Mini PC or another workstation

altwebid

altwebid

altwebid

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10 Nov 2013
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I currently have a Dell Precision T3600, Intel Xeon E5-1650 3.20GHz, 16.0 GB, GTX 1080 (8 GB).
I use it for Plex, Lightroom/Photoshop, occasional Davinci Resolve and some light gaming (at most Football Manager, L4D, DayZ).
It's still serving me well considering how old it is but it's creaking a little with all the Adobe updates and although I game infrequently, low settings is a must (apart from L4D).
Is it worth considering a Mini PC as a replacement or try another HP/Dell/Lenovo workstation with an newer GPU?
Budget is up to £500.

nb. I do have a far beefier work PC that I use for Davinci Resolve and can use for graphics but IT at work have locked down using my own HDDs that I have my personal footage and photographs on.

Cheers
 
The GPU on faster mini PCs is about equivalent to a GTX1060 so a step back, eGPUs are possible with mini PCs which support USB4/Thunderbolt/OCuLink but that is an expensive and problem prone route.

If that is a V2 1650 than only the very latest mini PCs will be faster, if a V2 then upgrading to something like a RTX3070 will give a big increase in performance from the 1080, much beyond that the CPU will start to be a bottleneck though.

EDIT: From the 3.2GHz clock speed I assume it is the V1 which is a bit too old really.
 
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altwebid said:
It's still serving me well considering how old it is but it's creaking a little with all the Adobe updates and although I game infrequently, low settings is a must (apart from L4D).
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A lot of the work is shifting to the graphics card now, especially with the newer Adobe features and a mini-PC is probably not going to help you much in those kind of apps.

altwebid said:
Is it worth considering a Mini PC as a replacement or try another HP/Dell/Lenovo workstation with an newer GPU?
Click to expand...
The Xeon is not hard to upgrade, even an older CPU like a 12600K (14400 is not far off) would be a big improvement, but doing both CPU/motherboard/RAM and graphics is not doable for your budget, at least not with buying brand new parts.

This is the minimum sort of upgrade I'd want to be doing (14400 is strongly preferable over the 14400F, for the integrated graphics), except it is double your budget:

My basket at OcUK:

Total: £965.80 (includes delivery: £11.98)​
 
Intel Core i5-14400F (Raptor Lake-S) Socket LGA1700 Processor - Retail
PRO-INT-02972
£210 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Crucial Pro 48GB (2x24GB) DDR5 PC5-44800C46 5600MHz Dual Channel Kit
MEM-CRU-01086
£500 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Zotac GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Twin Edge 16GB GDDR7 PCI-Express Graphics Card
GRA-ZTC-04916
£450 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Phanteks XT Silent ATX Case Closed Panel Black
CAS-PHK-03106
£78 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Phanteks AMP GH 750W 80PLUS Gold ATX Power Supply Modular - Black
POW-PHK-02517
£85 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
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I don't really have time so start building something (in the middle of house renovations) - I do have another unit I put together with the following but I'm pretty certain the MB is fried so don't want to go down that road of trying to test things out
Intel Core i7 4930K @ 3.40GHz
ASUS P9X79 (LGA2011)
64gb Corsair Vengeance DDR3
Corsair AX 760 PSU
Zalman CNPS11X Extreme CPU Cooler

I think the easiest thing would be to try and find a decent spec used workstation - any suggestions?
 
altwebid said:
I think the easiest thing would be to try and find a decent spec used workstation - any suggestions?
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You can use PassMark to do a rough comparison of CPU performance, you can find most CPU models on there, even the Xeons (the CPU Mark is equivalent to multithreading score).

The graphics, you can try TPU's GPU database here and there's a little table with relative performance:
www.techpowerup.com

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Specs

NVIDIA GP104, 1733 MHz, 2560 Cores, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 8192 MB GDDR5X, 1251 MHz, 256 bit
www.techpowerup.com www.techpowerup.com

But, it is important to keep in mind TPU's numbers are based on gaming performance, not Adobe or Davinci performance. If you want to check those, I'd suggest somewhere like Puget, or Tech Notice (YouTube). With workstation cards it can get very tricky to find good benchmarks.

