Intel U300

[Airmack]

My local Best Buy has a Lenovo that is running a Intel U300, 8 gigs DDR4, 256 ssd. The PC is only $130 but new they sell for $300. I just want it as a place to rip DVD's to and dunction as a network share. The CPU only pulls 15Watts. Is this PC to much of a pig to handle this? Should I look at something different?

[jaslion]

Itll happily do that

[Kebabannhilator]

It’ll do that nicely. Are you using it to play media over lan too?

[Airmack]

14 minutes ago, Kebabannhilator said:

It’ll do that nicely. Are you using it to play media over lan too?

Possible? First time getting into it so I’m not sure. Would it handle that or nah?

[Airmack]

56 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Itll happily do that

Including playing it over network?

[jaslion]

10 minutes ago, Airmack said:

Including playing it over network?

Yes. If you access its storage with a different computer its just a networked harddrive. A 20 year old pc can do that fine. The system itself does no processinf basically

[Needfuldoer]

Even if it has to re-encode video on the fly, it has Intel Quick Sync acceleration built in. It's fine.

[Airmack]

59 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Even if it has to re-encode video on the fly, it has Intel Quick Sync acceleration built in. It's fine.

Thank you Strong Bad

[Airmack]

New question. The u300 or this pc on market place. 

[Bitter]

The laptop will be more power efficient, but you can more easily add internal storage to that tower PC case and/or upgrade the CPU/RAM/GPU in the future to support more demanding uses. 

 

For the very basic use you're considering you could also recycle a Thin Client to do the same thing and use very little power. I'm using one to do my pihole, a network attached drive, and download torrents. It's a 10zig 6000Q with a Celeron J4105 that I swapped up to 8GB of RAM, a 128GB  SATA M.2, an external 1.2TB SATA over USB, and a 2.5Gbe ethernet adapter via an A+E M.2 key adapter. Does everything I ask of it for a peak of 12W from the wall, usually in the 3-5W range. You can get a used Dell Wyse 5070 for under $50 and do the same upgrades or easily add Wifi if it's not already installed. The Pentium Silver J5005 is competent enough and it can/will run Windows 11 since it has the necessary TPM hardware.  The Celeron J4105 models are usually in the ~$30 price range and will also do just fine.