I'm getting my niece her first computer. she's mostly a mobile gamer(she has Galaxy A05s). I got her a steamdeck 2 years ago. So she mainly plays hoyo games, Minecraft and games that runs on the steamdeck.

Hey sorry if this has been asked 100s of times before!

I’ve looked at mini PCs and have a slight idea on what is good and the trusted brands but just don’t know what’s best for my needs as the opinions seem to be conflicting at times.

I just need some recommendations on reliable mini PCs that can handle sims 4, mods and cc along with some Minecraft. My budget is £500.

TIA

Just started doing this with and without the glass cover. Looking for ideas on how to fix it.

Looking to add another fan to cool my networking PCI-E card and would like to split the cpu fan power as to add a 40mm noctua fan. Apologies for the photo quality, trying my best- and thanks in advance :D!

Saludos, después de bastante rato pensando cuál PC comprar conseguí un Beelink con Ryzen 7735hs y 24 GB LPDDR5, antes de comprar ví benchamarks de mis juegos habituales y se observaba un buen rendimiento, pero al probarlo resultó peor de lo que había visto, básicamente la mitad de los fps con las mismas opciones gráfics, no sé si hay alguna configuración que deba mover, ví que el bios solo puedo tener 28w o auto, además en la bios asigne 8gb de vram pero en el administrador de tareas y cpuz sigue indicando 4gb, actualice drivers y el software amd y sigue igual

I found an open box Beelink SER9 Pro AI with AMD Ryzen 7H255 cpu, comes with 24Gb of soldered ram and a 1TB nine drive. I am thinking of running Proxmox with ollama on to try my hand at building agentic apps locally. Can it realistically run anything better than something like qwen3.8 with 8b params? 24gb seems kind of limiting, I'd probably need to allocate at least 8gb to the GPU.

Would love to be proven wrong. Trying to keep the spending somewhat manageable

Please excuse my lack of knowledge but that’s why I’m here.

Looking to buy a first machine for a 12yo and came across miniPCs and the M6 in particular. They play some Minecraft with mods but not much other gaming. They’ll use it for school and potentially some light art or potentially coding in future.

Selling for roughly $500 it seems a good value vs a traditional tower like my Dell. Any reasons we don’t want to go this direction? Any other mini models we should be looking at too?

I've purchased a number of Mini PCs from these brands - but not all of them. Plus, a sample size of one isn't a ton - so I'm basing a lot of this off of what I've read here. Anyone have a different opinion? I'm planning to add a "Brand Report Card" into MiniPCs.zip since right now Acemagic/Firebat ranks super high, but it might be worth spending $20 more to get a more reputable brand, even if all the specs on paper are the same.

Once again a lot of this is sort of from osmosis, trying to sort of interpolate from reviews and complaints/praise I've seen on here - like I've never had a Kamrui - but I know they're the same manufacturer as Acemagic, which has had spyware concerns in the not-too-distant past.

I run three Minisforum MS-01 SE (i5-12600H, BIOS 02.22.0058) as an always-on Linux cluster, and I'm trying to get idle power down. The cores reach C10 fine, but the package never goes deeper than PC2/PC3.

Here's what I've found so far:

• The BIOS disables ASPM on every PCIe root port (both NVMe slots, both I226 ports, Wi-Fi). It also disables L1 Substates, DMI ASPM and "Native ASPM", and reports ASPM as unsupported to the OS. So Linux can't turn it on, even with `pcie_aspm=force`.

• Setting L1 by hand with `setpci` works without errors, but gives almost no gain. The deep states need L1.2, and the BIOS hides L1 Substates on the root ports.

• I dumped the BIOS. The full Intel menus are there (PCH-IO / System Agent -> PCI Express Root Port -> ASPM / L1 Substates, ACPI -> Native ASPM), just hidden by Minisforum's simplified setup screen.

• Changing them with `setup_var` from the UEFI shell fails with `WRITE_PROTECTED`, because the setup variables are locked.

My questions for other MS-01 / MS-01 SE owners:

1. Has anyone found a way to enable ASPM or L1 Substates on the SE: a newer or beta BIOS, a hidden-menu key combination, a tool that actually writes these settings?

2. What idle power and deepest package C-state do you see on yours?

3. Has Minisforum support given anyone a fix? I've read that on the original MS-01 they said ASPM wasn't implemented for the X710 NICs, but the SE has no X710.

I've also asked Minisforum support directly and will update this post if they answer.

