
What about MiniPCs that support serial console or network connectivity for BIOS / UEFI access? When I looked for a new router, I couldn't find any of the usual "cheap" suspects that supported that. As well, most didn't have anything better than 1 GBit network ports.
I ended up going with a more expensive mini-PC style vendor, but I was surprised there didn't seem to be a ton of competitors.
> Cheap and Replaceable
We must be looking into different kinds of MiniPCs, because I don't consider 300 euros cheap, and those models are a joke in specs.
To have something usable it is more like reaching the 500 euros.
Also I don't want replaceable, I want repairable.
Last year I had to throw one away that barely worked, and I am not getting one ever again.
What brand/model was your one? (So that we can avoid)
Replied in another thread, Gigabyte Brix, more precisely Barebone GB-BRR5H-4500.
Thanks. I'm surprised as I thought Gigabyte were a well known brand (previously bought their motherboards which seemed great). I've bought a few no-name minipcs and the only issue that I've encountered was when a supplied SSD stopped working.
having had quite a bunch of MiniPCs, mostly from reputable brands (Intel NUC series back when Intel had those, then Gigabyte Brix series, then some cheapo china ones), I have moved away from those, because every single one of them (independently of the brand) ended up dying spuriously not long after warranty end and in any case far sooner than any µATX desktop would (in fact I've very rarely had any of the latter die; they usually live far beyond their phase out / replacement)
Even without wanting to attribute that to any malicious planned obsolescence, my impression is that the very small size of mini PCs makes it almost impossible for the manufacturer to ensure proper thermal management for keeping all components constantly at a temperature low enough for device longevity.
My 2008 Mac mini is still running, so it can be done. I'm shocked that Intel NUCs weren't more reliable for you.
I had one NUC fail due to CPU failure. Intel RMA'd it without any issues.
Only one of my rpis ever broke, the 1st one I ever bought.
I thought to have bought a reputable Gigabyte Brix last year, in the end it travelled two times to support, could only boot from USB regardless of the OS, and eventually with all these travelling around and trying to get the SSD connection to work, it died.
So much for being reputable.
> "... Intel NUC ..., then Gigabyte Brix series, then some cheapo china ones ..."
That's the mistake. Secondhand Dell, HP, or Lenovo mini PCs would probably have served better. They're cheap when second hand and the ones I've had have lasted a decade because the big OEMs are experienced in building office PCs.
I bought a cheap Beelink mini pc to tinker around with. It didn't take long before something went wrong. It still technically works, but I can't simply reboot it anymore. I have to unplug the power, let it sit for 10-20 seconds, plug it back in and then boot. It's too annoying, so it's basically trash at this point. I tried a new PS, but that didn't help. I assume there is a bad capacitor in there or something.
I've had great luck with Mac minis over the years. I've had many of them. I'll probably go that route in the future if needed.
I know there are better quality x86 options out there, but the prices go up fast, and I find them hard to justify for what I'd be doing with it. The Mac is really price competitive, which makes it even harder to justify those other options.
As an alternative experience report: I have two beelink mini s12s, and administer another one that lives under my mom's tv. All work fine (though I wouldn't be bothered by your issue as much — I reboot maybe once every few months?).
The latest project I had for it was to host a radio station. I got a home FM transmitter and was going to load the Beelink full of music, set it to shuffle, and stick it in a corner for years. Then I could tune any radio in my home to the broadcasted station and have quick and easy music synced all over my house without and “smart” stuff. A $20 transistor radio would do the job. There were a lot of reboots during setup, and then after about 4 days the OS (mint) locked up and I needed another reboot. I think that happened a time or two after that, and I just gave up.
The whole idea was that I wanted it to be a simple flick of the switch, or turn of a knob, to play some music. The “smart” stuff and apps have more friction than I’d like when I just want some background noise. The random lockups and reboot issues created a different kind of friction.
