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The MiniPC Revolution

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Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#51

Post by lostmsu »

rkagerer wrote: post #33

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, reinstal…

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.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#52

Post by giardini »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #35
giardini wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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)?

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#53

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

jsheard wrote: post #49
ibaikov wrote: post #13

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 proble…

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.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#54

Post by bdcravens »

RankingMember wrote: post #45

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.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#55

Post by vorpalhex »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#56

Post by ibaikov »

wishfish wrote: post #31
ibaikov wrote: post #13

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 proble…

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.

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.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#58

Post by politelemon »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #12
kccqzy wrote: post #4

> 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.

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?

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#59

Post by bdcravens »

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.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#60

Post by RankingMember »

bdcravens wrote: post #54
RankingMember wrote: post #45

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.
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