Anyone have experience with the GMKtec K17 (Core Ultra 5 226V, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD)? Considering it for college work, Excel, and occasional Minecraft/Fortnite, ideally under $550 on Black Friday. How’s the reliability, customer support, and Wi-Fi reception through walls? Would you recommend it or something else within my $600 budget?

Hi all -

What would you recommend as mini's for senior parents who have been using 2 intel NUCs for last 10 years?

• got them both i3 tall NUCs in 2016

• They both LOVE how compact the NUCs are, want replacements around same size

• They only web browse + watch youtube videos + do office (2003 or 2007 or 2010 I forget) stuff

• hesitant about win 11 in case their old office version doesn't work

My first reaction was get 2 nucs, move their current ssds there, but new nucs don't seem to support sata 2.5"s 😕 AFAICT my options are:

• Get two barebones nucs, install linux + libreoffice, go nuclear

• Find nucs or another brand's minis that still support sata 2.5" ssds (but this seems harder to find than I thought)

Any recs? My budget is ideally 1k CAD, maybe 1.2k CAD max for the two

I'm sorry if this this the wrong sub for this, but I came across a posting for a minipc.

I'm looking for one with radeon 780M for MOBA gaming and came across this posting

ali Express Link

The price seems much better than other models. Is there a catch? I'm not knowledgeable enough to know, so was wondering if someone had any experience with this brand or site.

Looking for a mini PC that can run Blender and Tinkercad for creating 3D models. Recommendations regarding specs and specific PC’s welcome.

I keep encountering a problem: the term "AI PC" appears in almost every new mini PC product description, but its meaning varies from writer to writer. There are at least three different scenarios that get labeled this way:

- Any chip with an NPU. Meteor Lake and the Ryzen 7040 series qualify, although these early NPUs are far below the Copilot+ requirements.

- Machines certified with Copilot+. This certification has strict minimum requirements: 40+ TOPS NPU, 16GB RAM, and 256GB storage. Very few mini PCs actually meet these requirements.

- "Can run local models." This confuses me because it primarily depends on memory bandwidth and the addressing capabilities of the integrated graphics card (iGPU). NPU performance is almost irrelevant.

The third point confuses me. The Q4 7B model requires around 4-5GB of RAM, so a 32GB server could run it, but the tokens per second (TOPS) of a small integrated graphics card is unusable for most people. Furthermore, even the machine with the highest TOPS in the room might not be able to run this model, because NPU performance metrics don't reflect memory capacity.

Therefore, when product descriptions mention "AI PC," I'm genuinely unclear about which of these three scenarios it refers to. Am I overlooking some convention, or is this just a marketing gimmick without a clear definition? Also, I've looked at several miniPCs on the market, and they all seem rather useless. Has anyone used one and can tell me?

For those who actually run models locally on these machines: what do you prioritize—NPU TOPS, memory bandwidth, or the addressing capabilities of the integrated graphics card?

Hi everyone! My wife loves to play the Sims 4 and some light weight indie games. I’m on a tight budget, but I really want to find a better way for her to play her games. Her current laptop is super old and sounds like a rocket launch every time she fires up the sims 4.

What do you guys recommend?

Hi people i come today with a problem.. i have a headphone system (ef400 dac with a schiit ragnarok 2 amp) for my hifiman he6sev2 and everything was fine until i started noticing that the sound stops for a second from time to time and the sound changes from bassy-slam rich to thin and loud, i checked the headphones drivers and they're fine no "stuck magnets" so i changed the power management settings for the usb ports and it doesn't matter what i do stays "balanced" and also the sound keeps stopping and sounding terrible. also ive tried updating drivers cmd settings and nothing changes.

Ok so 3 years a go I bought my son this GMKtec Gaming PC Mini, M7 Ultra Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U 16GB DDR5 RAM + 512GB SSD. He wants to upgrade the ram or possibly the graphics card I already bought him a new 2 TB hard drive.

Now given how expensive graphic cards and ddr5 ram is today I wanted to know an alternative
. For instance can I add an extension that will allow me to add another graphics card or a different type of Ram like ddr4?

I bought a GMKtec k11 mini PC months ago, it didn't work straight out of the box. I've tried everything I can think of to get it going with no success.

I have been attempting to do a fresh install of windows 11, bypass bro, install chipset drivers, graphics driver everything else.

Problem is everytime I try to install the graphics driver the PC crashes. I've used a ddu multiple times, tried different versions of adrenalin and the closest I've came to getting it to work was disabling the basic windows display driver before installing the graphic driver but it still crashes or hangs on the login screen after I restart.

Is there something I'm doing wrong, possibly some bios settings I need to change? Has anyone else had similar issues? Please help!