A few old G4 Mac minis just came back into my possession. Maybe I’ll just use one of those. My main issue there is memories of old iTunes getting caught in a loop when shuffling. Do it do long and it starts to essentially play the same playlist it generated on repeat. But maybe for this I won’t care, that’s how most radio stations seem to operate anyway, and I’d have the power to force it to mix things up.
Cool project.
Not sure what went wrong with the beelink; the os shouldn't have locked by by itself, too.
Yeah a Mac Mini seems to be the only one that can go the distance.
Been running a variety of them (+SBCs) for years, but recently decided it's time for a full sized build too. For stuff like setting up virtualized k8s cluster via terraform my oldish minipc style setup was struggling noticeably with deploying lots of VMs in parallel.
So either buy one of these new very fancy minipc (ms-01 etc) or DIY. End up landing on 2nd hand AM4 hardware but with 2nd hand enterprise SSDs and optanes. And that's been perfect. Competent at virtualization (5700X) and the hybrid enterprise ssd/optane array will take endless punishment.
That said not abandoning the minipcs & SBCs. 3 raspberries for HA k8s controlplane, low power minipc to keep home assistant and adguard live 24/7 etc.
Cheap and replacable. I found this wasteful. You said "I don’t worry about this too much: they are fully solid state machines, running on low power and low-ish temperatures, thus making their rate of degradation much slower than some beefy machine churning 24/7". How coyld this be measured vs just wishful thinking?
You can get MFF Dell/HP/Lenovo refurbs from Microcenter (and elsewhere) for 200-300 USD. Typically 9th or 10th gen i5 processors and 16 or 32 GB of RAM. You can fit them into 10 inch racks you can 3d-print (often with matching 3d printed brackets for a proper fit). We've been using them to replace some of our utility servers that we pay way too much for in the cloud (obviously that's a trade off of dollars for being concerned with security/management). We're treating them like cattle, deploying via K3S.
Intel chips dominate this space (with a far better price per GHz ratio than ARM or RISC-V); sad to see their slow downfall. Agree with others that you need active cooling to avoid premature burnout.
Its funny that Intel is the supplier of choice for cheap Chinese mini pcs, how the mighty have fallen.
While we laugh, Intel keeps getting money, yeah really funny.
Back in 2022 I bought a 'case' of discarded NUC machines that some business had scrapped for $100 (it was like 35 computers in there) Roughly 1/3 had WiFi, none had storage (it had been removed before scrapping). Mix of CPU ranges but I keep finding uses for them. Hard to keep the ones powered up, up to date.
If anyone has a good orchestration system for minipcs sitting on a network in terms of patching etc would love a pointer.
> If anyone has a good orchestration system for minipcs sitting on a network
Have you looked at Proxmox? It will give you centralised management at least.
Maybe puppet? https://help.puppet.com/core/current/Content/PuppetCore/pupp...
Puppet is currently closest to what I think I want.
Make a floppotron of NUCs
Yes indeed, I'm running Proxmox on an Asus NUC Pro... thing. Can't remember the exact name.
I initially was recommended a "Minisforum" thing, which I did buy, but it absolutely hated Debian for reasons I don't understand. It would boot, but not reboot, so you'd have to power cycle it every time. Not practical.
The Asus also came with its own issues - it only supports one stick of RAM unless you do a BIOS update, so you have to be careful not to put both sticks in until after the update. Slightly crazy.
Unfortunately the article doesn’t really explain what is a MiniPC. Is it any small SoC system? Is there a specific size or price point? Is it these Ali express things?
This is basically the form factor: https://a.co/d/1Mll2aH
Price can vary significantly from under $200 for an Intel N150-based system all the way up to Ryzen AI Max+ 395 systems costing $2000.
