Mini PCs in 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Mini PCs in 2020

tomsguide.com

55 pointswalterbell73 comments

I’ve recently purchased a MacBook Air to replace my Pro as my day-to-day laptop while coding on the couch, and been thinking of getting a Mac mini to handle the times when I want the extra power: for playing games like WoW or doing mobile development. Android Studio brought my 2013 Air to its knees previously.

Has anyone done this and been satisfied / dissatisfied? The Mac mini just seems so economical both in terms of size and dollars. I guess the only thing I would maybe want to shell out for is an eGPU, but I’m not even sure that’s necessary for my usage.

If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, there's an excellent project for Hackintosh support on the Intel NUC8i7HVK Hades Canyon machines.

https://osy.gitbook.io/hac-mini-guide/

The only "hacky" bit is the necessary wireless card swap. You get an Intel CPU and Radeon Vega graphics, so the result is more similar to iMac internals than Mac Mini when it comes to graphics performance. Price is steep for the NUC, but starts to pull away in price/perf for higher end configurations like 32GB DRAM + 2TB NVMe.

The Mac Mini will be a nicer and more trouble free experience in every way, and can be supplemented with an eGPU like a Sonnet breakaway puck, so only do this if it sounds like a fun project.

But I can confirm that it does work and work well.

Many people will point out that the equivalent NUC or SFF PC will be less expensive. If you feel like you need macOS and have a monitor already, then there aren't a whole lot of options than the Mac mini. Hackintoshes are too much work in my experience.

If you can live with Windows or Linux, then you can get a whole lot more bang for your buck. I got my first NUC this year for family and it's totally plug and play. There are gaming NUCs which are beefier than the ones I had heard about. Bigger form factor machines have the typical PC building experience, but even these seem easier to put together.

The Windows Remote Desktop app for macOS is a really good experience compared to old versions, so you can easily move from where the PC is setup to your couch for many apps. I'm enjoying where VS Code is going with remote dev too, but I don't think it'll help you much if your focus is primarily on mobile.

I have no experience with eGPUs, but it feels like something you can add later.

If I was more of a hacker, I would spend time to get a Linux system just to my liking. I find myself chained to the Apple ecosystem mainly because it’s what I use day-in-day-out across all my other devices (esp. for work) and I just have no desire to experiment. It’s just enough *NIX and just enough polish to keep me happy.

I don't have personal experience with such a setup, but one consideration for a Mini + eGPU is that depending on the screen being driven, Thunderbolt 3 may bottleneck many GPUs. This is one the factors that led me to build a hackintosh tower instead of buying a Mac Mini and eGPU.

Hm that’s interesting. In which case(s) does Thunderbolt 3 become a bottleneck? I do have a thunderbolt 3 monitor.

The bottleneck isn't usually between the GPU and the monitor, unless you have an absurdly high rez monitor (8k, or 5k on machines that don't support Display Stream Compression).

Where problems show up is with an external Thunderbolt GPU, because Thunderbolt 3 only has a fourth of the bandwidth of PCI-E, meaning in situations that would be pushing an internal GPU to 100% will have an external GPU sitting at ~25% barely doing anything at all because it simply isn't getting enough data from the CPU.

The extent of this effect depends on your needs, though. Older or less demanding games for example probably won't exceed Thunderbolt 3's bandwidth limits, but if you're looking to play relatively recent games on high(ish) settings an eGPU might not make sense. It's best to look eGPU benchmarks for your games/apps and make a decision based on that.

I use a Mini for mobile development. My advice is to get the biggest SSD possible. The number of lanes for writing are dependent on SSD size, so you will get much faster writes from a 512Gb SSD than a 256GB, and fastest of all from a 1Gb.

Yes! Do this and if you're constrained by disk size, get an external NVME ssd enclosure.

They come in USB and Thunderbolt variants. I've only used the USB variant and am seeing Read speeds of 1000mb/s and Writes at 1300mb/s using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app. This is using a Samsung 970 1TB drive (~$200) and an Orico enclosure (~$35).

