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Looking for a "mini PC", won't be used for anything too stressful, just general office applications and the like.
There are literally hundreds on ebay from a range of manufacturers.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
Happy with my minisforum jobby. good spec for the price.
I've used Intel NUCs for quite a few years. They aren't the cheapest around, but they're a good thing to benchmark other makers against. You can buy fully built PCs or kits. For the former, you take it out of the box, plug in a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and you're up and running. With kits, you need to buy a hard disk and RAM, plus a copy of Windows. Whichever way you go, get a decent SDD and 8 GB RAM at a minimum. Better to pay a bit more up front than to try to cheap out and have to pay more later.
I bought a decent spec (16Gb gen 10 i5) refurbished Lenovo Thinkcentre (just as good as an NUC but cheaper 😃) mini PC off eBay a couple of years back for just over £300 to use as a home server, so worth looking at 2nd hand I'd say (assuming you aren't already!!) If you don't need anything as powerful you'd be able to get something even cheaper.
I bought a decent spec (16Gb gen 10 i5) refurbished Lenovo Thinkcentre
I've had good experiences with Lenovo laptops in the past so I might go with one of them.
There is a 16gb i7 1tb Lenovo for £240 on Ebay.
@gobuchul if that's the same one I've just looked up (seller pcfixtech) then I wouldn't... it's [I]ancient[/I]. Gen (generation) 4 - think we're up to 13 now? So it's literally almost a 10 year old computer! New-ness is much more critical to performance than whether it's i3/5/7 etc. Don't get suckered in by the fact it's an i7!
Don’t get suckered in by the fact it’s an i7!
Thanks for that. Didn't realise there was such a difference.
I stopped following CPU development around about Pentium 3!
Any comments on this one?
8gb i5 8th gen 1tb for £305.
It's getting on a bit now but my Acer Veriton has been excellent, mine is N4660G which is i3-8100. Tiny, quiet with one small fan, tool free to swap bits, takes M2 SSD and a HDD, 16GB RAM and loads of ports, and comes with a bracket to mount it on the VESA screws on the back of the monitor. If you get a N4660 it'll certainly be fine for office stuff today and maybe a few more years but newer would be better.
Edit: here's a newer version of mine.
Yeah you have to be a bit carefull with cpu generations...
Nuc and simmilar small form factor PCs will also be using. laptop CPUs which are typically cut down versions of their desktop equivalents. They use less power, but they are also not as capable as their pure breed desktop equivalents
For example a 6th generation i7 won't even run windows 11. You'd be better off with a 12th or 13th generation i3 or i5, or AMD equivalent... Depending on your usage.
A good general indicator is if it takes DDR3 memory or lower.. It's already obsolete and not worth buying... Or at least not worth buying brand new.
A lot of the cheaper small form factor PC vendors are pumping out a load of rubbish old stock, as nuc's and equivalent small form factor PCs are essentially limited to laptop components, due to the limited physical space and very limited cooling potential.
underspecced, overpriced!! although I've no real feel for the market these days tbh, but (without being able to specifically recommend this seller obviously) here's a newer one with double the RAM for less money: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/276025207712
> https://www.backmarket.co.uk/en-gb/p/lenovo-thinkcentre-m920q-tiny-core-i5-8500t-21-ssd-1000-gb-8gb/965aa4a3-3a99-4e83-9e1e-16ed7500d37c#l=10 < 8gb i5 8th gen 1tb for £305.
I wouldn't get too focussed on having a big SSD, I'm sure they're easily upgradable anyway but equally can just plug an external drive into it via USB-3 without any real performance penalty.
For example a 6th generation i7 won’t even run windows 11. You’d be better off with a 12th or 13th generation i3.
These things are more confusing than Shimano groupsets.
For example a 6th generation i7 won’t even run windows 11. You’d be better off with a 12th or 13th generation i3.
If you're buying a used PC, it'll run Win10. There's no real performance benefit to Win11 at the moment. In a few years, Win10 support will end, but that's not really an issue if you're buying a cheap used machine.
Don't know your budget, but if paying over £300 you're getting close to buying new prices, £429 with trade in.
https://www.ebuyer.com/1536805-hp-pro-mini-400-g9-desktop-pc-intel-core-i3-12100t-up-to-6b2d1ea-abu
Nuc's or SFF PCs typically are not cheap though..
Basically you have to ask yourself a question..
Do I really need a laptop/SFF pc, or do I have the space for an ATX standard smallish PC case?
If you absolutely have to have the smallest box possible, then you will have to pay for it in terms of cost, performance and future upgradability.
I got my dad sorted for one of these. I needed one with Windows so a slightly smaller choice as I didn’t want the hassle of licensing. He’s happy. NUC, current CPU, 16GB, 1TB SSD for £500 ish and I had a spare monitor at home and got new keyb/mouse from Argos.
Horses for courses really... My graphics card probably weighs more than that entire box! 😉
At least it's a fairly modern system.
And small form factor power supplies are very expensive compared to standard ATX power supplies..
So aside from swapping out the SSD/m. 2 for more internal storage.. It looks like it's pretty much non-upgradable.
I got my dad a Trigkey one off amazon in May to replace an ageing early Intel NUC I'd given him years ago. They change spec often but I got a 11th gen 4-core Celeron N5095 with 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD for about £140.
Ran it as my desktop for a week to check it was OK (I was a little wary at the price) and it did great for the usual office, browsing, etc. Blazing fast compared to his old one.
I think this is the current equivalent spec with a newer CPU, same RAM/storage at £124 after voucher: https://www.amazon.co.uk/8109U-TRIGKEY-Speed-Personal-Computer/dp/B09P88NLKK
And a celeron N is basically a mobile phone cpu! Lol,
You'd be better off buying a pixel phone and plugging that into your monitor.
Yeah I bought the Scan one for my dad on the basis that I have no intention of upgrading. Power supply was included but no idea if there’s anything special or costly about it.
A Pixel phone is more than three times the price on the Celereon mini PC that simon_g linked to.
It should be fine for a basic user's needs.
My father in law ended up with a refurbed lenovo thinkcentre from laptops directbfor photo editing (he's a wedding photographer).
His pal got one of those geekom mini pcs for general browsing.
Both were happy with what they got, I'd be happy with either for a given application.
As said before don't be fooled with i7, i5 etc, it's going out and buying a Mondeo, forgetting there is about 30 years between the newest and oldest versions. The ebay refurb are mostly pigs in pokes.
My (hopefully soon replaced) work laptop has an i7-7500u. Lower cpumark than the Celeron in the Trigkey I bought 🙃
The modern quad-core Celerons are really capable things.
What about a Ryzen 5 based one?
This one comes out at £260.
Well I bought the one in the link above.
Set it up yesterday and it sings along, not doing anything particularly heavy though.
The Beelink ones are crazy value but the support is poor. No European service center so if it craps out you have to post it to China for repair. If you get a good one then it won't be an issue.
this is annoying, today they have a deal on a higher spec machine for even less money!
£253 for this one with a Ryzen5 5560U.
this is annoying, today they have a deal on a higher spec machine for even less money!
The first rule of buying electronics is never do a price check for at least six months after you buy anything.