A lot of the mini PC makers have gotten pretty legitimate recent years, and some makers like Minisform can even charge a bit of a premium based on their brand name. More "traditional" hardware makers like Asus and ASRock also sell Mini PCs. And of course Apple is also a significant player in the Mini PC world with the Mac Mini. So definitely not just an Ali express thing - although Mini PCs can certainly be purchased there as well.
These refurbished 1L "tiny" desktops from big vendors like Lenovo, HP, and Dell are also popular with the Mini PC server crowd. https://a.co/d/g1mgUnl
The Verge just wrote a love letter to the new Framework Desktop, running SteamOS on the thing as a gaming PC.
IMO the Framework Desktop is too large to be considered a Mini PC due to its 4.5L case size. I'd call it a Mini-ITX tower.
It looks nice, though. I'm impressed they were able to get 11W idle power consumption with a 400W power supply (most mini pcs have much smaller power supplies, which are supposed to be more efficient with smaller loads). [1]
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-clustered-four-fram...
The (smaller) laptop mainboards, on the other hand...
Interesting, back in the day, we called PC with ITX motherboard miniPC.
This STH article might be helpful https://www.servethehome.com/perfect-project-tinyminimicro-p...
Used ThinkPads from eBay, especially the smaller models from the X-Series, can make surprisingly cost effective "MiniPCs".
If you need multiple devices, as mentioned in the article, you can even stack the laptops and build a small tower of "MiniPCs" all with different purposes.
Another advantage is that they already come with a built-in screen and keyboard allowing for quick debugging, without needing to connect external peripherals.
> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W.
I've been trying to optimize my desktop's power consumption. At the beginning of the year I put the kill-a-watt on it and was shocked to see it was using 115W idle! I got it to 90W pretty quickly with some minor Linux tuning but was still pretty unhappy to see so much idle load. Recently though, I've got it idling at 57W, which makes me feel much better about it (although more than I'd want for a 24/7 load). 5700X cpu and RDNA4 9070XT video card.
Dialing down unnecessary cooling helped more than I would have guessed. Under-volting the GPU -30mV may have helped but I'm not sure. Adjusting every governor I could find to powersave helps of course, and doesn't feel noticeably different. A lot I think is just that the new tuned daemon is way way way better at it's job than previous solutions like tlp was. I did have some problems with my Crucial P3+ NVMe drive not liking "powersupersave" PCIe Active State Power Management (aspm), but most improvements were a kernel setting away, and tuned really seemed to do .
One of the thing I really love about modern computing is that I can just dial in power consumption under load. With the new RDNA4 video card, I was seeing 450W power consumption when gaming. But I can open CoreCtrl and tell it, no, use 70W, and for surprisingly little FPS hit my system is now down to ~155W. (Still looking for more control in Linux for the CPU!)
It is lovely that there are all these mini-PC's, many of which will idle at ~10W! But definitely worth noting that power consumption on desktop is much more configurable than it used to be.
I basically did the same thing for my recent SFF PC build. I underclocked the max clock speed of the CPU in the BIOS and set the max wattage to 65. I then set the power limit of the GPU to 70. The fans barely run even when gaming and it stays nice and cool, not affecting the room temperature during the summor.
Is it the GPUs that are causing this? Even a very powerful PC need not draw much at true idle. The trick is getting to to a "true idle" which can be inhibited by lots of unexpected situations and broken hardware. One very common issue is that Realtek NICs prevent deep sleep states because either they are broken or their Linux driver is broken. Any kind of ethernet is worse than wifi in terms of energy consumption. Keeping a display attached to the box can greatly increase power consumption and might not be needed on a server. I have a fairly power Alder Lake-based server with 3 NVMe SSDs and 12 SATA devices, that draws < 15W from the wall when it's on but inactive.
These look like fun technology, but I don’t even know what the use cases would be anymore. I don’t need something to control my lights: I have an actual light switch for that. I don’t have endless terabytes of media that I need to serve within my household, so I just don’t know anymore what I would use this stuff for. Twenty or thirty years ago, I loved having a home lab, but these days I’m just not sure what I would do with it.
