The MiniPC Revolution

I agree and already got two minipcs I selfhost a lot of stuff now. I just now realized it is basically the future Gabe Newell predicted and wanted to make with Steam Machines [1], but he was wrong by targeting gamers and a little too early (perhaps?). Maybe they will succeed precisely because of this revolution.

I got soooo tired setting up a gaming system for parties on my projector. There are so many various problems and tweaks, gamepads disconnecting if you put a hand between the gamepad and the pc/playstation etc. BSODs on windows, driver problems and stupid obscure things varying from pc to pc. I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations. I am too old to debug this stuff to play a game for so little time, I would rather not. I didn't really believe in steam machines at the time, but now I sort of do, especially with game streaming and local LLMs that might be hosted there now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)

MiniPC must either charge from USB-C or have an internal PSU. Those external power bricks are so annoying when you start adding more PCs to the cluster.

Counterpoints:

- Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc)

- can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstalling and reconfiguring OS's, services and software).

- less supported over time (I can still download driver upgrades in some cases, and find solutions if I run into something unexpected as the vendor is still in business and supporting the legacy model).

Full sized machines aren't difficult to build, and I've had great luck with second hand enterprise-targeted parts (eg. for a long time years back, used Mellanox Infiniband cards were dirt cheap on eBay because universities were upgrading to later generations, they were an order of magnitude faster than NIC's available at competing price points at the time, and as a bonus had lower latency). Older Areca RAID cards were great for SATA drives, easily upgradeable to new models, and I still have a few kicking around in production today.

Meanwhile neighbors have thrown out piles of ewaste and wasted time after their commodity junk failed unexpectedly.

I have a homelab which is a zimaboard, a dumb netgear switch, and six mini-pc's (5560U/16GB/500GB).

The zimaboard runs pfsense & an nginx reverse proxy, then all six of the mini-pcs run proxmox. 4 mini-pcs run k8s clusters (talos) and the other two run home services and selected one-offs (home-assistant, plex, bookstack, build-tools, gitea, origin servers for a subset of projects).

It was a lot easier to set up than I had expected. Its was still a massive PITA though. I got what I wanted out of it work-wise, and its a nice little novelty.

I've been thinking about ditching most of it for a while; I like the idea in the article about breaking it up - move one under the TV, one into the office, one under the stairs, and the remaining 3 + zimaboard I'm tempted to sell. I'd keep running proxmox on them, but I wouldn't link them up. The key thing that needs to happen for this to make sense is using something like cloudflare to route domains.

The part I never sorted properly was storage. It has 3TB of storage, but getting that storage into k8s for proper dynamic allocation without giving random nodes CPU perf issues was a too-long-for-one-session task which meant it never got finished. I was tempted to add a NAS, but most NAS's are horrid.

I have repurposed retired laptops for my tech lab at home. They no longer keep up with the current software bloat for wife and kids usage, but make reasonable linux servers. Currently serving up 3 databases on one, kafka and networking on another and services/applications on a third. They take up very little space under my desk.

> So you mean to tell me you’ve been using your torch to take a shit this last week because your light bulbs don’t work without the PC you watch Netflix on?

This made me laugh. I’ve currently got a home assistant controlled floor standing light in my bathroom because all the old school switch ones in ceiling are dead and landlord is being well a classic landlord

I recently did a 180 in my homelab. I had been getting better and better equipment, enterprise level, and I found that it took a lot mroe work and was a lot less fun than doing things the way I used to, which had been maximize small low cost systems. I enjoyed the jank, and going enterprise equipment eliminated jank. So I sold all the high end stuff and went back to miniPCs. My main VM host now is a Lenovo P3 Ultra with lots of RAM and storage, and I have a handful of other Dell Optiplex 3090 machines and a bunch of Raspberry Pis to run everything from. I enjoy it more, it's actually more stable, less expensive, quieter, and cheaper.

Intel chips dominate this space (with a far better price per GHz ratio than ARM or RISC-V); sad to see their slow downfall. Agree with others that you need active cooling to avoid premature burnout.

having had quite a bunch of MiniPCs, mostly from reputable brands (Intel NUC series back when Intel had those, then Gigabyte Brix series, then some cheapo china ones), I have moved away from those, because every single one of them (independently of the brand) ended up dying spuriously not long after warranty end and in any case far sooner than any µATX desktop would (in fact I've very rarely had any of the latter die; they usually live far beyond their phase out / replacement)

Even without wanting to attribute that to any malicious planned obsolescence, my impression is that the very small size of mini PCs makes it almost impossible for the manufacturer to ensure proper thermal management for keeping all components constantly at a temperature low enough for device longevity.

You can get MFF Dell/HP/Lenovo refurbs from Microcenter (and elsewhere) for 200-300 USD. Typically 9th or 10th gen i5 processors and 16 or 32 GB of RAM. You can fit them into 10 inch racks you can 3d-print (often with matching 3d printed brackets for a proper fit). We've been using them to replace some of our utility servers that we pay way too much for in the cloud (obviously that's a trade off of dollars for being concerned with security/management). We're treating them like cattle, deploying via K3S.

These look like fun technology, but I don’t even know what the use cases would be anymore. I don’t need something to control my lights: I have an actual light switch for that. I don’t have endless terabytes of media that I need to serve within my household, so I just don’t know anymore what I would use this stuff for. Twenty or thirty years ago, I loved having a home lab, but these days I’m just not sure what I would do with it.

Anyone have recommendations for a particular mini that'll run Fusion 360 acceptably? I know that's generally an app for "main machine" use but I'm curious if any of these have started straying into the performance zone that might make it doable.

Yes indeed, I'm running Proxmox on an Asus NUC Pro... thing. Can't remember the exact name.

I initially was recommended a "Minisforum" thing, which I did buy, but it absolutely hated Debian for reasons I don't understand. It would boot, but not reboot, so you'd have to power cycle it every time. Not practical.

The Asus also came with its own issues - it only supports one stick of RAM unless you do a BIOS update, so you have to be careful not to put both sticks in until after the update. Slightly crazy.

Not a home lab, but I have one mini-PC dedicated to driving a CO2 laser (that needs Windows). Another one dedicated to StepMania (an open DDR clone).

They're cheap enough that I don't mind dedicating one (or two) for specific tasks.

> You can get MiniPCs with 4-6 internal M.2 slots that are great for building a NAS with.

Where can I find that? My current Intel NUC has two M.2 slots and a SATA connection. If I were to relax the definition of a MiniPC to include mini ITX then yes I can find these, but given how the author talks about being all-in-one, I doubt the author is talking about mini ITX builds.

My minisforum mini PC died within two years seemingly our of the blue. Support won't return my emails.

what are some hardware people would recommend (specifically looking for power efficiency)?

I find the idea of a pc being "cheap and replaceable" a negative.

PCs take a lot of resources to make. We shouldn't encourage throw away culture any more than is necessary.

Just my opinion, though.

Would benefit from one or two small pictures. I guess MiniPC means like a Mac Mini or an Intel NUC?

> You can expect average power draws of 20-50W in usage and 6-12W in idle.

> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W.

Have you measured that? I think my full ATX desktop only idles around 30 watts. (With a bunch of apps running ofc) I took out the GPU to reach that, something was wrong with the power saving, feels like bad drivers.

That said... I'm not totally disagreeing. I have a mini PC running a couple web and P2P services. I'm trying to unburden my ATX so it can shut down at night to save power and do maintenance. And having more computers would shift me away from my "kitten" habits, so I'd abstract over hardware better.