Mini PC - any recommendations?

[Harrison]

I'm currently looking for a mini PC like the ones from Geekom.

Does anyone use one or recommend any makes and models? I've read mixed reviews for a lot of the Chinese makes.

I want to set one up as a download and home server because of the low power consumption, as I want it to be on all the time. I'm currently running a full sized i3 but that's quite power hungry even using the built in iGPU and it's not exactly silent.

So one using a laptop CPU with built in iGPU would lower the power use to about 15W and be all that's needed. It will be running Linux Mint so needs a minimum of 8GB ram and at least 1 M2 slot. Additional storage can be external.

I've been looking but was hoping to find a bargain system. I lot of them are over 400 which is more than I was planning. I have a spare lower end HP laptop (was Tom's) that's got a AMD Ryzen 5500U with Radeon GPU and that works perfectly with Linux, even for a lot of games, so something similar spec. That CPU has 6 cores and 12 threads which is more than enough for a budget CPU,

What are the best current budget CPUs at the moment? AMD over Intel ideally.

Problem is at the price for a lot of them I could buy an Apple Mac Mini! And whilst I'm not a huge fan of Apple they are well made and the M chips are good. But MacOS is not what I want to run, hmm..