It's definitely not something for everybody, and I suspect not really a "revolution" outwith the dedicated enthusiasts segment of the population. (-:
If one wasn't likely to have a rack of desktop PCs at home, one probably will be hard pressed to have a reason for a collection of mini PCs.
On the other hand, there are a few more use cases than just over-egging a light switch or being a big file server. One can replaced dedicated hardware such as network gateways/routers, and do self-hosting, for examples.
There are RaspberryPi systems that one can get with extra Ethernet ports that can be set up to do application gatewaying and routing with general-purpose operating systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, and such. And obviously filtering HTTP/other proxies incorporating spam/advertising/malware blockers are a well-known use case.
There are oddball mini PCs in some parts of the world with loads of serial ports, useful as terminal hosts if one has a lot of systems with no disploy/HIDs. (I saw one mentioned on the FediVerse the other day. It turned out that it was an old Russian point-of-sale system, with 6 serial ports.) More of a use case for someone who already has lots of PCs (with serial ports), of course.
But yes, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone is Kitboga with a server farm in xyr garage running speech synthesis engines and language models to call scammers. (-:
On the gripping hand, I swapped out someone's under-the-desk tower for a mini PC years ago simply for space reasons.
> what I would do with it
I set up one to run Frigate [1] to detect motion over my several security cameras and send me notification emails with still images and video clips attached. It works well, and I hate the idea of sending my private videos to the cloud for processing with usual security camera setups.
[1] https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate
How ableist of you :)
The thing is that once lights are computer programmed, you can program them. For example I had made a program to stop playing music after I leave home because I hated to put the music off and then walk out, but I also didn't want the music to play all day while I was out.
That's not much of a disability-related use case to insult me about.
You can't imagine a disabled person might have difficulties to get up and reach a light switch?
Absolutely, but you suggested that it was because you hate to turn off music and then walk out.
I did no such thing; that was a non-disabled use case just to show you it has use for everyone.
As much as I like the idea of miniPCs my biggest issue is that almost everything in miniPCs are soldered down, if you could replace the RAM/CPU/Storage I'd have zero with them. But for now, I'm skeptical in that the current push for miniPCs are a clandestine way to get more technical people onboard with unrepairable devices.
There are plenty of miniPCs with replaceable RAM and storage. Some of the newer ones based on the Ryzen Ai CPUs have soldered RAM but most don't.
Replaceable CPU is harder to find. However, there is the Minisforum MS-A1 which has an AMD AM5 motherboard with replaceable CPU.
https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-a1
Worth noting the AMD APUs dont have ram soldered on a board cannot be replaced even with soldering. The ram is inside the chip and is shared between the cpu/gpu.
No, maybe you're thinking of Intel Lunar Lake.
Oh wow I never knew that, very good to see.
Huh, I paid $270 for a Minisforum UM350 w/ 16GB, 500GB. The RAM was replaceable and last year I upgraded it to 32GB. I swapped out the included M.2 for a 1TB, and then added a second 1TB M.2. All fully supported as-is.
Weird, every mini PC I've used has had normal SODIMM slots and removable SSD. CPU is mostly soldered though.
I've got a couple N95 miniPCs and they have replaceable RAM and m.2 slots to upgrade the storage.
MiniPC's are absolutely fantastic and better yet you can often find ex-government machines for cheap, they use hardly any power, take up minimal space and the majority of people are more than enough for your standard server with Proxmox, Unifi, PiHole, Plex etc
I'm not sure how much I agree with "just buy another host", definitely use cases for that but having one machine running everything works very well
I've been thinking about going this route for my work PC at the office.
Currently I drag my laptop with me back and forth from the office. It's small and light, so not a huge issue. I also use Resilio Sync to sync my data between a few different laptops I use, plus github, and the amount of work which is just in the browser now, I have almost nothing that isn't accessible from anywhere.
