mini pc Experience with Mini PCs

[Nexblitzer]

I'm Curious to see anyone experience with a mini PC, you know those really small Bare-bones kit PC's, those ones. Anything regarding brands, performance, longevity, pricing etc. I wanna hear it, just for fun. now GO

[George.]

Quite fun to play with, can't really do any heavy work with them but most are sufficient to run most kinds of storage servers. Not really designed to replace normal desktop pcs, but rather handy for nifty testing. There are some Chinese versions if you want to spare money, but from what I've seen they all work as well as their specs go. Make sure it has all I/O interfaces you would need. 

They don't really wear out, their specs might make them useless before they would get damaged, it's all electronics so time does very little damage. Don't really heat up too much.

I think that most are priced pretty adequately.

[minibois]

Should I think more like Intel NUC or AsRock Deskmini A300?

[Nexblitzer]

14 hours ago, minibois said:

Should I think more like Intel NUC or AsRock Deskmini A300?

Either, both are still mini SFF PC's designed for lightweight, with of course the intel NUC being superior.

[minibois]

4 hours ago, Nexblitzer said:

Either, both are still mini SFF PC's designed for lightweight, with of course the intel NUC being superior.

I have used and configured a couple NUCs and they have been pretty good.

Like not anything exceptional, since it's basically a laptop in a disk kind of shape, some with passive some with active cooling.

I/O is also about what you could expect. Nothing exceptional either.

 

The main advantage is just the size of the machine, which makes it easy to install behind a monitor for example.

 

Something like the DeskMini will give you some more variation in what CPU to choose.

Small cases gives you more flexibility/options, but often are a lot more harder to work with.