MiniPCs

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/battlestations/p/1389168/contemplating-alternative-setup

Here is my current setup. My laptop is an incredible gaming device but I'm kind of hung up on the fact that I don't much enjoy gaming at my desk. I much prefer to game in a lounging position where I can put my feet up. Because of this, I'm considering splitting my priorities for gaming and browsing into separate devices.

I'm thinking that a mini pc might be a good option for my desk setup. I would use it mostly for browsing, some light server needs, and (possibly?) some light modeling/design work using freecad (for 3d printing shenanigans). I've been eyeballing the minisforum um790 pro or something similar.

My gaming needs would likely be outsourced to a handheld pc. I'm pretty set on getting a onexfly and loading it up with bazzite. I know they're expensive, but the form factor and hardware capability really has me sold on this one. I know it would handle everything I wanted to play on it, and more. I've even been wondering if it would be a good daily driver with a dock or something and just omit the mini pc idea altogether.

Since my laptop's battery fried out last week, I'm finally considering switching to something that's more solid (and trading portability with a tablet of sorts since my work doesn't include too much computing power), but I don't have the time or the space to assemble a desktop tower at the moment. Here's the reason why I was thinking of a mini PC, at least to buy some components that I could reuse (starting from the whole monitor-keyboard-mouse-HDD shebang) in the future. I'm thinking of something in the 350-400€ range, like the Beelink SER5. Do you all think it's a good option or I can aim for something else? I'm mainly looking for some light gaming, media handling (music and video), the usual.

On desktops, I have seen problems (not direct experience) with getting full speed from 4x64gb ram sticks. Will 5600ddr 2x64gb sodims be stable on a budget (BOSGAME 7840hs) mini pc?

For use with LLMs, I doubt the 780m can have great (usable?) performance for models that would need 128gb (with context for coding). 96gb is decent price/size value. But is 64gb simply enough for what you would practically use?

780m mini PCs seem the best value for me. ddr5, gtx1650 performance is good enough for me. Better processors than desktops at twice the price. 4 monitors.

Any brands that are good or bad at linux support. Especially sleep/wake functionality?

Waiting for next gen 890m, and amd AI to come down in price, I can do. I'm surprised that discrete laptop rtx3050 gpu with intel isn't more popular, but I could be bad at finding ones.

How long would you expect it to take for 780m mini PCs to drop $100 or $200 in price?

Up on Amazon now. Down the line I imagine buying this as compact gaming machine too. It's $600 coupon for $1500 now but imagine these ended up way more expensive once supply depletes and it's new shipment post-tariff priced

64GB RAM +1TB SSD $1399 128GB RAM +2TB SSD $1799

Cheaper than the Framework Desktop What do you think?

Beelink SER9 users - I was having trouble with game streaming on my SER9 32GB. The video would freeze (one new frame every 10-20 seconds) in some but not all games. The audio and controls would continue to work. Clients were AYN Odin 2, Retroid Pocket 5, and Apple TV. AMD firmware was either 24.10 or 24.12.

I attempted to update several times to AMD drivers 25.3.1 and 25.3.2. Each time this upgrade failed with a black screen, and I was unable to boot into Windows. Each time I had to painstakingly revert the driver in safe mode with networking to 24.8, 10, or 12.

I was able to solve this by first updating my BIOS to V103.P8C0M0C15.73 using this link HERE. The BIOS download site was slightly confusing, as it states that your serial needs to begin with B, Y, or D, and mine started with 9D. It also refers to the SER9 as the SER9 Pro. As stated, I only have the regular 32Gb with Ryzen AI 9 HX370, the word 'Pro' is not listed anywhere.

The BIOS update process is fairly simple, but needs to be done carefully:

• Use a USB flash drive (I used an 8Gb)
• Format to FAT32 (drive needs to be less than 32Gb to format to FAT32 in Windows)
• Name the drive to WINPE
• Extract the contents of the zip download
• Copy the contents of the folder (not the actual folder) to the FAT32 formatted flash drive with the volume label WINPE

WARNING - The process below must not be interrupted. Don't start it during a thunderstorm:

• Boot SER9 and press F7 to get boot device menu
• Select flash drive
• Allow process to complete (~10 minutes)

After completing the BIOS update, I was able to update to AMD driver 25.3.2 using the full download installer. I made sure to check the box for clear user settings, as other posters have suggested this. This new AMD driver 25.3.2 has so far resolved my Steam game streaming issues.

Good luck, hope this helps.

I have a laptop nearing the end of its life with (what I thought was) a good cpu/ram and an integrated graphics card. It was fine at running a DAW but it couldn't run 10 year old games at a non fucky framerate. I would include its details but I didn't memorize them and don't have access to it right now.

I'm looking at replacing it with a minipc because laptops are getting more user hostile but I like the idea of having something I can move around occasionally. So I look on the reddit spreadsheet, and I'm struggling because there often seems to be a gap between the listed specs on the spreadsheet and the actual thing itself (ie "this thing has this gpu" vs "this thing has a slot for you to install a gpu").

I absolutely need something that will run Reaper or an equivalent well with a billion tracks and add ons at the same time. I would very much like to run ten year old games reliably at a good framerate. And if possible I'd like to badly run a local ai which I understand basically requires a decent standalone gpu, but it isn't that important because they're a dumb toy that has no actual use. Is there a minipc that I can buy prebuilt that does that, and if not how close can I get? I don't know enough about hardware to answer my own question with the spreadsheet sorry.

Looking for advice on a good Mini PC for a family Minecraft server. 64 GB, SSD, budget is $400. Amazon is preferred, because I have award credits from my job. I'm happy to assemble things myself if that's more cost effective.

The new $599 M4 Mac Mini is really good. In more than one way.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/24386329

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/27805966