Hacker News Reader

Comment by flower-giraffe | Hacker News Reader

I think the influx of very low cost Chinese mini PCs makes the NUC, Asus PN and Asrock devices a bit less attractive. Also thelow power AMD APU has been very good for the form factor. Maybe the margins are too tight for Intel. Another take maybe that the NUC came in when low power Arm desktops looked viable and Intel needed a low power small form factor to defend against that.

The Minisforum, Beelink and the generic aliexpress units are incredibly cheap.

There are celeron based fanless models with 4 2.5gbe NICs available for less than $200 on Amazon.

Personally I have been using the AMD 15w Ryzen variants it’s a nice balance for performance. I have several, my daily driver is an Asus PN50 with 2Tb nvme disk and 64GB ram driving 3 sceeens at 2560x1440 in a completely silent Akasa case.

As long as you are prepared to fiddle and potentially destroy the original case rhe Akasa cases are fantastic.

View on HN

> The Minisforum, Beelink and the generic aliexpress units are incredibly cheap.

Certainly are, hard to resist for personal use, but then I read that one will likely never receive a BIOS update.

Also, those moments when you wonder whether something in your home is listening, resulting in ads for something you've just talked about... well that is usually some super cheap product listening for keywords and selling the info to a company that can't get away with doing the listening themselves...

So they're not worse than ASUS then.

I've had several motherboards from them, and they stopped receiving BIOS updates a year or two after release. Never got anything since meltdown & spectre have become known, for example (I think BIOS updates are needed for microcode updates on Windows, so this would be a serious problem for most users).

I've also used two ASUS smartphones, and… never again. The last one received one major update (from Android 5 to 6), and stopped receiving security updates a year after the phone was announced. Fuck that company.

I bought a Qotom Q190G4 in 2016 for $139.00. That was also a Celeron branded CPU -- but it was not Atom, I don't buy Atom PCs -- with four gigabit NICs. This is to say, I do not think there's a new influx, these machines were available for a long, long time now. And yet, NUCs have thrived alongside.

I wonder what impact they really have. I have always bought NUC though traditional IT market channels and we us them in the SMB market pretty heavily

I can not see any of these VAR's carrying minisforum or other generic aliexpress systems. So from an SMB stand point my options are NUC, Lenovo Tiny/Micro, and the simliar offerings from Dell and HP.

Maybe some Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte, etc.. Higher end consumer brands.

So I guess it comes down to how many NUC's are being sold in business channels vs the budget consumer channels

Can you share a link to the model that you're running?

Are any of these ARM systems suitable for easily running Linux on them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com