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Comment by syspec | Hacker News Reader

The fine folks over at /r/minipc Reddit forum keep a whole spreadsheet tracking nearly all the best options with columns for various features.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IjCpi4_z_WfO0G53E_mW...

Personally I purchased a beelink ser7:

- AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840HS

- Radeon780M (RDNA 3)

- 32Gb ram

All for about 700 IIRC

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Having recently been in the market for a mini pc myself (my use case were slightly different), I have arrived at the conclusion there is nothing similar to Mac Mini/Mac Studios on the market at the moment. These devices take 10W idle & 80W while running compute heavy tasks like stable diffusion/LLM using it's unified memory - magical.

That being said you might like AsRock's offerring for a more DIY customization - https://www.asrock.com/nettop/index.asp They are supposed to comeout with a AM5+DDR5 version this quarter if you want to wait for that.

Minisforum, beelink have some top of the line offerings supporting AM5 already but their limited upgrade-ability means they will not retain price over the years (you might be better of buying a year older version of their offerings to be more cost effective) unlike with ASRock desk(mini|meets) where you decide what you put into it.

It's kind of disingenuous to criticise minipc's for "limited upgrade-ability" when the Mac Mini has everything soldered on and is completely non-upgradable (no storage, no memory, no cpu upgrades), and the Mac Studio has memory slots, but non-upgradable and proprietary components.

If you want to judge a small serverlike device for being non-upgradable, the Mac Mini and Mac Studio would completely fail this criteria.

I did not criticize MiniPCs just for it's limited upgrade-ability though. My criticism was that limited upgrade-ability of certain MiniPC makes it a bad "investment" over the years as new hardware comes in since they are essentially laptops without monitors/peripherals. The same cannot be said for Apple devices since they have been known to hold their re-sale value compared to other devices (while being non-upgradable) - i think you will fine an article posted here recently that dives into this.

> These devices take 10W idle & 80W while running compute heavy tasks like stable diffusion/LLM using it's unified memory - magical.

That... sounds like you're describing the average Ryzen APU? My 8-core 5800u feels pretty similar to an M1 Mac Mini in most respects, besides the fact it's in a laptop.

They aren't even close to performance per watt.

M2 Mini maxes out at 50w and when I do full loads it usually doesn't go above 40w.

It gets a Geekbench score of 2633 single core and 9750 multicore.

5800u is 1641 single core and 6451 multicore.

Significantly more performance at half the power draw. Likely 4x the performance per watt.

The 5800u is a 25w chip, though.

The MX chips are ARM so the idle draw is probably better on the Mac, but for most tasks I don't understand how the Ryzen would be disqualified. It's probably the best low-power x86 solution on the market right now; you're missing out if you haven't seen what the Steam Deck can do at 10w.

Does the performance per watt on a mini desktop matter all that much at this scale? Don't get me wrong, it's impressive what ARM is able to pull off, but unless energy prices are crazy high in your area I've never really understood why it matters all that much. Also, the 5800U is 3 years old at this point. Hardly a fair comparison.

TBF In California as of the new year, energy prices are in the range of $0.40/kWh - $0.52/KWh (depending time of day, with 4-8pm being considered peek). In the summer the rates are higher, with peek being about $0.72/kWh.

I've been trying every SFF concept I can get my hands on.

The only thing I've found similar in size + capabilities to a Mac Mini is a Steam Deck or Asus ROG Ally.

The base Steam Deck is $350 now and the base Ally is $399.

My Ally with the Z1 Extreme is my primary gaming desktop. I got a nice USB C dock and it runs great on my setup. Anything more demanding than what the handheld can do I just stream through GeForce Now.

Outside of hardcore gaming, I primarily use an M1 Pro laptop (that I got after selling my Mac M2 Mini). Got it refurb, it is still insanely fast, works great for streaming games on GFN, uses basically no power, no heat, great battery, etc.

I've got 4 of these in a proxmox cluster and they are quite decent. My only complaint so far is some weird behaviour out of the usb4 interfaces trying to setup a redundant ring type network with openfabric frr. Speed was great node to node but for the 4 paths that require traversing a node speeds go to 1.5ish MB/sec which makes it unusable. I'm hoping a kernel update comes out with a fix for whatever bug is causing that.

I've actually went and looked over the sub reddit and it's a great resource for exactly what I was looking for (thanks even more for the Google Sheets).

Given the pricepoint and specs of the BeeLink, its availability for shipping in France, and the all-in-one design of the SER7 with USB-4, that seems like a great option to explore.

I will take a deeper look at their other offerings as well.

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