Why Is Everyone Buying These? | Why Are Mini PCs So Popular? | Mini PC Buying Guide

[jimgann]

For someone who just wants to surf and check email on occasion or even every day, these kinds of computers are ideal. I turned an elderly couple's TV into a home computer by adding a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. A couple of lessons, and now they can email their grandkids and shop online. They liked it!

[moosey]

I'm using a Trigkey with a Ryzen 7 5800H and 32GB for high end audio editing. It's rock solid and eats everything I throw at it. Save yourselves a fortune and get one.

[michaelcollins]

I bought one of these small footprint computers but I went more high end and I love it. I am not the normal 75 year old, I use my machine daily and I wanted more speed for business applications. First I had all of the peripherals that were needed and I went with an Intel i7 processor and 32 gig of memory with a 1.5 TB of SSD storage. I do program my own applications and run some larger commercial applications on it. I couldn’t beat the price and think it was a great buy. I believe that this type of machine can meet the demands of many individuals. Great informational review.

[Azureblaze]

I have a beefy gaming PC and have not just played many high end games on it of late. I found I was simply surfing the web, reading web comics, and watching YouTube mostly. You know, the chill life. I also love older or more retro like PC titles too, which are really overkill for my gaming PC. Beyond those issues, it was also really heating up my small office for no reason (as I was not pushing the system) and using a lot of watts as well.

So I bought a SER5 (5560u) on sale and hooked up my 2 monitors and a USB switch so I can switch my USB devices back to my gaming PC easily if I really want to. It's been great as it's super quiet and only 25w vs over 300+ watts on my other system at times. It's been a big difference in heat and electricity use for this small office space I have. I'm also not sacrificing much in performance with the NVME and 6 cores and 12 threads for normal use. I can even play some chill more retro like games i.e. Vampire Survivors with no problem. Will I still use my gaming PC sometimes for newer/more demanding titles? Yeah, sure I will. But when I don't need it, I don't need it.

[leedavis]

I saw a video like this in August, so I bought a MoreFine minipc for $159 to give it a try. It is WONDERFUL. I was not expecting much, so I went for the cheapest I could find. This is perfect, I love how small it is, I like that I can add to the internal storage and memory. The Minipc came with 16gb ram and 512g of storage, expandable to 32g ram and 4TB of storage. It is able to do everything I want. Now I have 20 HDDs usb'd to it with no problem. I will be adding to the memory and storage as I go by. Running 2160p videos with no problems. I will be buy another couple of these for different jobs later. It is working perfectly with all those drives attached. I am actually only using the one of the rear usb 3.2 ports. Never heard of MoreFine But this is a good little computer and has a 3yr warranty. I think my 2 big old desktop will now be storage for music and movies. I am totally sold on this computer.

[theinktician]

Some people assume it's a niche interest, which is fair. But at this point in time, it really makes sense to get one of these on sale for $300 instead of building your own rig with older parts. It costs more to build something that performs the same now. Best you can do is an old microtower with an RX 580. Anything else performs worse and suffers from old backends

[proximohitman]

I got my Beelink SER6 Pro recently and it cost me 50% less than an Apple Mac Mini M2 with similar specs. So far, I'm very pleased with it's performance and quietness.

[JB.zero.zero.]

I have had a Beelink GTR6 since September 2022, I use it everyday for 12 hours straight. Great system.

[jmcminn]

These tiny systems are great for my little arcade cabs. I have a beelink ryzen 7735hs with a 680m agpu in my counter top arcade cab, and it runs MK11 at high on the 1366x768 at a constant 60fps, among other things. I got a beelink s12 n100 to go into what will be my “vertical” counter cabinet, because I don’t need more than that to run MAME. Awesome stuff.

[EgoChip]

I have a Minisforum mini PC and it's so good. It cost me £400. I didn't want a cheaper Celeron CPU because what I am using it for is quite CPU intensive, and the 11th gen i5 with 16gb I was using struggled at times, so I went for a more powerful system that will hopefully be good for years.

