This is lacking most of the useful specs you’d want to search/filter for, like internal and external connectors, Wifi/Bluetooth capabilities, passive vs. active cooling, dimensions, and so on.
And any pricing information. I know it's hard to keep up to date but that's what makes shucks.top amazing. (or made it amazing, it seems to be down...)
One thing you didn't mention that I'd like to see is what, if any, PCIe slots there are. This is pretty rare in mini PCs, and I've only seen it on the Minisforum ms-01 (https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01)
HP MicroServer Gen 10 isn't a mini PC, but it it is quite small form factor and comes with 4x 1 gbit NIC (I350, supporting SR-IOV). 4 SATA 3.5" slots, allows for iLO and PCIe (I use a PCIe to NVMe there). It draws a lot of power though, as it is a Xeon processor. Sadly PiKVM wouldn't fit in the iLO spot.
A Minisforum uses far less power and can be decked with some (3) NVMe. It also has TB4, and a PCIe slot, which can also be used for NVMe/SSD, as well as the one where the WLAN is in (miniPCIe?). Thinking of putting my Coral accelerator in there, though it probably gets quite hot. I suppose the TB4 you could use to attach a bay of SATA drives to the machine, or to use a TB4 case for a NVMe.
Low power is my main interest in these mini-pcs. Eg, the ability to use "laptop" level CPUs in servers that do a lot of IO, but have smart NICs that can offload TLS.
Great minimalistic web design but it only has 65 mini pcs on it and doesn't have a lot of popular ones like the Minisforum ones or Lenovo Thinkcentres. So it is hardly the "ultimate resource for everything Mini PCs".
It depends on the CPU, the load, and the selected case option. The CPU will throttle when the load gets too high. They are using mobile/low-power CPUs. It’s generally fine if you don’t plan to have long-running heavy all-core loads. There is really no alternative to such cooling-fin cases in order to have a 100% silent PC.
For more processing power, a large case with quiet fans (e.g. Noctua) and a massive CPU cooler is the way to go, but isn’t completely silent (depending on load and environment noise level), and you’ll have to build it yourself.
Minisforum MS-01 is way better since it can function as a router and NAS / server with high uplink. It sports 2x 2.5 gbit, 2x SFP+, and all of these are decent Intel NICs (i226-LM, i226-V, X710). The X710 supports SR-IOV. It also has a PCIe slot you can use, for example to add another 10 gbit NIC or two 2.5 gbit. And it has an on-board WLAN (which you can remove). Actively cooled, which is IMO what you want. It has 3 NVMe slots, though you could also use that PCIe slot for another one.
"At the end of the day, if you are looking for a P-core enabled high-performance mini server or workstation, the Minisforum MS-01 is probably the best out there right now."
The review is why I bought the damn thing. But I didn't go for the most expensive option and bought my own RAM and NVMe for it. NVMe I went with a Samsung PM9A3 for filesystem consistency and heavy writes with Proxmox. For RAM I just went with w/e. It isn't ECC, but also not as bad as non-ECC.
Is the machine perfect, no it isn't. For example all the power saving stuff does not work if you want to use the I226-LM NIC 24/7 and that is a bummer. Also, it took 3 months to arrive (approx 1 month longer than advertised). But other than that? Great machine.
> And the next sentence says "On the other hand, this is a $619 list price CPU"...
You are misquoting. The next sentence does not say such.
The quote is "At the end of the day, if you are looking for a P-core enabled high-performance mini server or workstation, the Minisforum MS-01 is probably the best out there right now.". After that comes a new part of the article, concerning Where to Buy.
What you quote is mentioned in the article, but taken out of context by you. The full quote however is:
> The Minisforum MS-01 is a really awesome machine. Let us simply say that first. It is hard to make a system that pleases everyone. For one, I might want more RAM capacity and a lower-end CPU. On the other hand, this is a $619 list price CPU (Core i9-13900H) that comes in a system with a SSD, RAM, multiple network ports, chassis, and so forth for $829. That is a lot of extra components for $210. While I may want a lower power processor, I am not sure how much better of a value it would end up being.
In other words, it is actually a compliment. But the Core i9-13900H is the most expensive option. I didn't go for that one. Besides, I also put in my own SSD and RAM (and SFP+).
The primary bottleneck is the PSU. Limit the current draw to 65W (also during turbo boost) and you've got yourself the perfect workstation at a very reasonable price!
That seems interesting for retro-computing, but not really for anything current running on them. Be it for lacking instruction-sets, or peripheral ports.
It's a fuzzy line, systems like the Wyse 5070 were originally marketed as thin clients but they are more than powerful enough to be repurposed as an SFF PC or home server. That one can be upgraded all the way to 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD if you want, and the fat version has a standard PCI-Express slot which can accomodate a 10GbE NIC.