For reference, my onboard SSD soldered to the motherboard of my Mac gives me 1250mb/s Reads and 2400mb/s Writes. I'm guessing the Thunderbolt enclosures go higher but they're wayy more expensive right now over USB.

I have the off the shelf 6-core Mac Mini. It is delightful for coding tasks. Last time I played WoW on it it was functional, but I had to limit the resolution to 1080p and disable anti-aliasing.

Compared to 2020 Macbook Air, a Mac Mini's CPU has up to 3x the base clock frequency or 3x the number of cores. So there should be a performance difference.

> while coding on the couch

Just reading that makes my back and wrists hurt. Are people really able to be productive this way for extended periods of time?

For me, sitting for periods longer than 20 mins makes my back hurt; so I alternate between standing, kneeling and laying on my back on the couch :P

Might be worthwhile to look beyond just the big brands. I have an obscure Chinese Mini PC, which is about the size of a NUC (15 × 15 × 6 cm) but comes with a much more powerful i7-8850H CPU, and, since it has two M.2 connectors, I can use both an external GPU and an NVMe SSD for storage. The case is made of high-quality aluminum alloy and looks better than any of the products pictured in the article. Needless to say, I'm very satisified with it. Only had to patch the BIOS to make all the advanced settings show in the menu but as a bonus it came with the ME already disabled (manufacturing mode).

The CPU in a NUC10i7FNH is more powerful than the one you mentioned, and it has m.2 and a TB3 port for an eGPU if you want. All the junk in the linked article is 2 years old; I'm pretty sure it's a repost.

The NUC you mention was just released, and I've had my mini PC for a while already. The i7-10710U CPU inside the NUC is officially 2 generations ahead, so it wouldn't be surprising if it were more powerful. Not really sure what you're trying to prove here.

However, is it really more powerful? I don't think so. The i7-10710U is a 25W TDP U part, whereas i7-8850H is a 45W TDP CPU used in workstations like the ThinkPad P52 or some gaming laptops. Benchmark results show the i7-8850H is significantly faster (speed rank #120 vs #226) [1].

And, most importantly, the NUC you mentioned still only has a single M.2 port. Why would I want a TB3 port when eGPU performance is better over NVMe? Only this wouldn't be possible with the NUC.

Anyway, I'm not telling anybody to buy what I bought, just that there are more options to be considered. I think we agree about this part.

1. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8850H-vs...

The reason I mention it is because running a foot-long ribbon cable out of a case vent from an nvme port to an egpu is ridiculous and sure to offend every amateur radio station in your city.

Mind sharing brand name ?

It's called "SYWZ S200H." This, I think, is the manufacturer's website: https://www.syvvz.com/productinfo/817181.html

Thanks

I live in a downtown condo. After I got fed up with 4-bay Synology - noise and proprietary everything, I copied all the data to a single 4TB WD passport and bought a fanless mini-itx on AliExpress and installed Ubuntu on it and few services, mainly in docker containers. I understand it is a shoddy setup so all important data has reserve copies and offsite backups but in terms of form factor - that was the right decision for me.

If you're comfortable with Docker but want a great modular experience, I highly suggest UnRAID (unraid.net).

Obviously, you're likely good with your situation, but anyone else looking for a similar alternative to the proprietary NAS solutions should definitely look into UnRAID. I've got it hosting a web server with a ton of different services on a 2700X with 4 6TB and 1 4TB drive. Excellent software and really great community support.

Thank you for recommendation! I think I looked at Unraid and other options like FreeNAS and Proxmox etc, but from what I understand - the main value add of Unraid is presenting multiple HDDs as a single volume and with a single data drive (1) it does not make much sense (2) I specifically wanted to be able to stick the drive into another computer, and mount its ext3 file system and go, that came in handy few times. As for the amount of data - I went full Marie Kondo on my old datasets and now my backup set is well under 2TB.

