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Comment by ww520 | Hacker News Reader

These cheap mini PC look nice on paper, but I have bad experience with them. They tend to break after a while. They got shut down due to overheat; their small form factor make ventilation difficult. BIOS was set to overclocking by default. BIOS settings got magically reverted back to default. Everything makes it look good on paper on benchmarks but bad for consumers.

OTOH, I got good experience with the Intel NUC boxes. Got good experience with HP and Dell's slim PCs, which have slightly bigger form factors and are good for heat dissipation.

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Old Intel NUCs make for nice home servers. Small footprint, low power, but has room to grow for standard storage and USB peripherals. You can pick one up on eBay for under $75, and it generally comes with everything you need (otherwise sold separately for Raspberry Pis): case, disk storage, power supply. Mine has a 5th generation Core i3 processor from 2015, but it more than handles everything I need: Ubuntu Server 22.04 and Docker containers for my self-hosted web services (e.g., Jellyfin, OwnCloud, Home Assistant).

Yeah you can get a refurbished Dell Optiplex for about $100 w/ keyboard, mouse, and wifi adapter, and should have a passmark score of around 6k (for reference the i7 in thinkpad x1 carbons from 2018 has a passmark score of 8k). I got one of these setup for an event organizer that wanted to drive three displays w/ timing software on a budget.

+1! -- I use Optiplexes in my homelab for client/misc/fw duty, and I have a pair of Supermicro mini servers with Xeon-D chips for slightly heavier stuff. Both bulletproof and small/innocuous/inexpensive to run.

I keep wanting to upgrade to something shiny or attempt to consolidate since my Dells are on some hilariously old chips (4th gen LTS "T" series i7s) but man they just keep chugging along, it's hard to justify.

Yes. I have got a "used" HP 800 G4 DM on the cheap, which looks brand new still wrapped with plastic skin, as my camera NVR machine. It barely uses 2%~3% CPU processing 8 camera feeds and pumping out videos to 3 monitors. The mini PC did the same thing with 80%~100% CPU and got overheat easily. The HP is slightly bigger but flatter than the current mini PC form factor. I believe the design is great for heat dissipation.

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