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The MiniPC Revolution

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Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#201

Post by LeoPanthera »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #65
mcny wrote: post #19

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 EliteDes…

Are there any mini PC vendors that do provide BIOS updates?

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#202

Post by Mars008 »

Agingcoder wrote: post #113

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…

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.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#203

Post by throw5g432y »

Felger wrote: post #163

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…

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.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#204

Post by scuff3d »

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…

I've never heard of Talos until now, but it looks interesting. How was it to work with?

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#205

Post by srcreigh »

throw5g432y wrote: post #203
Felger wrote: post #163

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…

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?

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#206

Post by mrheosuper »

pnw wrote: post #124
Agingcoder wrote: post #113

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…

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…

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.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#207

Post by mrheosuper »

lostmsu wrote: post #144
dontlaugh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#208

Post by mrheosuper »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #201
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 EliteDes…

Are there any mini PC vendors that do provide BIOS updates?

Big players like HP, Dell, Lenovo do.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#209

Post by mrheosuper »

freetime2 wrote: post #149
coffeebeqn wrote: post #96

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…

Interesting, back in the day, we called PC with ITX motherboard miniPC.

Re: The MiniPC Revolution

#210

Post by mrheosuper »

cdkmoose wrote: post #11

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 ?
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