Super interested in this setup! Is it possible to provide some links?

I bought from https://www.hystou.com/ not affiliated, bought after the recommendation from a friend). Cannot link to the specific model because they continually update them and it was few years ago, but you can check their Fanless PCs lineup.

I do not have a detailed write up of a setup but shortly: it the latest LTS, installed on built in SSD and attached USB disk is for bulk data - 4TB WD Passport. All important data are stored in encfs over Dropbox so - saves in a cloud continuously and encrypted. Once a month I swap one of the two secondary USB drives and a custom script does a combination of rdiff backups and encrypted zips and the disk is stored offsite. Hopefully one day I will move that script to borg.

Dockers run a bunch of random stuff like tt-rss and airsonic music server where I store a bunch of old and obscure stuff not available on Spotify.

Still no real AMD-based mini-pcs in 2020 (except for the ASRock A300).

I'd love to have a small AMD cluster (k3s, boinc, ...), but there still is nothing like the NUCs.

https://www.axiomtek.com/Default.aspx?MenuId=Products&Functi...

There are a couple of dual-NIC ASRock 4x4 devices based on Ryzen Embedded, available at retail:

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-4x4-box-v1000m/p/N82E168561580...

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-4x4-box-r1000v/p/N82E168561580...

Two that aren't on the list:

It's getting a bit old now and prices crept up but I've been really happy with my little Gigabyte Brix GB-BLCE-4105. The J4105 Celeron is only 10W TDP but has 4 cores and a 3020 Passmark. $150 plus 1-2 laptop sticks of DDR4 and a 2.5" or M.2 SSD and it's a lot cheaper than a NUC. Mine runs Plex for the household but I tried it as a desktop first even with CSGO and it was usable but a little slow at times. Not for the performance-minded but I think my total cost was closer to $200 than $250.

I also have the ASRock DeskMini A300 with a AMD Ryzen 3400G and it's hard to notice that it's a "mini" PC at all from the performance until you try AAA gaming or push the CPU hard. I got a bundle deal but right now it's I think $480 without RAM or disk. Not cheap but I think it beats price-comparable NUCs. I think the same A300 should handle the upcoming new APUs if you wanted a little more umph. There's also a Noctua cooler that fits this case (even an all-black version) for very quiet operation.

My favorite miniPC is the Mellori ITX: https://github.com/phkahler/mellori_ITX

Yeah, shameless plug for my printable design ;-) Next rev should be smaller.

I have a Hades Canyon NUC and it's served me well, however I wouldn't get one today.

Great little box but the price/performance of the hardware in mid 2020 doesn't make much sense anymore and Intel has discontinued this style of NUC.

What else would you get in that form factor today?

I have one and love it. One thing I wish it had is a more powerful CPU. Aside from that it's been awesome. It doesn't take up much space, is easy on the eyes and since I temporarily moved because COVID I just threw it in the backpack and was ready to go ;)

Lenovo P330 Tiny and HP Z2 Mini have Nvidia GPUs and are small.

Anyone have a recommendation for a small desktop that can fit a double slot GPU (like a 1080/2080)? It doesn't make sense for me to get a eGPU+mini pc because of cost reasons but there's not many prebuilt mini-ATXs.

The new Intel Ghost Canyon NUCs have PCIe slot and optionally come with 2070 RTX. But they are not cheap either.

My favorite mini PC is the Lenovo M92P "Tiny". Fairly easy to find a used one on eBay with 8GB RAM and a small SSD. No fan noise, decent performance, and no issues for me thus far.

My girlfriend converted me to Macs by giving me a Mac mini about 7 years ago. I love them, and every time I read the complaints on here about Mac keyboards, screens, mice, batteries etc I like them more. I can't imagine not being able to instantly replace those when needed, being stuck with annoying faults. I need a real mouse and keyboard too, and bigger-than-laptop screen.

