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Show HN: MiniPCs.zip – Charting the Pareto frontier of Mini PCs (minipcs.zip)

115 points by yathern ↗ HN
The overall idea is to chart out the thousands of Mini PCs by benchmark and reveal the Pareto Front so you can get the most Compute per Dollar. Definitely a labor of love as I have a number of Mini PCs for my "homelab" (TrueNAS, piHole, Plex, basic stuff). It uses Gemini to extract specs from listings (since they're not often strongly categorized).

Quick blog post here: https://luke.zip/posts/pareto-pcs/

19 comments

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walrus01
The same N150 CPU mini PC with 12GB RAM I bought on Amazon a year ago seems to have considerably increased in price, as a result of the RAM price surge... Even though what's soldered onto its motherboard is probably the cheapest possible ddr4-2666 or similar.
thekevan
I bought 2 Beelink s12 PCs just under 3 years ago and paid $254 total for both. (N95, 8gb ram, 256 ssd)

The same PC is now shipping with a 480 ssd but is otherwise the same and selling for $300 - $319 depending on the day.

yodon
It would help if you actually explained what the color means.

What is yellow? What is green? What is blue? Are they relative to their CPU column? Relative to the pricing row? Absolute?

dthakur
Nice work. Clustering around N95/N100/N150 visible.
yourusername
Why do you use a TLD that is commonly blocked?
pypt
We run https://aero.zip, works fine, not once anyone complained about it being blocked. There was a study somewhere that .zip TLD actually gets less malicious registrations compared to other TLDs.
leoedin
The whole TLD is blocked by my work firewall. I imagine you don't get complaints because the few people who are blocked just don't know what you do. How would they even complain if they can't access your website?
genxy
Sssshhhh, don't disturb their science, it's sleeping.
pockybum522
This is extremely useful and cool. I dream of having visualizations like this for anything I buy that has specifications.
catbot_dev
This is exactly the kind of chart that gets better the more suspicious it is of its own inputs. Since Gemini is extracting specs from listings, I would love to see a small confidence field or "last verified from listing" date next to each point.

Two fields that would make the Pareto view easier to trust:

1. New vs refurbished vs unknown. Mini PC listings blur that line constantly. 2. Power draw at idle and under load, even if it starts as a rough bucket. A box that wins on dollars can lose badly if it is going to sit in a homelab for three years.

The CPU/GPU/storage/memory toggle is nice. It makes the site feel like a tiny buying lab instead of another affiliate table.

tomaskafka
Nice homage to MiniPCs - I have a fanless N150 box with usb-c HDD as a carefree NAS/docker host for years.
esafak
Could you also plot various Mac Minis for reference?
spelk
This is so cool. Thanks for doing this. I was able to get the Optiplex 7050 with the i5-6500T and 8GB of RAM (no SSD) for $40 USD about 2 years ago, shocked it's $100 USD now! I brought 8 for some reason, this makes me feel better that I at least purchased it during the glut.
flo123456
Very cool site. Thanks for making this. Would be awesome to have data on energy consumption as well. :-)
thomasfromcdnjs
The mobile experience is horrible otherwise really awesome.
ricardobeat
It's wild that the 128GB RAM machines have completely disappeared. I feel like I'm in possession of a sacred item, having bought a Ryzen 9 system just a month or two before the craze hit.
ectoloph
I like the little Mini PCs.

I have a GMKtec nucbox with an Intel N100 and an M5 Plus.

The biggest issues with them are around firmware and power consumption, especially idle. It's hard to get them as low as some of the bigger vendor devices.

The M5 plus sometimes resets its fTPM and won't boot without user input until that is resolved.

I can get the nucbox to idle around 4-5w and the M5 plus idles closer to 8w.

Most of the BIOS options are hidden or obscured for power saving.

The worst offender though is Beelink which idles at closer to 30w in the GTi14.