this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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226
Low Cost Mini PCs (lowcostminipcs.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
77 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Nice, but I wish there was a "Reputable Brand" or "Warranty" filter.

A lot of these boxes are made by the same OEM, and branded a thousand different ways under various names specifically for price fixing on large marketplace portals online - different colors, different cases, but same features without a warranty.

A lot of these fake brand names come out of companies who simply change names once they hit a certain number of bad reviews on marketplaces. Same shitty hardware, different brand name. Beelink and Minisforum are legit, but 'KingHive Pro' is probably made by 'MiniKing', and also sells things under "GamerKing", for example.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Beelink and Minisforum are legit

I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I'm quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn't pick another one, and I would have liked a "reputable brand" search function.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Next time, check out Level1Techs on YouTube. Wendell reviews a lot of these devices, and he'll give pretty good feedback on what's legit and what's not. Ho has reviewed MinisForum for years and has consistently recommended them. Just be careful, because he also reviews the more sketchy devices and sometimes recommends them (but with caveats), so don't assume that because it is covered, that it's legit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks for the rec! I also love that you presume that there will be a next time, cuz, uh, that's accurate. These little boxes are powerhouses, I probably want one for a TV set-top box now that all the TV boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire, even Android TV and soon Apple TV) are riddled with ads.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 4 points 1 month ago

Yeah, I might end up getting one for that. My current TV doesn't have ads, but does have enough smart features to have a Jellyfin app, so I'm good for now. But my SO wants a bigger TV, so that may end up being sooner than later.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Beelink are solid in my opinion, but I was in the same boat, I picked one at random that had the specs I wanted.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I was mainly looking for used ones like Optiplex, Thinkcenter etc when I made this. Hence those brand filters. Thought they were a much better deal than a beelink, so I guess the site is optimized for that. Oh also can you send the link for the KingHive Pro listing? Might be able to filter out brands like that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Those were just made up brands, but you can see what I mean if you look through Amazon, eBay, Alibab...etc.

From your own tool you can see these brands stand out:

Some extra context: https://news.risky.biz/risky-biz-news-acemagic-mini-pcs-shipped-with-pre-installed-malware

'AceMagic' AKA 'AceMagician' AKA 'AcePuter' AKA 'AceMini' depending on your market.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Need to add shipping charges to the price...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There's a free shipping filter, but if you're not in that country, shipping costs a lot. The solution to that is to add more marketplaces, which I'm going to next. Where are you located?

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[–] Piemanding 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What's an HHD?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Hybrid hard drive. Basically, a hard drive with a large solid state cache.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Shipping prices would vary depending on location though, right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Actual shipping would vary depending on location, but sellers are padding the shipping charge so they can display a lower unit price.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago

I really like that it is a static website being updated and built on a schedule from github actions.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Number of Drive bays is also a neat filter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Unfortunately this info is rarely provided by sellers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I know, which is why it would be extra helpful.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I don't see a filter for drive bays. I'm on mobile so maybe that's why?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Looking great! I think it would be amazing if there are filters for processor generations as well as form factor. Thanks for sharing this tool!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Not quite as simple as checkboxes, but the ability is there to some degree!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I'll add gen filters. Form factors are tougher because sellers are inconsistent with them.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Does anyone happen to know if there is a N100 model that supports HDMI-CEC so I can make my old TV set smart with a recent Kodi and maybe some retro-games? But I'd rather not let it consume 9W or whatever such a machine needs all day long. So it'd need to start and shut down on its own. Preferably without manual additional steps involved, hence the CEC...

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

This is a great site, thanks for sharing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I have a few services running on Proxmox that I'd like to switch over to bare metal. Pfsense for one. No need for an entire 1U server, but running on a dedicated machine would be great.

Every mini PC I find is always lacking in some regard. ECC memory is non-negotiable, as is an SFP+ port or the ability to add a low-profile PCIe NIC, and I'm done buying off-brand Chinese crop on Amazon.

If someone with a good reputation makes a reasonably-priced mini PC with ECC memory and at least some way to accept a 10Gb DAC, I'll probably buy two.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've been running OPNsense as a VM in Proxmox for a year on an AliExpress box that doesn't have ECC. If I might ask, why do you have a requirement for ECC?

Before this box, I ran a Dell R230 with pfSense but got tired of the noise and 40 watt power draw.

I've had zero issues without ECC, so I'm just curious about your need for it.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (8 children)

Doesn't work for me on Firefox mobile. Neither "mobile" site or Desktop versions. Hitting "Next/Enter" on my keyboard does nothing, there is no Submit button that I can see, and refreshing the page just resets all fields to defaults.

I don't want an Intel with 4gb RAM and a 256GB spinning drive, and OS included? No dice, that's what I'm offered. Without being able to filter results, its just another craigslist/amazon/newegg front-end ... a less useful one.

EDIT: Turns out there are zero fanless non-Intel, 16+GB RAM, 1024+GB SSD/eMMC offerings with USB-C to list. Strange no-one is packaging an OrangePi 5 Plus like so, but I haven't seen a fanless heat-sink sufficient to make that a good idea anyways.

I had tweaked some of the options, but without clearing either-or-both of those last two, especially "fan-less", all I was getting was the five sponsored "results" the top, which changed just enough to make it seem like that's all the results I could get.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I'll try to optimize it, thank you.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Works for me, but damn it's dog snot slow. Like typing takes 1-2 seconds for each character to show up

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

This; works on Mull; there is no submit button, it just constantly refreshes the results and thus is slow AF from continuously juggling the data.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

works fine for me

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Using Firefox mobile, everything works and is mostly performance 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I didn't have an issue.

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[–] RmDebArc_5 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sadly only for US and UK, or am I missing something?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I plan to add Canada and Australia next.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

FOR THE COMMONWEALTH

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Awesome! I was looking for one to gift to my cousins

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Update: added germany https://lowcostminipcs.com/de/

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 2 points 1 month ago (19 children)

Anyone have experience with external HDD enclosures? I currently have two 3.5" HDDs, and I'd like room for two or three more. Reliability is pretty important to me, so something that'll cut out periodically isn't going to work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] sugar_in_your_tea 2 points 1 month ago

Makes sense for single drives, but if I go with USB, it'll be something like this with multiple bays, which will almost certainly support UASP. I also don't want a hardware RAID controller because I'd much rather my BTRFS filesystem handle the individual drives than rely on some controller to not corrupt my data.

The problem, however, is that a lot of these enclosures use really crappy components. Sometimes drives will drop off for no reason and the entire unit will need to be power cycled. They also tend to require a separate power supply, which is also annoying. But if there's a super high quality one for pretty cheap, the entire package (mini PC + enclosure) is probably smaller than pretty much any equivalent case. So I'm interested, I just haven't found a good fit.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.

[Thread #974 for this sub, first seen 17th Sep 2024, 00:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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