I was expecting to see cabinet-sized minicomputers for some reason.

I think I hear the term "SFF" (small-form-factor) to describe the PCs in this article. "Mini" is a term I haven't really heard since "Minicomputers" (not to be confused with today's microcomputers). The DEC-PDP11 was a minicomputer for example.

If you are willing to go the DYI route and pay extra in money and time, https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/ has many good Small Form Factor PC designs with powerful CPUS & GPUs in a relatively small case.

Looks like it's a private/closed subreddit (at least the popup told me so)

nope

Interesting - I tried again and now it works fine. Thanks.

At work we have a HP prodesk with a monitor mount, which is extremely neat. They are specced about the same as the Lenovo tiny computers (which I used to replace 3 raspberry pis), but are mostly aimed at companies.

The monitor mount is really neat. The computer is ok-ish reachable, but stays very much out of your way.

Maybe next time they could include mini laptops such as those from GPD, One Netbook, Chuwi and Topjoy.

Is it reasonable to use a Raspberry Pi 4 as main desktop in 2020?

I know a few kids who have a Pi as their only computer; they can do most things they need to do, and it comes with Minecraft. They quickly outgrow it if they end up needing to do more work on the computer or media work, but the Pi 4 is not a slouch.

Meh? I currently Dev on a Jetson Nano, which is fine except I wish i had 8gb of ram, rather than 4.

Using a not GNOME DE made a lot of my problems go away.

I know an artist/dev who uses one exclusively, but it's kind of weird to see listed as a "Mini PC" since it's not x86.

If you have any intention of using something PC-centric like Steam to play even simple games, it's not supported on ARM yet.

I think a much better alternative to this is a SFF-PC. The smallest comes in at about 4.7 liters and includes a discrete GPU and ITX PSU.

Most discrete GPUs and all ITX PSUs have fans. Lack of fans is one of the nice features of these minis.

is there amd NUC alternative with comparable performance to an i3/i5 ? Can't find anything

This is larger than a NUC, but also cheaper and potentially more powerful:

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-deskmini-a300w/p/N82E168561580...

These two are NUC-sized:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23288281

I've been very happy with dell optiplex micro series which are not listed here.

Isn't this a bit of a technology without a spot?

Day to day activities can be proficiently carried out through laptops, while heavy crunching and 24/7 operations must be carried out through heavily cooled rigs.

So, what's the place for a fanless, low powered mini pc?

So, what's the place for a fanless, low powered mini pc?

I use an Intel NUC with Linux (NUC8i5BEH) for daily work on Linux. Reasons I like it:

- Nearly all-Intel hardware, so very good Linux support.

- Easier to upgrade (3.5" SATA, M.2 NVMe, RAM) than many laptops. (Of course, there are laptops that are also easily upgradeable.)

- Since the firmware is also Intel, probably gets firmware updates for longer than many mainboards.

- Affordable. IIRC it was somewhere between 300-400 Euro a year ago, but same CPU/GPU as the 2000 Euro MacBook Pro 13" 2018 (which still makes it faster than the current crop of 8th generation MacBook Pro 13" 2020).

- Not very noisy under load. Probably noisy for a NUC, but definitely very quiet compared to the Dell workstation I had before.

Downsides:

- No space for another GPU. Though, it has TB3, so an eGPU would be an option.

- Not as extensible as a tower.

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Day to day activities can be proficiently carried out through laptops

For me there is no laptop outside a MacBook (or possibly Windows, but I have never really used Windows). I use a laptop when I am on the go (work, conferences). I do not want to fiddle with drivers, bad battery life, bad noise reduction, xrandr, or whatever when I am on the go. It just has to work.

However, powerful MacBooks are quite expensive and I do not want to carry around a 2500 Euro machine on a trip.

So, I am doing my daily work on a MacBook Air and on the Intel NUC (plus remote work GPU servers).

