Mini PC - any recommendations?

[Harrison]

Very nice, but way too much RGB! Hurts my eyes! Looks like a kids soft play area with a fish tank under the table. (just kidding)

I was actually looking at the big fish tank case design for my next build. The ones with the long display on the front corner. But I'm holding off building a new gaming PC until (as you mentioned) the prices for Ram drop (although we could be waiting a long time.. until the Tangerine toddler is gone).

What keyboards are you using? I'm researching for another at the moment.

Ethernet

I upgraded part of my network to 2.5Gbit last year.

I had all the floorboards up in my games room/study to renew the electrics, and whilst running the electric cables I also ran a load of new CAT6 cables under the floors and up to wall sockets. and this all feeds down to the garage where I have a main switch to distribute throughout the house. The switch then runs through the wall into a wall socket in the hall that the main router plugs into to feed it all. All nicely hidden out of site. Also means I can connect and wall mount in the garage the other things connected to the network, such as the Hive hub. The garden room/office is also connected into here from an armoured cable that runs up the garden and then in through the wall into the garage, Means I have wifi coverage in the whole garden too! Ethernet wall sockets in the living room and small bedroom also run to the garage (smaller spare room added as a contingency). I still want to run another to my son's bedroom as it's the only room in the house that still struggles with Wifi strength.

I upgraded the main switch in the garage to a 2.5Gbit one, and the switch by my desk too The switches have dropped in price a lot and the UGreen ones are really cheap and all I need for most devices. Speed test showed they manitain full bandwidth and they don't get very warm. But for a lot of devices they still only use 1Gbit ports so I've keep my Gbit Zyxel switches for those, such as my gaming and home cinema setup.. the TV (as with most) only has a 100Mbit port as they don't need anything more, and the Sky Steam, PS5 and other devices are still on Gbit too.

Budget CPUs

I know you only go for the top end gaming CPUs, but you don't need them for everything, In my own testing budget CPUs are perfectly fine for most uses and no issue for home server performance. But messsing around with Linux Mint on that spare laptop using the budget AMD 5500U CPU (which is a couple of years old) and that has been impressive for a budget chip. with 6 cores and 12 threads it's more than enough for most things. Unlike Windows it's far more lightweight without all the legacy junk and unneeded processes and services running in the background.

In contract when this same laptop was running Windows 11 it was utter Crap! My son had so many issues with the laptop. He mainly just plays Minecraft and some Roblox. But Windows started to get slower and slower over time as it common and then Minecraft would crash a lot. The system would freeze sometimes. We bought him a new Acer Nitro gaming laptop at Christmas and he's happy with that, In contract wiping the old laptop and installing Linux Mint Cinnamon has made it feel like a new system again.

I've also tested it a lot with Steam and also the Heroic Games Launcher (which adds the GOG, Epic and Amazon game stores, and I also added the EA App to it manually). I know this CPU wouldn't run new games very well. But with the built in Radeon GPU it has run older games perfectly with no issue via the Proton layer used by both Steam the HGL, I also messed around with getting Minecraft Bedrock running and that runs very nicely with a very long redraw rate, It's never going to go up against a proper gaming setup, but it's more than enough for nearly every other use. I even tested it with BforArtists (Blender fork) and it had no issue in the modeller with realtime render previews. No slowdown. And a bit of video editing in DaVinci Resolve worked fine too,

I will be continuing to use this little HP laptop with Linux Mint for my main none gaming laptop for web dev work where I only need to log in remotely to my servers via terminal session or to log into Plesk, And this is what gave me the idea of looking into similar spec mini PCs to use as a home server to cut electric use and size. It would only need a 1TB M2 drive for the OS and software, plus to store a local LAMP test server setup. And media would be served from an external USB3 drive. The other option of course is to build a more standard tower setup with a similar budget CPU with iGPU (it doesn't need to be a discreet GPU). That way I would have the case space to install extra traditional drives. 8TB drives are around ?200 at the moment. But that defeats my idea of cutting power use and noise.

If I see any of these mini PCs on offer I might be tempted if they drop under ?400, They do make an AMD Ryzen 7 with 16GB DDR5 and 1TB M2 for just under ?500. It has 2,5Gbit ethernet, USB4, dual HDMI, 2 USB-C with video out etc. Seems a nice little setup.

[Kin Hell]

There's a lot of vanilla hardware out there these days. RGB can be VERY in your face sometimes. It looks busy with both systems running at the same time but mine is toned down in so far as the only full RGB motion is on the Ram, CPU & GPU block with static on the fans. The reservoir's RGB in the 14900KS is disabled which adds to the balance I managed to achieve, by limiting animated colour changes to the afore mentioned items.

You're probably better off buying a nice 2nd hand setup with pricing atm & yes for sure, you don't need a high end gaming CPU for a server. My Z590 Godlike server is pure overkill but I don't gamble or drink in public houses & I love my hobby!

Be interesting to see which way you jump but I bet it isn't team blue!

[Harrison]

I'm not against Intel. I buy whatever is the current best price to performance ratio. I have an i7 in my main PC. But I do pick AMD when it's for Linux as it just has far better support due to being more open source. And with all the recent Intel CPU issues it's pushed me far more towards AMD.

I've been doing some more research into the best budget CPUs with built in iGPUs and you have to be a bit careful as ideally I want the newer Zen3 or 4 architecture with RDMA 3 GPU or RDMA 2 as oldest, but some only have Radeon Vega 8 which is OK but not ideal. I can get a Geekom 8 core 16 thread 2-4.5GHz AMD Ryzen 5 with Vega 8 iGPU mini PC with 16GB ram for ?360. Or up it to a more recent Ryzen 7 with RDNA 3 for about ?500. But I have to think do I actually need the extras for the additional cost. The cheaper one only uses 15W whereas the newer more powerful version is up to 35W which is quite a difference Need to think some more.