The Mini PC You SHOULD Be Looking At

I love raspberry pies and other single board computers but they can often be underpowered incompatible with software or just really expensive I also love desktop computers for their performance and expandability but they can often just take up a lot of space I mean look at my office right now for example what if you need something small and efficient that also has great performance and compatibility we'll get ready to Chuck those raspberry pies and kick your desktop to the curb because this might be a much better solution [Music] now stay curious isn't just something I say at the end of my videos and have on my hat it's something I try to do which is why I'm really glad to talk about today's sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online learning community where you can discover and take courses and even teach them I'm still fairly new as a content creator and I'm trying really hard to make my videos look better and skillshare is a great tool for me because I can find amazing courses on video editing and lighting to take my videos to another level and I haven't talked about this on the channel yet but I'm actually planning to go full time and I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to business stuff so being able to take courses on things like entrepreneurship is huge for me because while I could learn a lot of this elsewhere it's great to be able to find a good course and watch it on my own time if you're looking to learn a new skill or improve something you already have you should definitely check out skillshare and right now the first thousand people to click the link in the description will get one month free so definitely head down there and once again thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this video the Raspberry Pi is just fine it's all good I recently made a video covering some Raspberry Pi alternatives for Home Server use and I got quite a few comments asking me why I didn't mention used Mini PCS and honestly I should have while single board computers can be a good fit in certain applications used one liter PCS as they are often called can be a really great bang for the buck for a lot of applications they're obviously small and generally pretty efficient but also have x86 CPUs meaning you can basically run any operating system or software making them a great fit for basic use desktops Media or game streaming PCS simple home servers or even nodes in a budget kubernetes or proxmox cluster today we'll be checking out this HP Elite desk 800 G3 mini which I picked up used on eBay for fifty dollars technically it was listed as four parts because it was bioslocked but that was a pretty easy fix I'm actually working on a full video covering bios and power unlocked PCS so maybe get subscribed if you want to check that out the PC was a bit dirty and beat up with a few cracks in the case and busted Wi-Fi antenna but no major issues the elite desk 800 G3 mini comes in a few configurations but mine came with an Intel Skylake Core i5 6500t a four core four thread processor with a base clock of 2.5 gigahertz and a boost clock of 3.1 gigahertz it's nothing crazy but should be pretty efficient the G3 mini also came with a single eight gigabyte stick of ddr4 but that can pretty easily be upgraded to 64 gigabytes if you really want to mine didn't include any storage but it has room for an m.2 in vme or two and a half inch SATA drive obviously there's not a ton of options for storage but that's one of the trade-offs when you go with a one liter form factor there's also the m.2e slot for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth but if you don't need Wireless functionality this can be swapped out for something more useful like two and a half gigabit per second networking or even a coral TPU for AI acceleration to use with something like frigate for example I had plans to try out two and a half gigabit networking thanks to this optional DisplayPort you can remove on the back but sadly the thing I ordered didn't come in on time so I might post a follow-up because that can be kind of cool after working with this Elite desk for a bit I can say that I'm mostly really happy with it it's simple solid and very small and for the most part is pretty easy to work on for example you can swap the ram without a single tool just slide the latch on the back to take the top cover off and then flip up the CPU fan and you got the ram pretty cool swiping the nvme drive is a bit more of a pain though as you need to remove three Torx screws to remove the caddy and then there's also this awkward SATA ribbon cable that seems very easy to break the Lenovo m715q I covered a little while back was much better in this regard only requiring you to remove a single thumb screw to get the drive caddy out I was pretty impressed with the efficiency of the 800 G3 and the I5 6500t at least at idle where it only drew around seven and a half Watts from the wall while on the Windows 10 desktop later on when running Linux I actually got the idle power draw down to only a little bit over 6 Watts but I'll talk more on that later before testing it out I disassembled everything and got it all cleaned up it really wasn't too dirty but I just like to get used Hardware like this looking and running as good as possible [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] ing