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Good mini PC for around 100€
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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If I were you, I would look at the chinese offerings on aliexpress. If you carefully read the spec sheets, you can find excellent price/performance
Just looked around and there are mini PCs for around 130€ with Intel N100 CPUs, which have a 6W TDP, AV1 decoding and they beat an i5 6500T (that one's in a 130€ Dell Optiplex I found on ebay) in single core and gets close enough in multicore. Is there some kind of catch I'm not seeing with that CPU? Because it looks perfect for my use case.
The N100 has a reputation for decent performance and good power efficiency at a cheap price. It's a basic quad core CPU with only efficiency cores (no performance cores) and no hyperthreading, but it comes with modern codec capabilities. It will certainly give you more power than a Raspberry Pi for everyday tasks, but don't expect to do anything too demanding with it. If your needs are basic an N100 mini PC seems like a good option.
Can't quite speak for the n100 but I got a n305 one of these "China PCs" it's passively cooled (which was important since it's running in my bedroom) and seems to have amazing performance for what I need (I put jellyfin on there). I'm quite happy after futzing around with ARM SBCs and external drives this just works so well.
I can't comment on the performance but yeah.. 6500t is what, 8 years old at this point? N100 is a year old. Tech can improve a lot in that time.
One catch is that you have to assume it's gonna be sending data to China or at least have a hidden backdoor, possibly both. That may not matter depending on what they are doing.
Another catch is that the hardware design is bad. They usually cheap out and those machines have close to no ESD protection on all I/O ports. A simple short in a USB device will most likely kill the motherboard and/or CPU.
When looking at these it seems I can only find models with "EU plugs" even though I am shipping to a US address, all the items with "US plugs" are greyed out. I assume the only difference is the wall socket, right? Are the sockets on the power supplies universal?
Generally... Power supplies these days are auto-switching capable (so they can use 120v or 220v).
BUT...I don't know specifically if these units do so (so it's a very good question).
I would guess that since they're capable of 220v (which is EU), they're more likely to be auto switching than something specifically marketed for 110v (US).
I haven't seen a manually switched 110v/220v power supply in years - they've all been auto switching.
But I wouldn't assume either - I could totally see manufacturers in China making 220v-only units without auto-switching, to save a few pennies.