161–170 of 261 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
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…
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.
Yeah you can't change the processor or motherboard out, but generally those sit in "new computer" territory anyways.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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’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.
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 s…
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."
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.
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 run…