The only reason I'd need a laptop at the office is for when I go into a zoom meeting and need a device in one of our breakout rooms.
Sure, I could just use my phone for that, but not quite the right experience.
Anyone have suggestions for this?
I never got the point of these, since they’ve always got huge power bricks. I definitely love Mac Minis/Studios and have also built a bunch of custom SFF PCs around cases like the Ghost S1/NCase/Dan Case, etc. I don’t think they’re better than consoles, not even close since Windows is clunky and the Xbox has quick resume and plays 4K Blu-ray’s, but they’re great for keeping your desk organized.
Many of the N-series machines support USB-C power delivery and can run off minuscule wall warts.
Does anyone have recommendation for a mini PC with min 2 sata ports for two 3.5” HDDs, min 2 NVMe for ssd storage, one ssd or eMMC for OS, and 64GB of RAM, with the ability to power up the HDDs from the miniPC (not requiring external power source)?
The HDDs are installed in a case externally. An external PCIe slot to support those 4 mixed drives via an adapter would work too. I tend to avoid usb HDDs enclosures, since usb connection doesn’t work well with ZFS.
That would be a cool ZFS NAS.
That's a NAS. Just get a 2 bay NAS.
But a two bay NAS is typically maxed out at 16 GB of RAM, see UGREEN or QNAP. The CPUs are also dog slow for non-NAS tasks, like running VMs and containers.
Zimaboards come close. Two sata ports and 1-2 NVMe via PCIe. I heard the board may not be able to power all these drives. RAM is limited to 8-16 GB.
I guess I should separate HDD storage in a proper NAS and use a miniPC for VMs and containers only.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UgreenNASync/comments/1dm4iiu/is_th...
Apparently you can upgrade the Ugreen 2-bay DXP2800 to 32GB.
A bunch of the mini pc manufacturers make 2 bay NAS variants, notably Aoostar and Ugreen. I recently looked into this to get a 4 bay variant.
Thanks!
AOOSTAR 2-bay AMD R7 5825U mini PC seems to check the boxes, for an entry-level storage + virtualization miniPC host. The CPU is similar to AMD R7 5800H in a Beelink SER5 Pro miniPC which runs proxmox very well.
It has a cpu with 8C/16T, up to 4.5GHz, and supports max 2x32gb DDR4 3200Mhz RAM, 2x4T PCIe 3.0 M.2 NVMes and 2x2.5G NICs.
You do get ones with up to 6 nvme slots, but they'll be running at reduced speed. Generally X1 gen3
Yeah I know, like Beelink 6 NVMe. But NVMe storage is not affordable at high capacities. So, I want two +14 TB HDDs for cold slow storage, and two 4 TB for fast warm storage for VMs, containers, databases, and applications.
I also need a lot of RAM for proxmox VMs and containers. The CPU in my experience need not have many cores. I mean truenas itself virtualized demands 8GB of RAM.
If you want lots of nvme, lots of sata, lots of ram and lots of ability to power drives then you're not looking at a minipc anymore.
Would suggest you do the same I did - climb onto ebay and look at the AM4 systems that gamers are dumping. AM4 is aging out of gaming space but for NAS/proxmox duty they're aging like fine wine. Look for one that has is X570 and has bifuraction support on the X16
Has anyone here managed to get USB4 networking (USB4NET) working with an AMD mini PC (specifically ones from Minisforum)?
I'd love to have a 40Gbps backlink for a Ceph cluster.
I am doing this between two UM890 Pros. It was easy to set up and I have had no issues over many months, but I "only" get ~11.6 Gbps between them. This seems to match other reports e.g. https://fangpenlin.com/posts/2024/01/14/high-speed-usb4-mesh...
Perfect, thank you!
That link has pretty much all the info I was after. Pity it doesn't reach anywhere close to the theoretical speeds though, but hey at least it's better than 10GbE. :)
MiniPC must either charge from USB-C or have an internal PSU. Those external power bricks are so annoying when you start adding more PCs to the cluster.
