How many of you have a mini pc? What are your uses for them? Are you interested in them? Ive bought a total of two a mac mini m1 and a minisforum um790 pro.
My m1 is for guests and the um790 is likely going to be a htpc.
Will do some video compression tests in the coming week with it.
Do you have one
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Feel free to share you little pc!
Id like to get a 5600 or 5800u/h class for around 300 for my nephew. A basic gaming machine. He is 5 and would be able to transport it to and from his house. He already is playing some of my steam library such as crash and spyro. I also have some emulators it would be good for.
I’m thinking about getting a mini PC for the living room to clean up the TV cabinet.
Currently an old laptop is just laying flat besides the TV, because Wake-on-USB does not work properly and I sometimes need to press the power button.
I’ve been using Intel and AMD based mini PCs as my “home server” for about a decade. They’re fairly powerful machines for the wattage they consume. For a long time, I used it as an htpc, gaming system (emulators), nas, and whatever apps all at the same time.
As my needs change (right now I need more storage), I can solve that problem with a specialized solution. But for most uses, I think they’re a perfect platform or starting point.
Add an external drive or two, install some software, and baby, you got a stew going.
Crap pic, but here’s the setup:
Mini-PCs are great as spare/occasional-use machines. Need a system with some other OS or software that you only use occasionally? Well a dozen mini-PCs will store in the same amount of single laptop, and much less space than a single tower PC. You could run a whole computer “store” with a wide variety of system out of a milk crate or the trunk of your car…
I also like mini-PCs for long-running tasks (that aren’t CPU-intensive like video encoding). Some programs need to be left open and running for days at a time, well it uses a lot less power and generates no noise to run them on a mini-PC instead of your desktop. With most monitors having multiple inputs, you can mount a mini-PC to your monitor, and switch over to it when you need it for something you can’t or would rather not run on your main desktop.
I have a 2018 model Mac Mini (Intel version) which is attached to an external multi-bay HDD enclosure, which contains a RAID1 of 2x 20TB HDD’s for personal file mass-storage, and a 8TB disk for Time Machine backups on all Mac’s on the network. The RAID1 is also backed up via Backblaze’s unlimited personal backup as well.
have a spare 2012 Mac Mini that used to serve this ^^^ function for years until the 2018 model replaced it
have a second system, an Intel NUC 13 Pro (i5 model), which I am currently working on as a dedicated torrent seed box for Linux and BSD ISO’s, and any other legal free open data I can find (such as Wikipedia or other internet archives that might be available)
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