it up and adding in a 256 gigabyte SSD I installed Windows 10 to run a few benchmarks for a bit of comparison I'll be adding in results from a Lenovo m715q gen2 which has a ryzen 5 2400 GE as well as a Dell Optiplex 790 with an older I5 2400 starting off with PC Mark 10 the elite desk managed an essential score of 6443 productivity score of 4541 and a Content score of 2615. this is a bit lower than the m715q but those are typically a bit more expensive in cinebench R15 the HP scored a three-run average of 448 which puts it a bit above the Intel i5 2400 but a ways off from the 2400 GE cinebench R23 multi-core finished with a score of 2828 which isn't that far behind the m715q and a noticeable improvement over the older I5 2400 I tested power draw from the wall while idling at the desktop as well as when Running Center bench R23 and you can see that the elite desk managed to only draw seven and a half Watts at idle but did jump up to just over 40 Watts under load granted that's still less than the idle power draw of the older Dell Optiplex that it beat out in all three benchmarks benchmarks are great and all but let's move on to some more of the fun things that this guy can do while it might work for some light gaming the integrated graphics on this are going to be a massive limitation but if you have a gaming PC already you can totally use parsec on this to stream your games anywhere and the integrated Graphics worked really well for transcoding video with almost no noticeable latency I also did a little bit of emulation with this doing some PS2 emulation and it handled that fairly well I would test some Nintendo emulators but honestly I just don't want to deal with Nintendo I'm a big fan of self-hosting and these are perfect for building your first Home Server or as an addition to your existing home lab especially if you're looking for cheap nodes for a cluster to play around with self-hosting a bit I installed proxmox so that I could run some virtual machines and containers and this is like I said earlier when I got power draw to come all the way down to six and a half Watts although it didn't stay there once I started spinning up some virtual machines I set up a Debian VM to run Casa OS and ran some simple containers like home assistant with no issues for a nice bit of nostalgia I even set up a Windows XP VM and it ran great although I still have no idea how to play solitaire I also set up an lxc container for jellyfin to test out media streaming and hardware transcoding and for most codecs Hardware accelerated transcoding works great unfortunately the Skylake CPUs don't support agvc 10-bit decoding but if that's something you need you can always look for one of these that comes with a newer cable Lake CPU as that feature was added for the 7th gen Intel CPUs one of the biggest downsides to something like this at least in a Home Server application is the lack of storage options obviously I wouldn't recommend this for a budget Nas because there's no place to put multiple drives if you're only wanting to put your Plex or jellyfin library on here you could throw caution to the wind and toss something like a two or four terabyte two and a half inch hard drive in here but that would leave you with no parity if your drive fails you could add in a two Bay USB drive enclosure but those can get kind of expensive and I wouldn't trust them for anything much more Mission critical than a simple media library if you're looking for a budget Plex or jellyfish machine get subscribed because I'm actually about to be working on a video for that as well now just for fun I did try throwing in a Xeon E3 1275 V5 which is a four quart eight thread Xeon but I didn't really expect it to work because it's an 85 watt or 80 watt TDP one of those two and this power supply only can provide 65 Watts I think so I didn't expect it to work and of course it didn't but I thought it was worth giving a shot I did try installing 32 gigabytes or two 16 gigabyte sticks of ddr4 and that actually worked just fine if you're interested in the elite desk 800 G3 or other similar systems you can find a lot of good deals on eBay if you're patient you might also keep an eye out for the 800 Gen 2 as those can often be a bit cheaper and still have almost if not identical specs just be careful to read the descriptions carefully as many of these are sold as Bare Bones and or don't include the power adapter hopefully you enjoyed this video and if so make sure to leave a like that actually really helps the channel if you find these types of PCS interesting maybe check out this video here where I built a kubernetes cluster with three mini PCS that's about it for this one though so as always thank you guys so much for watching stay curious and I really hope to see you in the next one foreign

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 465,447

Keywords: Mini PC, Raspberry Pi alternative, Home server, Node for cluster, Media PC, Game streaming, Parsec streaming, Jellyfin, Hardware transcoding, Budget NAS, Solid-state drive, Low power consumption, Small form factor, Efficient, Desktop computer, HP Elitedesk 800 G3 Mini, Used mini PCs, hp 800, elitedesk, mini, budget mini pc, budget server, budget homelab, cheap raspberry pi, mini pc server

Id: amVP96OYfUg

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023