That's one of the things the Mac mini has going for it: the built-in PSU. I'm surprised the Chinese manufacturers haven't just ripped off the design of those yet.
I definitely think USB-C would be a pretty good option!
Another option is getting a dedicated power supply. Mean Well makes a HEP-600-20, with 560W of 20V power. You can power quite a cluster off that! It sucks that they don't take 24v: there's so many 24v power supplies, but 19/20V is quite rare!
I have quite handful of hard drives in toaster-style carriers: having a single high efficiency rugged 12V power supply felt better than dealing with a sea of questionable-efficiecy power bricks.
GMKTec mini PCs are powered via USB-C, the included charger is quite manageable
> You can get MiniPCs with 4-6 internal M.2 slots that are great for building a NAS with.
Where can I find that? My current Intel NUC has two M.2 slots and a SATA connection. If I were to relax the definition of a MiniPC to include mini ITX then yes I can find these, but given how the author talks about being all-in-one, I doubt the author is talking about mini ITX builds.
https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-me-mini-n150
Currently in Pre-order, but $210 for 6 slots and an N150
There's been a lot of recent offerings like this. Beelink is a pretty great company so this one is particularly tempting, and the form factor is cute as hell.
One thing to note in this recent trend is that these designs mostly use the Alder Lake-N / "Twin Lake" cores, which are quad low-power E-cores (still adequate). But more critically, there's only 9 lanes PCIe 3.0! And some of those lanes need to go to networking, be it ethernet and/or wifi! Often there'll be 1x PCIe lane per SSD. Given that it's a NAS running maybe dual 2.5Gbit, this isn't catastrophically bad (1x can do 8Gb/s), but conceptually I find it a bit dismaying anyhow. https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/processor-n150.c4109
Ohhh, with a built-in power supply on the top of it! Very nice! Thank you for the tip.
Roughly 1GB/s for each NVMe.
They're pretty rare, but there's some.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme...
You can also get larger ones like the Asus Flashstor that can do 12.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/almost-perfect-mini-n...
I do think the Beelink Jeff mentions in this other post shows a lot more promise, with a much more serious cooling solution. It also holds 6x SSD! https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme...
They're all fairly new. "Mini PC NAS" seems to be the magic Google words. One example is the "Beelink ME mini", which has 6 m.2 slots.
What are people doing with 6 M2 slots?
Installing 6 m2 drives.
Or three or four for now, and expanding to more later :)
If you keep an eye out you can sometimes find 4tb nvme drives for ~$200, so you could build an eye watering 24tb raid0 array in one of those that would saturate a 25gb nic for less than $1,500.
Or make it a 5x1 parity for a smidge of redundancy.
These machines sadly dont have a 25gb nic though!
Well, yeah, but they would if they had one, which would be pretty neat, lol.
There are SSD NASes that fit the description, and products like the Beelink ME mini.
Also a good option for experimenting with local AI: GMTec AMD Ryzen™ AI Max+ 395 --EVO-X2 AI Mini PC
What I want is the equivalent of a PS5 or Xbox Series X, but a PC.
Like a big boy Steam Deck with no display or controller.
Preferably in the same price range, definitely under 1000€.
Anyone have recommendations for a particular mini that'll run Fusion 360 acceptably? I know that's generally an app for "main machine" use but I'm curious if any of these have started straying into the performance zone that might make it doable.
Funny enough over the weekend Fusion kept crashing on me, and I have an M3 Max with 36GB of RAM. I've run it on a slightly less machine (but not by much - an Elite Book with a Ryzen processor and 32GB of RAM). Honestly I'm kind of afraid to put it on much less.
Ha, thanks for the data point. I figured it might still be out of reach. I was running it at what could best be described as "sort-of acceptably" (random crashes for seemingly low-lift functions) on a Ryzen 5 desktop with a GeForce 1060 and 32GB RAM.
