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Ask HN: What alternatives exist to a Mac mini but for Windows?

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Re: Ask HN: What alternatives exist to a Mac mini but for Windows?

#41

Post by arrakeen »

blutack wrote: post #12

Steam Deck as a left of field option with the best supported gaming outside windows and very competent linux machine when docked (might want an alternative OS such as Bazzite[0]). Fan noise audible if it's permanently loaded up but that's like many of the knockoff NUC or litre PCs. 0: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/

> Bazzite

off topic, but does anyone know if this[0] is considered best practices for Fedora-based distros? the Dockerfile format already feels like you're fighting against legacy cruft for specialized containers; for specifying a general purpose, desktop container, it seems unsustainable

[0] https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives exist to a Mac mini but for Windows?

#42

Post by pathartl »

leetharris wrote: post #35
smoldesu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These devices take 10W idle & 80W while running compute heavy tasks like stable diffusion/LLM using it's unified memory - magical. That... sounds like you're describing the average Ryzen APU? My 8-core 5800u feels pretty similar to an M1 Mac Mini in most respects, besides the fact it's in a laptop.

They aren't even close to performance per watt. M2 Mini maxes out at 50w and when I do full loads it usually doesn't go above 40w. It gets a Geekbench score of 2633 single core and 9750 multicore. 5800u is 1641 single core and 6451 multicore. Significantly more performance at half the power draw. Likely 4x the performance per watt.

Does the performance per watt on a mini desktop matter all that much at this scale? Don't get me wrong, it's impressive what ARM is able to pull off, but unless energy prices are crazy high in your area I've never really understood why it matters all that much. Also, the 5800U is 3 years old at this point. Hardly a fair comparison.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives exist to a Mac mini but for Windows?

#43

Post by syspec »

pathartl wrote: post #42
leetharris wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't even close to performance per watt. M2 Mini maxes out at 50w and when I do full loads it usually doesn't go above 40w. It gets a Geekbench score of 2633 single core and 9750 multicore. 5800u is 1641 single core and 6451 multicore. Significantly more performance at half the power draw. Likely 4x the performance per watt.

Does the performance per watt on a mini desktop matter all that much at this scale? Don't get me wrong, it's impressive what ARM is able to pull off, but unless energy prices are crazy high in your area I've never really understood why it matters all that much. Also, the 5800U is 3 years old at this point. Hardly a fair comparison.

TBF In California as of the new year, energy prices are in the range of $0.40/kWh - $0.52/KWh (depending time of day, with 4-8pm being considered peek). In the summer the rates are higher, with peek being about $0.72/kWh.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives exist to a Mac mini but for Windows?

#44

Post by snapplebobapple »

syspec wrote: post #13

The fine folks over at /r/minipc Reddit forum keep a whole spreadsheet tracking nearly all the best options with columns for various features. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IjCpi4_z_WfO0G53E_mW... Personally I purchased a beelink ser7: - AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840HS - Radeon780M (RDNA 3) - 32Gb ram All for about 700 IIRC

I've got 4 of these in a proxmox cluster and they are quite decent. My only complaint so far is some weird behaviour out of the usb4 interfaces trying to setup a redundant ring type network with openfabric frr. Speed was great node to node but for the 4 paths that require traversing a node speeds go to 1.5ish MB/sec which makes it unusable. I'm hoping a kernel update comes out with a fix for whatever bug is causing that.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives exist to a Mac mini but for Windows?

#48

Post by thiht »

leetharris wrote: post #27

I am a big "mini PC" guy. We've owned a bunch of NUCs, custom SFF builds, custom laptops, etc to try and get generally the best bang for the buck in a small form factor. My recommendations: - Intel NUC. You can pickup a used Skull Canyon NUC if you can find one at a reasonable price, will easily handle all the games and things you mentioned. I owned one and loved it! - Asus ROG Ally with the Z1. $399 at Best Buy, can…

> Asus ROG Ally with the Z1. $399 at Best Buy, can handle all your gaming needs, only needs a single USB C hub to connect to everything. I currently use the Z1 Extreme version (more powerful) as my PRIMARY desktop. I love it.

My girlfriend also uses a Rog Ally as her primary desktop and she loves it: it has a compact form factor, handles all the games she plays perfectly (apparently better than more classical mini PCs like Beelinks), as well as somewhat heavy software such as Photoshop.

It’s a shame it’s marketed just as a portable gaming device when it’s in fact a very capable mini PC.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives exist to a Mac mini but for Windows?

#49

Post by halftheopposite »

syspec wrote: post #13

The fine folks over at /r/minipc Reddit forum keep a whole spreadsheet tracking nearly all the best options with columns for various features. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IjCpi4_z_WfO0G53E_mW... Personally I purchased a beelink ser7: - AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840HS - Radeon780M (RDNA 3) - 32Gb ram All for about 700 IIRC

I've actually went and looked over the sub reddit and it's a great resource for exactly what I was looking for (thanks even more for the Google Sheets).

Given the pricepoint and specs of the BeeLink, its availability for shipping in France, and the all-in-one design of the SER7 with USB-4, that seems like a great option to explore.

I will take a deeper look at their other offerings as well.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives exist to a Mac mini but for Windows?

#50

Post by samspenc »

markphip wrote: post #8

System76 sells the Meerkat. You cannot buy it with Windows installed but it does support Windows according to their support page: https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat https://support.system76.com/articles/windows

Not bad, $599 for the entry-level version, though that is exactly at parity with the cheapest Mac mini.
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