Why Is Everyone Buying These? | Why Are Mini PCs So Popular? | Mini PC Buying Guide

have you been shopping for a computer on Amazon recently you might find that there are a lot of these mini PCS all over the place they seem to be some of the most popular systems across the whole site you might be asking yourself well why is that the case and I'm gonna explain to you right now some of the reasons that make these systems so popular and why I think they're only going to continue to grow in popularity to start off let's take a look at the really budget end of the market here here what we have is a gmk tech Nook box G1 now this is rocking an Intel n95 quad-core processor eight gigabytes of RAM and a 256 gigabyte SSD now this little system right here is actually surprisingly capable for how cheap it actually is and a lot of systems with this specific Hardware are some of the most popular on Amazon specifically the b-link units so in my testing I've actually found this Nook box to outperform the healing while being quieter and the overall construction of it is just better but the key advantages of this specific Hardware is actually the fact that the CPU in here even though it is a Celeron as in some of the lowest end that Intel has right now the IPC that it's at is pretty much at the level of Skylink which means that this little system right here will outperform pretty much any system that is an i5 from Intel's two thousand three thousand four thousand and perform identical to anything from the 6000. now it doesn't have hyper threading so because of that it won't perform as good as the i7s from that era but it's also extremely efficient so it uses pretty much no power at all and it is extremely Quiet Now intel did do some annoying things like artificially limit the performance of this system by making it only single Channel memory this is an artificial invitation because this level of Celeron has never been a single Channel support this is the first time that they've done it I think it's because the performance of this is starting to encroach towards a territory where it really calls into question the overall existence of the I3 if they're only keeping it at a quad core 8 thread CPU now because of this they really needed to do some artificial ways of limiting the performance on this thing in general this won't be a problem in the vast majority of workloads but it is something to keep in mind it's more of an annoyance more than anything else and in general this is still going to be more than adequate for what the vast majority of people are doing out there because one of the reasons that in general these mini PCS are as popular as they are right now is because what you need to do what you want on a computer is really not a whole lot if you're not gaming or doing video production or doing programming or anything like that if you are just using a computer for your day-to-day activities like using the internet doing your online banking doing your school work doing anything like that practically any computer out there can handle that if you have a computer from 2011 something with a I5 2400 you could do all of those tasks today with the fact that for less than a hundred and eighty bucks you can pick up a little system like this that will outperform anything from back then be in this extremely small box and use very little power being pretty much silent you're pretty much golden the fact that everything has transitioned to the cloud you know if you do things like use Office 365 or if you use Google Docs or Google G Suite in general well all of that is pretty much handled in the cloud anyway so that means that all you're getting here is a extremely quiet extremely efficient computer kind of is just small enough to get out of the way and what I love to actually use these little PCS for is actually just to use them as a replacement for Smart TV a lot of Smart TVs like built-in roku's and built-in Fire Sticks and things like that really are not that great for example if you are on Roku right now you don't have a Twitch app if you watch a lot of twitch well you just can't watch that on your smart TV and there has been times where different pieces of streaming Hardware have lost access to certain services like YouTube because of frivolous arguments between company you avoid all of that if you just use a PC and you get access to features like Adblock and you can pretty much access whatever services that you want you can pretty much just start storing and downloading all of your own favorite shows and you can even host your own alternative to Netflix with something like Plex or jellyfin and all of this you can do on this Hardware right here especially because of the fact that it actually has a very very good built-in Intel encoder decoder chip quick sync is one of Intel's best features and a system seller for sure you know what it's what makes this a very interesting piece of hardware for not a lot of money but let's move on into a little bit of the more expensive tier from here now we're taking a look at the category that is pretty much completely dominated by AMD hardware and that is of course the 200 to 350 dollar price range here are the two models you're looking at is the b-link ser5 and next to it is the Ace magician am06 now this Ace magician specific model you can find actually under a bunch of different names it seems to be just a very generic white label OEM Mini PC that any company could just pick up and slap their name on and looking on Amazon it seems like quite a few different companies actually end up doing that in general this price tier is almost exclusively dominated by AMD and for the most part the entire Mini PC market is dominated by AMD D you will occasionally find some Intel options that are at least compelling to a certain degree but AMD really seems to hit the balance in terms of igpu performance and CPU performance so you're usually going to be shopping in this tier if you're actually looking for a little bit more performance compared to what the n95 and all of its different derivatives will provide you and where that really comes from is the fact that on the cheap end here we're looking at something like a system with a ryzen 5 500 you know a 6 core 12 thread a CPU based on the zen2 architecture and it has a Radeon 7 High GPU so that is seven Vega based cores and of course now we are actually getting dual Channel memory in comparison to the n95 now in the last section I of course was talking about how the performance that people need for day-to-day tasks is really not that high at all so a four core four thread CPU might be more than enough where the vast majority of people out there and it does seem to be the case but the thing is is that while the requirements for what people want to do on the day-to-day have gone down some things have actually become more demanding that is Windows Windows does a lot of things in the background there are a huge amount of different background tasks if you've ever just seen the windows built-in antivirus just running and using up half of your CPU just because it's doing some random scan in the background you could understand how demanding Windows has pretty much gotten and that's where the benefit of a multi-core CPU like this really comes in even for General users out there whatever it is that is happening in the background it will never affect what you are doing on your day-to-day task because there are just so many cores out there the workloads are always going to be spread out and you will never really run into any limitations four cores without any hyper threading might be good enough for most tasks out there but doing practically anything is already going