Hot take, N100 is the best CPU Intel made this decade. Easily one of the best x86 CPU for cost, performance, and energy efficiency.
Not a home lab, but I have one mini-PC dedicated to driving a CO2 laser (that needs Windows). Another one dedicated to StepMania (an open DDR clone).
They're cheap enough that I don't mind dedicating one (or two) for specific tasks.
100% agree. Mini PCs in my opinion are the only modern PCs designed to stay on for decades. Sort of like those old server towers with SCSI drives that still run many legacy online things to this day.
I bought my forever box on impulse, it was only $130 for a whole mini PC! (with my own ram+storage) I thought surely it'll join the group of devices collecting dust... I was very wrong.
Turns out this PC is meant to be the most utilized of all my computers. It basically has been up 24/7 for 7 years and I really have no excuse to upgrade it yet.
While its processor is nothing to look at (even an N100 is a meaningful step up), on paper it roughly matches a Phenom II X4 955 BE CPU, which was my Windows 7 gaming CPU for many years! so it holds a special place in my heart. It was also my entry to the world of self-hosting docker containers which empowered me to replace the paid/enshitified services I depended on before.
what are some hardware people would recommend (specifically looking for power efficiency)?
N100/n97/n150 are all perfect (about the same perf).
6-10w idle (similar to rasp pi) but 4-10x more perf.
Just to adjust the numbers a little, the Pi idles at 2-4W (for similar RAM spec), and the N100/150 are only about 2-4x more performant (with a slight bit less efficiency), for most tasks, in real-world benchmarks.
(Not saying they're not a good value, but you'd have to cherry pick a few benchmarks to say there's 4-10x performance.)
it depends a lot if the RAM is DDR4 or DDR5, those Intels really like fast memory
Up to n100 you still can cool the passively (see TopTon on Aliexpress).
Above that they need a fan.
I've had luck replacing Raspberry Pi's with Dell Wyse 5070's. They're not screamers, but they are relatively recent fanless hardware with low idle power draw and plenty of oomph to push every service I self host.
At the moment a good low power mini PC is anything with an Intel N150.
I've been using one for a few months for home video consumption, it works quite well and is quiet.
Mac mini is the perfect. Its also the most power efficient.
The ewaste problem is not a problem, actually: Consider what you replace in a full tower: The SSD, RAM, Wi-Fi card, power supply. All of these are replaceable in a mini-PC (the power supply is an incredibly standard laptop charger brick usually).
Yeah you can't change the processor or motherboard out, but generally those sit in "new computer" territory anyways.
I've been buying miniPCs since the days of Intel and Microsoft subsidizing shitty Bay Trail compute sticks. Even those were plenty powerful running a bunch of terminals connected to other machines doing hard work. I used to have one stuffed behind my monitor. They're also were laughably bad under Windows but pretty amazing under Linux.
Modern ones with Intel N95 CPUs are actually fairly impressive for the price. The N95 is roughly the equivalent of a Sandy Bridge era i5 which is plenty of power for what I'm using them for. They've also were under $150 IIRC.
My N95 systems have SODIMM slots for RAM and m.2 slots for storage. They're also got two Ethernet ports I set as a bonded interface so they get ~2Gbps to each other (and my NAS) on the same switch.
My unofficial tips:
- Get miniPCs with barrel adapters for power rather than USB. A lot of cheap ones like the old Bay Trail sort used microUSB for power and that's just terrible (sorry Raspberry Pis)
- You'd be surprised at how powerful an N95 or AMD equivalent APU actually is these days. Outside of compiling, 3D rendering, or AI inference such machines are rarely CPU-bound.
- Get black tape to put over stupid lights and front LCD screens that can't be controlled in Linux.
