this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
0 points (50.0% liked)
Homelab
371 readers
9 users here now
Rules
- Be Civil.
- Post about your homelab, discussion of your homelab, questions you may have, or general discussion about transition your skill from the homelab to the workplace.
- No memes or potato images.
- We love detailed homelab builds, especially network diagrams!
- Report any posts that you feel should be brought to our attention.
- Please no shitposting or blogspam.
- No Referral Linking.
- Keep piracy discussion off of this community
founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For HP, you'll see a model like an HP Elitedesk mini 800 G4, for instance. Elitedesk will either come in a 705 or 800 - this is just AMD or Intel. Prodesk will come in 400s or 600s - this is mostly chassis and cooling for differences, with anything ending in a 5 being an AMD model. The "G4" part is the HP generation number. A G4 corresponds to a 7th or 8th gen Intel or a Zen1 CPU (or Celeron/Athlon equivalents on the low end). These numbers line up with their SFF and full fat desktop brethren, for reference.
All of these machines can come with 35W, 65W, and 95W TDP CPUs (or closest to those numbers in the case of the AMD CPUs). If you are looking at the minis, you'll want to avoid the upper end (which are all K-series CPUs) on account of the fan needing to constantly run to cool them. Usually a T-series (or E-series for AMD) CPU will have the same power draw as a non-T CPU, but lower performance and lower peak heat production, which is actually important here because of how small these boxes are.
Depending on how old you go, the minis mostly have either an M.2 slot plus a proprietary port for SATA (2.5 inch drives only) or two M.2 slots. There is a configurable portion the back that can be anything from a VGA/D-SUB out to a Thunderbolt port or even a full dGPU (which would also use up the space for your SATA drive). If you buy off-lease hardware, it is almost always the former, but swapping these out are super simple. Just make sure the part exists for the exact model of miniPC you want - they get stupid specific on what is and isn't compatible.