to put quite a bit of load on the CPU if Windows just just decides to do something in the background or if you leave something big in the background going it could actually start to affect your performance in other tasks in this category of Hardware that's just not going to be the case now for the most part though a lot of this can be relieved if you're out there shopping for refurbished systems from companies like HP or Dell you can usually find older i5s and i7s or cheaper prices than this and you can actually get some pretty great levels of performance now one of the downsides is that your GPU performance is going to be abysmal in comparison to these AMD mini PCS and of course you are going with used Hardware in general though the big selling point of these AMD systems is their igpus their igpus perform significantly better than than anything that Intel pretty much has across the board until you actually start to get into their dedicated graphics and amd's mobile GPU drivers are actually still significantly better than where Intel is at specifically if you like to play older titles now in this price category things do become a little muddy because there is just such a wide variety of different configurations you have models with the ryzen 5 500u you have models with the ryzen 5 5560 you had you have models with the ryzen 5 5600u you have models with the ryzen 5 5600h you have models with the ryzen 7 5800u and then the ryzen 7 5800h all around pretty much 20 to 30 dollars in price from each other and it can get kind of Muddy in terms of what exactly is worth getting in this price category and I'm gonna try to clear things up a little bit for you here if you're just looking for a computer that you can use every single day for your day-to-day task use it for school work use it for office work use it to just watch YouTube videos to go on Facebook to just do anything like that pretty much just go with whichever is the cheapest of this category here I think that if you have the disposable income for it I recommend going for this category just because again it does make the whole experience of using Windows so much easier to have this many cores just handling everything in the background you really don't need any more than this just make sure that you are actually getting something a little bit more recent I know that there's a lot of rise and based systems out there that are still on three thousand they can definitely be worth considering but I think that the sooner you get the hardware in there the longer term your support is going to end up being and I think that overall for a system that you're going to be using for tasks like that something like this could actually last you a very long time so get getting as many security updates and things like that that you can is just an overall good practice now if gaming is something that you really care about then here is the main takeaways here TDP is the most important thing of any of these systems here it doesn't really matter whether it says it's a 5500u or a 5600u or a 5600 H or anything like that TDP is the most important factor and unfortunately a lot of these companies hide this information or sometimes they even give misleading information specifically the listing for the trig key ryzen 5 500u system that I bought actually listed its PDP at 15 watts but when I got it its default TDP was actually set to 25 watts now this is a welcome surprise and I think that this is actually a better indicator of an overall better product but if I was looking for a system with a TDP of 15 watts then I actually just got lied to I think it could have been just as easily the reverse now the ace magician system here actually has a ryzen 5 5600u but it performs worse than the 5500u system here because it has only a 15 watt TDP that is going to be the biggest indicator of performance so what I can recommend is of course the b-link scr5 Mini PC series as well as the trig key speed S5 because both of these I can confirm come at a 25 watt TDP which is exactly what you want for gaming if gaming is what you care about I really would not go for the ace magician system here if CPU performance is all you care about the lower TDP just means that it uses less power but it actually does give you a little bit better CPU performance than the ryzen 5 500u at 15 watts even though the 5500u is at 25 watts but there are some games to be games to be made there but in general this will cover what 99 of users out there will ever really need you know tomorrow Facebook is not going to become more demanding YouTube is not going to become more demanding we've had 4K content now for a very long time and the vast majority of people out there are still only watching things at 1080p video content at this point is all just handled by specific ships that are just designed to process that kind of information at a very very low wattage so your CPU isn't even doing anything when you're watching videos and things like Excel and office Hardware requirements are not going to just suddenly Skyrocket most of this is handled in the cloud nowadays anyway so this is why this is the most popular Hardware right now and I think that it's only going to become more popular because of the fact that all of this is based off of mobile Hardware this is the hardware in here was actually designed to go into laptop because that's where the market has been now for the last decade PCS have fallen out of favor and laptops have really just taken over as as the most important section so they get the most attention in terms of development and what has happened now is that if you want the most advanced apus if you want the most advanced Hardware out there that is designed to be used in a low package with low power but still provides decent performance it's the mobile Apu Market where it's at the desktop Apu Market has pretty much been left behind now for quite a while to the point where if you want the best apus in the world you have to get these systems that are using mobile processors and I think that this is only going to become a more and more common Trend because Apu performance is getting to the point now where we're probably one or two generations away from the vast majority of the most popular titles out there being able to be played with an igpu at high refresh rate with decent graphic settings we're already there for a lot of time so this is why you are seeing these systems everywhere and why they're going to continue to grow on popular polarity because the performance is pretty much there for the vast majority of people they're extremely tiny and efficient and they're extremely low cost for the most part now if you want really high performance out of an APU yeah you're going to be spending a lot of money and they're really not worth it for the vast majority of people if you're looking for a gaming Mini PC I really just recommend going with the minutes forums Neptune series here it really is just the most ideal in terms of giving you an actual good gaming experience because it has a built-in graphics card while still maintaining a relatively small package but outside of that these mini PCS are definitely worth considering especially if you're looking for systems for your family for yourself or school for your kids for school a computer to give Grandma anything like that these are just great for pretty much everybody and give you more than enough Hardware that you will never have to really touch them again until something catastrophic happens but anyways I'll catch you in the next one

Channel: EVO Tech

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Id: wCiUQRziYvY

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023