The Mini PC You SHOULD Be Looking At

Fun Fact: These are the Mini PCs that Chick-fil-A uses for their in-store POS Servers. They're getting upgraded right now so there might be a lot flowing into the market soon.

A single one of those 1L PC’s could run a whole homelab for many of us.

It’s worth noting that any of these mini PCs with vPro on the CPU badge can be remotely managed and monitored, allowing you to remotely turn it on and off among other things. Just make sure the MEBx hotkey is enabled in the BIOS (this is what it is called in my unit), and press Ctrl+P while it is booting to enter the Intel AMT configurator.

As someone who uses MicroPCs extensively in a variety of projects, I use MiniPCs almost as much for general use. They are absolutely fantastic for low power consumption daily drivers, nodes, etc. Due to their widespread use in enterprise applications, they are frequently offloaded for great prices. In thinking about it just now, I cant even remember the last time I did something like use one of my rPis in a similar application. Ive long recommended MiniPCs to anyone who has mentioned to me that they are looking at getting an rPi as a "cheap computer."

I have two of these. When I realized I had a desktop in my home office out of habit but only used it for web browsing and light tasks like word processing and occasional video conferencing, I pulled out the bulky tower in favor of a low profile mini box. We have a second one upstairs available for use as a media server, for playing archived video and audio files as well as streaming off of web services that don't have traditional smart TV apps.

The HP elite 800 g3 (and newer) are one of my absolute favorite 1L PCs to work with in my homelab. Great to see others picking up on this fantastic little box!

I think, Xeon didn't work not because of TDP limitation, but because of compatibility. Since Skylake generation, Intel started to restrict the use of server CPUs on home chipsets

I was really tempted to get one of these 1L PCs but settled on the optiplex 7060 sff with i7 8700. Having the extra pcie slots, M.2 and easy installation of 2 sata ssds made it perfect for my proxmox install. Currently running a vm for docker containers, a pihole lxc, plex lxc, and a home assistant vm. Still pretty small and quiet for me since I have it in the basement.

These tiny PCs are quickly getting more popular, I love it!

I had hp 800 Mini G3 with the same processor for almost 10 months. It worked great with YunoHost as a server. Nextcloud, home assistant and other apps worked very nicely

The reason I use an RPi 4 is for portability my portable ham radio outfit, my son got me a mini PC that runs on 12 volts, but its kinda rough to run from battery ( voltage drop ) but im really interested with using one of these little rigs for my home radio station, desk space is a premium for me. Thanks for the good info! Keep up the research!

We have thousands of these where I work ranging from G1 to G9, mostly in this form factor. Very good product overall.

This is the computer i use as my proxmox server. I have quite a lot of services running on docker. around 15+- LXC containers and 1 VM. 0 issues so far with it. Why i love it is because its so tiny, u can buy 2 more and have a cluster. I kinda paid a bit more than 50$ tho :P (250 euros) All in all i would recommend it

Good video, thanks! I've just ordered a new mini PC, and it's interesting to see a similarly powered old box being set up. In the UK it's not as easy to get this type of SFF so it's actually not much more expensive to get an N100 mini from a Chinese manufacturer like Morefine, Beelink and Chuwi

We build corporate network (physical cabling as well as IT Architecture) for our clients in the Southern Cali to Texas area. G3 and Lenovo mini PC are what we use as server / network monitoring station for all our clients. And yes, we used to use TeamViewer but now we use both RDS and Chrome Remote Access.

I did exactly this as I wasn't prepared to pay pi scalpers almost double for a model 4. I ended up getting a Dell Optiplex 3046 with a 6th gen I5, 16Gb RAM and a half decent ssd for about £80. Does a great job and runs everything I've thrown at it so far.

I have been using these mini PC's (Lenovo) for a number of years now and they work great. One is in daily driver mode at one location and performs perfectly for things like video watching. Easy to work on. I recently picked up a batch for about $50 each including power supplies. One thing to watch out for is whether the hd caddy is included. Those can be a pain to source independently. It varies.

They do rock. I have a bunch if them and I mostly just mess about. Couple things to keep in mind are that in some of the generations there are 35W variants and this might not be reflected in the sale (35W are in the SKU if you know the serial, 65W says nothing). Also, under most circumstances you should be able to use a dual drive (NVMe and SATA) configuration.

A couple of months ago I spent a bit more for a refurbished one to replace the Pi 400 my wife had been using for a couple of years. It worked out so well I decided to step up to the next largest size (the 800 G3 SFF) for a dedicated Plex server. After installing Ubuntu, dropping in our existing 8 TB media drive, and copying over our existing Plex configuration, it was up and running easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Got one of these and they are absolutely fantastic. Relatively cheap and easy to upgrade to make a very powerful and quiet home server.