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Comment by soyiuz | Hacker News Reader

Minisforum machines are excellent in that regard. Sturdy little bricks with price and performance.

I have one and my main gripe with it is how large the power brick is. It's practically like carrying a second mini pc; I didn't take this into account when I got it, lesson learned.

I've seen some newer models pop-up recently with inbuilt power supplies.

considering https://streacom.com/products/nano160-fanless-psu/ stuff like microPSU, miniPSU, and nanoPSU exist, this is unacceptable. I've used these mini PSUs - which are a barrel power jack, a hdd molex power cable, and the N pin ATX plug on a breadboard the rough size of the N pin ATX connector from large PSU - in remote inaccessible locations to do "in box UPS" for vm hypervisors on intel atoms/celerons and the like. Plug this in to the board, wire in a 12v stamped aluminum PSU that takes a battery as backup (used to be like $22 on amazon) and a SLA battery, toss that in one of those "mini desktop" cases - not the elitedesk - like the ones you saw in every office 10 years ago.

anyhow you can get a 12V PSU that does whatever amps (12? 15?) in a pretty small formfactor, and the "additional" stuff the motherboard needs is, as shown above, insignificant. The PSU can be pretty dirty, as in in the US do literal 10:1 winding to get 12V out (i know it'd be slightly different winding amount to account for losses in rectification and lines and whatnot but 10:1 looks nice to the math) and rectify it straight into one of those nanoPSUs. believe me i've seen me do it.

also don't ask to see my laptop DC-DC supply for running straight off a solar panel... it's larger than most NUCs, too. oh wait, you still need a laptop brick, plus the DC-DC. So you gotta DC-DC -> DC-DC -> laptop which -> DC-DC and probably DC-DC again (1.2v/3v3 rail probably clocked off 5v rail, that's what i'd do naively)

those "dashes" in "DC-DC" are doing a lot of heavy lifting

Yeah they look good. Unfortunately from what I've seen they have limited availability outside of the US and EU. I could probably get hold of one but not sure if they'd cover the warranty outside of their sales area.

Not very power efficient, and warranty is meh.

Had to do a repaste to get proper cooling.

"not very power efficient" -- definitely some of the most power efficient x86 machines you can find today. Until the latest generation, Ryzen APUs provide better performance with lower power consumption than Intel ones. And you can lower CPU frequency if you want -- even at base frequency, they run fast enough for everyday tasks with fan almost completely quiet. Of course this is oversimplifying things a bit.

i9 power efficient, OK lol. If you want power efficient, get a Kontron. Below 3W idle we can talk. My MS-01 does 16W idle.

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