Not just HP but Lenovo and Dell too. They all use the same case and motherboard design. x86 so every Linux and BSD distro will work, upgradable CPU, RAM, and HDD etc. I can vouch for them.
These are all outdated and old. I have a Beelink with an Intel N100, that's over a year and a half old CPU, and has been super common on the market this year. They only list 3 brands with an N100 on here, and I have never heard of any of them. Looking at the Beelink PCs they do list, they all have CPUs from 2016-2017
These cheap mini PC look nice on paper, but I have bad experience with them. They tend to break after a while. They got shut down due to overheat; their small form factor make ventilation difficult. BIOS was set to overclocking by default. BIOS settings got magically reverted back to default. Everything makes it look good on paper on benchmarks but bad for consumers.
OTOH, I got good experience with the Intel NUC boxes. Got good experience with HP and Dell's slim PCs, which have slightly bigger form factors and are good for heat dissipation.
Old Intel NUCs make for nice home servers. Small footprint, low power, but has room to grow for standard storage and USB peripherals. You can pick one up on eBay for under $75, and it generally comes with everything you need (otherwise sold separately for Raspberry Pis): case, disk storage, power supply. Mine has a 5th generation Core i3 processor from 2015, but it more than handles everything I need: Ubuntu Server 22.04 and Docker containers for my self-hosted web services (e.g., Jellyfin, OwnCloud, Home Assistant).
Yeah you can get a refurbished Dell Optiplex for about $100 w/ keyboard, mouse, and wifi adapter, and should have a passmark score of around 6k (for reference the i7 in thinkpad x1 carbons from 2018 has a passmark score of 8k). I got one of these setup for an event organizer that wanted to drive three displays w/ timing software on a budget.
Yes. I have got a "used" HP 800 G4 DM on the cheap, which looks brand new still wrapped with plastic skin, as my camera NVR machine. It barely uses 2%~3% CPU processing 8 camera feeds and pumping out videos to 3 monitors. The mini PC did the same thing with 80%~100% CPU and got overheat easily. The HP is slightly bigger but flatter than the current mini PC form factor. I believe the design is great for heat dissipation.
+1! -- I use Optiplexes in my homelab for client/misc/fw duty, and I have a pair of Supermicro mini servers with Xeon-D chips for slightly heavier stuff. Both bulletproof and small/innocuous/inexpensive to run.
I keep wanting to upgrade to something shiny or attempt to consolidate since my Dells are on some hilariously old chips (4th gen LTS "T" series i7s) but man they just keep chugging along, it's hard to justify.
That's an unexpected selection. When I think Mini PC I think Lenovo ThinkCentre, Dell Optiplex Micro, maybe a USFF Fujitsu Esprimo or HP EliteDesk. Basically any USFF (Ultra Small Form Factor) model from a major manufacturer. Reliable, easy to source, and if you're fine with being a couple years behind the curve really cheap to buy refurbished because companies buy them by the truckload and then replace them every couple years.
They’re perfect for home lab applications as well, I’ve used one as a firewall and another one as a NAS. A model with a decent amount of CPU cores can pull virtualization duty. They’re generally pretty power efficient, like a next step up from an rPi.
The Minix name has also been appropriated years ago by a line of miniPCs which apparently have no relationship with the legendary Minix operating system.
Actually the early ones were not very good with the Windows 10 they had, and a fresh reinstall left you needing drivers that only came from their provided restoration images.
After about a year they were not useful for that any more with only 16GB of drive space and 4GB of memory soldered in.
After our IT guys replaced them with Dells, I repurposed by installing Windows 11 in Compact Mode from the command line and dedicating for spectrometer use which is not going on the internet.
Minix is still there with more powerful units which are quite a bit more expensive.
I would look closely at support downloads for little things like this, I still had to get some of the drivers for W11 from the (now externally saved) original W10 images from 2016.
If you're looking to tinker the Amazon Prime sale has some reasonable deals on N100 mini-PCs right now, at least in the US. Popular models like BeeLink and Minisforum are down from $200 to $160.
Thank you for this. Love the simple design. I hope this DB keeps growing!
One note: Sorting on Ram Size column seems to be string sorting (e.g. descending order gives 96, 8,...,7.34,64), when it obviously should be numerical.
I liked the idea of mini PCs, but for my usecases, they weren't powerful enough. In the end, I went with what I'd call "medium PC" - Intel NUC 13 extreme. Desktop-level components in a small form factor. At the time, I couldn't fit more powerful components into similar SFFPC. Of course, I paid premium price for it.
In the end, Intel gave up on the whole idea and sold NUCS to Asus, which means I'll never have another NUC, sadly (I wouldn't support company with as bad customer service as Asus).
