I've been buying miniPCs since the days of Intel and Microsoft subsidizing shitty Bay Trail compute sticks. Even those were plenty powerful running a bunch of t

I've been buying miniPCs since the days of Intel and Microsoft subsidizing shitty Bay Trail compute sticks. Even those were plenty powerful running a bunch of terminals connected to other machines doing hard work. I used to have one stuffed behind my monitor. They're also were laughably bad under Windows but pretty amazing under Linux. Modern ones with Intel N95 CPUs are actually fairly impressive for the price. The N95 is roughly the equivalent of a Sandy Bridge era i5 which is plenty of power for what I'm using them for. They've also were under $150 IIRC. My N95 systems have SODIMM slots for RAM and m.2 slots for storage. They're also got two Ethernet ports I set as a bonded interface so they get ~2Gbps to each other (and my NAS) on the same switch. My unofficial tips: - Get miniPCs with barrel adapters for power rather than USB. A lot of cheap ones like the old Bay Trail sort used microUSB for power and that's just terrible (sorry Raspberry Pis) - You'd be surprised at how powerful an N95 or AMD equivalent APU actually is these days. Outside of compiling, 3D rendering, or AI inference such machines are rarely CPU-bound. - Get black tape to put over stupid lights and front LCD screens that can't be controlled in Linux. - Avoid Windows on such machines and just go with Linux. Ubuntu and Mint fly on them out of the box, lighter DEs fly even faster. As servers they can host an impressive number of services that aren't compute-bound. Hardware video encoding means even stuff like Jellyfin is really light.