There are fanless cases which can make some NUCs almost silent, e.g. if there's no spinning disk.

http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/product.list....

Great Linux support but surprisingly for an all-Intel rig I can't get Windows to install on a NUC8i5. It just whines that it can't find a mass storage driver.

Were you creating a USB Windows install drive from Linux?

macOS. Is there a trick? Stackoverflow "answers" on this topic center around moving the boot medium from one USB port to another at just the right moment.

Home theaters and offices. I've been wanting to build one as a media center and plex server for awhile. The only performance you really need is for transcoding but I've got some ideas about how to deal with that. Really just need enough storage for movies and music, and some kind of kiosk UI.

While a laptop is fine with regards to performance (especially when expensive computations are done on a remote server), it's not with regards to comfort and upgradability. I'd rather have a small computer with quiet cooling, proper keyboard, mouse and screens than whichever laptop you can get even with an extensive budget. Even when it comes to desk clutter, I'd rather have only a keyboard and a mouse than a whole laptop. Writing this from a laptop, btw.

I've been contemplating getting a mini pc for a while now. I would like a setup where the monitor and keyboard weren't tied to each other. I guess the standard solution for this is a docking station, but I would also like something I could easily hide away, potentially tucked somewhere underneath my desk.

A traditional tower could probably work, but it seems like too much space for what would effectively be a web browsing machine.

So far I'm just sticking with my laptop though.

Laptop + docking station is the default setup at my work place. Works fine for me. If you have a laptop with USB-C, you can get power, screens, keyboard, mouse, and audio all with a single cable.

True, but... My wife has this setup and there is a noticeable performace hit when using USB-C connected displays. Anyone else experienced something like this or is this my setup's related quirk?

Non-crappy Laptops are more expensive, so if you don't need it to be used in different places using a PC is a fairly obvious alternative.

E.g. tons of business/office machines are this kind of thing. (Of course right now some businesses probably wish more employee machines were laptops)

PCs installed in fixed locations are another use case: meeting rooms, behind TVs in public areas, small servers in shops (e.g. Chick-fil-A deploys clusters of NUCs in stores) etc, ...

I've got two mini pcs as desktops for me and my wife; lets us put desktops in places with less desk space (we used to have back to back computers on a fairly deep desk). The old ones are doing MythTV duty in closed tv cabinets. Not fanless though.

Since we've got a bit more desk space now, I'm planning to go a little bigger when the Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs come out.

A big chunk of the mini PC market is sustained by commercial and industrial uses. Electronic signage is one of the more common use cases. Simply using them as a low-footprint alternative to a traditional desktop PC doesn't really cover what this market segment is for.

We have a PC in the living room for Spotify, random Internetting, homework of the kids, some games and so on.

It could have been a laptop with a connected screen and keyboard etc I guess, but a hp prodesk mini pc in the cupboard next to the small table looks much neater.

I used to keep a full-sized PC (in a case made to look like a retro stereo) in my entertainment center, but when the motherboard died a couple of years ago, I got on Amazon and bought a fanless mini PC with an SSD and Windows 10 Home preinstalled. About as big as a wifi router and does everything I need, which is to check email and play videos from sites the smart TV doesn't support. I think project computers are great and I have lots, but sometimes you just need a damned toaster.

Yeah, I'm always attracted by the svelte package, but from a practical standpoint I don't see much purpose unless you're short on desk space. Maybe they could make sense for computer labs and such? Do schools still have computer labs?

> I'm always attracted by the svelte package

The problem: when you consider all the cables you need to plug into the thing, then suddenly it's not so "svelte" anymore.

You can't really get rid of the cables (unless you go with an integrated monitor), but if you get something you can mount behind the monitor, that reduces the footprint.

tiny PCs make great home servers, IMO. A low real estate and power sipping machine with an i5 and ~16G RAM makes a great lab server.

Connected to a TV for "home theatre" or Steam link; or moderate amounts of always-on storage.

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