- Avoid Windows on such machines and just go with Linux. Ubuntu and Mint fly on them out of the box, lighter DEs fly even faster. As servers they can host an impressive number of services that aren't compute-bound. Hardware video encoding means even stuff like Jellyfin is really light.
I'm a big fan of mini PCs starting with the (now abandoned) Intel NUCs.
Yes, some have soldered down parts but a lot don't. For ~$500 you can get a decent CPU, 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD and something like a Radeon 780M, which is no desktop GPU but it's surprisingly useful. Some even have Oculink connectors for external GPUs although I'm not sure how many people end up using this.
You will find wildly varying networking connectivity like Wifi 6 vs 7, 1 or 2 Ethernet connectors that can be anything from 1GbE to 10GbE and a wide variety of different USB connectors and speeds.
At $500 I really just don't care if it lasts forever.
You can go more expensive and get a beefier CPU and/or GPU or go cheaper by going cheaper on both.
I'm personally so over assembling PCs. I just want something that works.
Would benefit from one or two small pictures. I guess MiniPC means like a Mac Mini or an Intel NUC?
> You can expect average power draws of 20-50W in usage and 6-12W in idle.
> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W.
Have you measured that? I think my full ATX desktop only idles around 30 watts. (With a bunch of apps running ofc) I took out the GPU to reach that, something was wrong with the power saving, feels like bad drivers.
That said... I'm not totally disagreeing. I have a mini PC running a couple web and P2P services. I'm trying to unburden my ATX so it can shut down at night to save power and do maintenance. And having more computers would shift me away from my "kitten" habits, so I'd abstract over hardware better.
A beelink mini pc will draw about 5w when idle (measured with a watt meter the pc was plugged into). It’s smaller than a NUC (I think!) - it’s slightly bigger than a raspberry pi with a case. Not exactly this model but it cost about us $150.
https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-eq14-n150?_pos=4&_...
Intel no longer makes NUCs. Asus bought the rights. But there are lots of other form factors. Search for n100 or n150 minipc and brands like topton and cwwk. More router like than the classic nuc.
Mac mini power consumption and thermal output (BTU): https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253
I find the idea of a pc being "cheap and replaceable" a negative.
PCs take a lot of resources to make. We shouldn't encourage throw away culture any more than is necessary.
Just my opinion, though.
This sounds good in principle, but I think it would be helpful to have some real numbers to look at in terms of lifecycle management before deciding.
Are mini-PCs actually more likely to have a shorter lifespan? Does the smaller physical footprint contribute to a smaller ecological footprint than a full-sized machine? Does the smaller energy consumption offset the manufacture footprint in a meaningful way?
Personally, I found that I've been more likely to donate older mini-PCs to local nonprofits who repurpose them than I am full-sized machines, which I tend to keep around for "just in case" parts scavenging that in practice I rarely actually do. Meanwhile, having a lower cost mini-PC available has made me more likely to start out with a low power machine for a dedicated task with them promise I can always replace it with a "real" machine if the need ends up requiring it. To date, though, the mini-PC has always ended up proving to be "enough" and I've never actually needed to replace one for performance reasons.
But this is just anecdotal. Like I said, I'm curious if there's any real data pointing one way or another.
You're right. My response also overlooks PC recycling. I don't know if anyone is making good use of that other than to occasionally repurpose old tech or to cannibalize it for parts, but there may be some reclaimable value there that I'm not accounting for as well.
I've got one of those Minisforum UM790 Pro Ryzen mini PCs and I loved it for the first 8 months -- very fast, worked well -- and then the fan started making noises. Took it apart, tightened things up and cleaned it, and the fix lasted a few days before it started being noisy again.
But the problem is.. custom non-replaceable parts. I realistically don't see a way I'm going to be able to fix the problem so I have to live with the noise. So basically another disposable consumer appliance. But it wasn't cheap.
This is frankly the problem I see with these little things. They're just too custom and the brands not mainstream, with no retail supply chain into Europe or North America to support the product.