It has Windows 11, a 12th gen i7, 32gb RAM and 2x 1TB SSD's, one NVMe and one SATA I added myself. It runs like a dream, I thought my old i5 machine was good but this is on another level. It boots up in about 5 seconds from a hard shutdown. Then there is the space it saves, it's on a shelf out of the way, and there's no huge tower in the way that makes a lot of noise any more. You can even mount it on the back of a monitor so it's out of sight. The only thing it's missing is an SD card slot, but that's easily remedied with a USB hub.

[johnhulse]

I use to build my own PCs but recently bought a Beelink SER5 5800U on sale, which came with a nice 36 gigs of RAM. It was a great choice for my tiny office. It is also quick enough for my needs as I'm only a casual gamer and is nearly silent. It also uses less electric power than my old PC and has the ports if I choose to upgrade to dual monitors. Sure, its not the computer equivalent of a monster truck, but it does all I ask without a hitch.

[terryhayward]

I have 2 Lenovo Thinkcentre Mini's intel i7 3.3ghz c CPUs. 32gb RAM at less than £150 (used) Great little machines, almost completely silent. Almost the same price as a Raspberry Pin and a much more useful computer as a local web server, home computer, music and film machine. I love them.( I run Linux Mint on both )

[akin]

Don't forget the Geekom IT12 for those who don't game or game on a console.

Intel 12th gen P series CPU, easy setup for non-technical people, and priced at $500. Add a Lenovo 27-inch QHD monitor for $300 and other accessories for $70. Total $870 for a modern setup.

[ricdale]

I discovered Intel NUC's about 3 years ago with the NUC 8 i5. Needed a good, cheap 4k movie and media streamer. The goal was under $500 complete. Small foot print and stupid powerful for daily surfing and streaming. It's not a pro gamer machine but it is a powerful audio and video machine.

[domainmojo]

We've been buying them to use as firewalls (I work for an ISP and we buy hundreds of these at a time) and other appliances. Supermarket chains and retail buy them in the hundreds of thousands, since they are perfect as POS-es. (Point-of-Sale, not the other "POS")
As I said- we use them as firewalls- from the 2-port, to the 4-port models. The 8-core Celerons make great firewalls once you install pfsense or Untangle or other firewalls on them.
The 4-core Celerons in turn, make great SDWAN boxes.

Many companies sell them as SDWAN boxes, firewalls, packet-inspection devices, general security devices, routers (with any one of the many open-source router software on the internet installed on it), head units for IP cameras, storage head units, and much more.
That's why they disappear from stock.
They make rather poor desktop PCs, but great servers! That's why it's not the general public that buys them so much... it's corporations- in order to repackage them as "appliances" with their own software pre-installed.

[bnrjason]

I have three of the Minisforum UM690, two on DIY arcade racing setups (mostly for emulating Initial D and Mario Kart GP) and one in my RV. It is absolutely perfect for the RV for sure. I have it connected to a 32" Samsung Q60a (4K QLED) and we play family party games like Overcooked 2 and others while glamping or the kids play together while traveling, it only uses about 60 watts max which means we can pretty much play it for days without any issue. I love them!

[enesjei]

What people need most is a device that can stream videos, web browsing, do some light weight editing, office stuffs, play some popular games with decent frame rates without breaking their wallet.

Laptop is overpriced for those needs and standard pc is overkill (also draw too much power)

[frustratedalien]

I moved away from using a Ryzen 7 5800U based laptop to work from home to using a Ryzen 7 5800H based mini PC from Trigkey that was dirt cheap. It works really well and with 32 GB memory, it can easily run a lot of docker containers for my development workflow. I now have so many of these mini PCs that I am actually having a hard time finding a good use for half of them. I think I'll just use the remainders as a proxmox cluster.

[matt]

Love the little N95 i bought. 😊 Older Games are no problem at all!

[KatRollo]

Ryzen 7 5800H unlocked at 54W TDP (Beelink SER5 Max) is the best bang for buck. You get comparable performance with RDNA2 without paying a premium price. You can emulate upto PS3/Switch with the 5800H.