this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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What are people doing with these mini PCs?
I use 4 of them. 2 run services, one being primaries (DNS, Mail, etc), and the other secondary services and backups of the first. 2 more are CARPed OpnSense boxes.
I needed to replace my old server which was my old desktop, and I grabbed some deals from Aliexpress for cheap. Now I have redundant disks and machines, which is nice.
Edit: And I chose low power options, so all 4 use less power than my old server.
So no one is actually gaming on them, right? Because that sounds really dumb.
There's low resource games that would do fine. You aren't gonna be able to run a graphics intense FPS, but I've seen people run Minecraft, stardew valley and the like on minis.
I've got one running Batocera, and it works just fine as a little emulator console. Not something I would want to do any kind of modern PC gaming on, but good for my specific use case
Actually, we use an Intel n150 miniPC for playing Zwift with the bike trainer. So I guess I have 5.
I didn't realize you could run Zwift on your own PC...
mini PC things.
...or PC things, but mini.
Super helpful, thanks
I have one as a media server
Anything else?
Proxmox server, *arr stack, Jellyfin, dns filtering, reverse proxy, home assistant, plant management, file server, archive warrior ...
Want me to continue?
Besides a server...
It's a decent 1080p gaming rig. Obviously you need to manage expectations but these AMD iGPUs are very capable.
What is?
Anything you'd need a smaller system for that a laptop/notebook can't achieve but a traditional deskrop/sff system is to big for.
In the end it's just a small PC.
It's not going to do anything you can't do with a laptop because they're using laptop processors.
Too big how?
What would be the advantage using one of these over, say, a raspberry pi?
Stability and resiliency you get from a system like this. Obviously stacking a Ryzen 7 against any RPI is not possible / fair really.
If you have a RPI around, it is a great starting point for a lot of thjngs. At some moment ypu will just want something can be extended, doesn't rely on SD card, isn't too picky about which SSD you give it etc.
ARM vs x86(x64)
Besides that: Performance (and not even that considering what iMacs can provide)
Besides that? Probably not much else.
Technically a Pi (-clone) suffices for most tasks.