Should you bother with... mini PCs?
Should you bother with... mini PCs?
Mini PCs are put to the test to see if they're as viable for gaming as their manufcaturers think.
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I have an i7 NUC that I use as my jellyfin server cause it has hardware transcoding. It absolutely rips and takes up less electricity at full bore than my gaming desktop at idle. I agree that there's a place for mini computers, but it's probably not serious gaming.
Not to one-up you, but I'm doing the same with an Odroid H4+ board (no case yet, although I'll probably 3D-print one), which has the exact same transcoding feature as part of its Core i3-N305. It can handle multiple 4K HDR streams just fine (at least in theory - I'm only serving three users at once at most and none of them are using 4K HDR) - all while being passively cooled and using about three smartphones worth of power. Note that I had to use a dummy HDMI plug in order to get the hardware decoder to kick in, since I am using this as a headless server.
I paid €240 for it new, which is a steal (although you have to get SODIMM DDR5 memory for it, which isn't that cheap). On the official website, it's available for $139, but that's without shipping and import duties from South Korea.
Granted, apart from the transcoding feature, general-purpose performance is not even close to your i7, but I'm using less than half as much power for the same job. If you have an i7-1260P, you're about 70% ahead in synthetic benchmark, but my little i3 is still an 8-core CPU that has about 25% more CPU processing power than an old i7-4790k that I was using on my main PC (including for gaming) until last year. Since I am limited by my storage array going through a single SATA cable anyway, that's fine by me, especially since this thing replaced a significantly less performant Intel Atom-based mini PC I was previously using for the same purpose. My priorities were having multiple SATA ports, being low cost, efficient, quiet and small - and in that order.
People have also used the same board as a normal PC and reasonably capable low-end gaming/emulation machine, by the way. You can get a case that looks like a Nintendo GameCube straight from the manufacturer. Here's an overview video that includes it being used for this purpose.
Very nice! I don't find this a one up but I love the ingenuity. I managed to salvage this NUC from work because we shut down a zoom room from a agency we acquired at work and then disposed all the unneeded /nonuniform hardware. Before that point, I was looking at doing something quite similar to you.
I also had to use get an hdmi dummy plug. That was an annoying stumbling block. Just, why??
Apparently, it depends on whether or not a specific BIOS setting is available. I don't think there was on this board, but I might be wrong, since I already had the plug lying around and immediately used it when QuickSync refused to work. If you haven't had any experience with this before, it can definitely be annoying though.
I'm really interested in this! How do you passively cool something like that? It's to get quite under load, no?
There's just a big ol' heat sink covering most of the board. Even under sustained 100% CPU load, I've never had it getting any hotter than 72° C, which is not even close to the maximum operating temperature of 105°. It's sitting under a desk in a corner with practically no air flow, almost completely enclosed from all sides.
You might need some limited active cooling if you are using the device for gaming, like a large and slow fan as shown in the video, but I wouldn't be surprised if you can get away without it.
wow... that's incredible! thanks!