Where can I find these mini PCs? I am trying to find hardware for an upcoming project and I’m considering the Pi but would love to see some alternatives.
I’ve purchased a few HP Elitedesk 800 G3 Minis (refurbished) for about $125 on Amazon. They even come with Windows 10 if you’re looking for that. They’re a deal considering the Pi’s extra expenses like power, case, storage, etc.
The Dell wyse 5070 idles close to 3-5 watts. A bit more than the pi, but pretty close. It's older now, can be picked up cheaper than a pi off eBay. DDR 4, sata m.2, on board emmc flash. M.2 a-key for WiFi. Max 16GB ram.
When you throw in m.2, lots of ram, all that IO eats power. So the minimum idle power creeps up. Arm boards too.
There is also a general improvement in code support by sticking with x86. I bought a similar 10 year old i5 based workstation dell and so many little things just work _better_. I didn't realize just how much of my battles were based on hardware architecture issues.
I love the principle of the mini elitedesks, but some have a terribly annoying fan. It's not firmly attached to the chassis, so it rattles while spinning (and it spins all the time). The heatsink uses a proprietary 3 point attachment, so you can't use a big aftermarket cooler instead (even though it wouldn't fit in the case, I would have accepted the compromise).
Not sure about the <=G3 and >=G7, but the G4 and G5 have the issue. The G6 seems to have the fan attached more firmly, but I've never tested one in a quiet room.
Hp Elitedesk and prodesk are the two 1L available models they have you want to hunt for.
Lenovo has M700, M75q (AMD) and a bunch others ranging from thin client to workstation performance.
Generally new ones are awesome at about $700 but older ones are absolutely capable for upgrading ram, disk, wifi whatever. there are modules for up to 10g and other things too. Servethehome on YouTube has a bunch of guides.
I did something similar too, just beware of refurbishers putting cheap/trash SSD disks in those machine, they can stop working all of a sudden sooner than later (I experienced that on my skin)
I just stalk eBay's Buy It Now. Got an i7-7700T w/32GB RAM and a 256GB NVMe for $163 shipped+tax. Previously got an i7-6700T with 1 stick of 16GB RAM so it was cheaper to match that for 32GB total.
If you can get friendly with local electronics recyclers or auction buyers you might do way better.
Agreed. Or if one lives near large research universities, they often sell off the equipment they no longer need for a solid deal. Sometimes they do sell computers, servers, monitors and such by the pallet, however, and I’m not sure anyone really needs a cluster that large at home haha
I've been fairly impressed by a couple of Beelinks Mini S12 I purchased a couple of weeks back. Intel N95 CPU, 16 GB RAM, 500GB NVMe. More than enough for checking email.
One was immediately wiped and I installed Debian 12. The other was wiped and I installed Windows 10 Pro. Both seemed to just work.
Main home server/NAS is a Ryzen 7 Beelink with 64GB. Works a treat. Fan is audible when you're hammering the CPU (doing a large backup, unpacking downloaded media, running a Minecraft server with multiple users) but other than that it's not audible from ~5ft away.
This is running a 5257U which is an ancient 5th gen mobile chip and even with the Iris graphics it got (much better than the usual Intel HD) only HDMI 1.4 is supported.
I'm always on the lookout for the beefier chromeboxes, they're pretty small physically and pack a lot of punch for such a little box. Asus chromebox 3/i7 is my favorite so far.
Yes! I picked up a 4GB Acer chromebox with a celeron for $20. This is much better value to me than an RPi because I don't have to worry about ARM. Obviously RPi serves a different use case of tinkering with embedded dev, but tons of people are trying to put docker on these things...
