Anyone using a Mini PC ?

[J4CKO]

I kicked my desktop out as it tended to make too much noise, use too much space and use to much electricity.

I replaced it with a Raspberry Pi 400, then more recently a PI 5 8GB which is much better but I do sometimes fancy something that can do a bit of gaming but not bringing the desktop back in.

So, Windows Mini PCs seem to have come on leaps and bounds, will get £100 for the Pi and can add to my budget up to maybe a total of £700 for a decently powerful Mini PC, may also let the desktop go as it sits there never getting switched on.

Will be on a single 26 inch 1080P monitor for now.

Looking at the Beelink ones, thinking something with a Ryzen CPU with some built in graphics, 32 GB of ram and dont need massive storage really, but may as well get 1TB or so.

Anything to look out for ?

[theboss]

I have a Minisforum M1 with i5 and iGPU, 32GB RAM etc

I picked it up for about £450 before RAM prices went mental

It's a very capable little thing, I currently use it on an away-from-home desktop setup, but might repurpose it at some point to run a few headless workloads with a hypervisor (I currently have Home Assistant, Plex and various other things running on a NUC but this is better)

Be warned though its not silent under any reasonable load - my main workstation is a big Dell workstation with 2 Quadro cards in it and that's much quieter generally. Small fans tend to be noisier. If you want something genuinely quiet I'd look for a mini PC in a passively cooled case.