Personally, I think you will find this task very hard (to meaningfully upgrade both CPU and GPU), for the budget that you have.
 
altwebid said:
I currently have a Dell Precision T3600, Intel Xeon E5-1650 3.20GHz, 16.0 GB, GTX 1080 (8 GB).
Click to expand...

Look on ebay for an E5-2650 or better (depending upon the cooling capability of the Dell) and get a Radeon RX 9060XT graphics card.

The cooler in the Dell reference picture looks like it would cope with an E5-2690, but I'll defer that recommendation to the more knowledgeable.
 
If you are running this 24/7 eg Plex server, then you are way past the point that jumping to something more modern makes sense, the idle power on your rig won’t be pretty and an N100 for example is £80 and could do that in under 10w while paying for itself in short order just in power savings.

If you are using it as a Plex client and workstation, then a used bundle for £150-200 puts you in early Ryzen territory quite nicely. If you insist on sticking with the dinosaur, a v2 E5 is going to be reasonably inexpensive, as will another 16GB of DDR3, you just pay more in power usage and the IPC sucks at this point. Avoid any ES Xeon chips as they won’t work with the Dell. The rest of your budget is going to have to be GPU, and here Nvidia tends to do better than AMD for the non gaming side, but my experience is dated.

Building a new system is really of minimal additional effort to upgrading an old one. Also nothing you are mentioning supports W11 without workarounds and W10 is EOL this month (though can be worked around for another year).
 
Gone for an ThinkCentre M90q Gen 6 (Intel) Tiny PC, its got the newer intel core ultra 235T cpus so should be very energy friendly, I have had the cpu in other dell micro pcs and its pretty good 10-12 watts idle roughly and about 30-40 watts for light usage ie surfing/media playback, 50-60 watts when stressed like heavy file unraring.

Its got 3 nvme slots and thunderbolt 4 and an custom lenova pci-e slot which needs an adaptor to make it work. Still its much better then anything from HP and dell who don't even other the basic addon cards.

I will test drive it for an unraid or truenas build and see how it goes.
 
Rroff said:
The GPU on faster mini PCs is about equivalent to a GTX1060 so a step back, eGPUs are possible with mini PCs which support USB4/Thunderbolt/OCuLink but that is an expensive and problem prone route.

If that is a V2 1650 than only the very latest mini PCs will be faster, if a V2 then upgrading to something like a RTX3070 will give a big increase in performance from the 1080, much beyond that the CPU will start to be a bottleneck though.

EDIT: From the 3.2GHz clock speed I assume it is the V1 which is a bit too old really.
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So first up lol.

In reality the faster mini PCs are actually silly fast. Here is a mini PC comfortably beating a full fat desktop 14900ks and RTX4060 system for a fraction of the power.

 
jigger said:
So first up lol.

In reality the faster mini PCs are actually silly fast. Here is a mini PC comfortably beating a full fat desktop 14900ks and RTX4060 system for a fraction of the power.
Click to expand...

As I said the latest ones will be faster - a lot of mini PCs are using Intel N100/150 chips or Ryzen 5825U, etc. yes you can get stuff with 13900HX, 9955HX or Strix Halo, etc.

You also get stuff in the middle like the 7000 series mobile chips but they bracket a well setup 1650 V2 depending on power level - though they are very power efficient chips for the performance aside from having a little elevated idle power consumption.

As I showed awhile back with comparing the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which is around middle of the road for mini PC performance, against my 1650 V2.
 
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Rroff said:
As I said the latest ones will be faster - a lot of mini PCs are using Intel N100/150 chips or Ryzen 5825U, etc. yes you can get stuff with 13900HX, 9955HX or Strix Halo, etc.

You also get stuff in the middle like the 7000 series mobile chips but they bracket a well setup 1650 V2 depending on power level - though they are very power efficient chips for the performance aside from having a little elevated idle power consumption.

As I showed awhile back with comparing the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which is around middle of the road for mini PC performance, against my 1650 V2.
Click to expand...

The older parts are faster… the fastest AMD APU’s are getting on for 2.5x the performance of a GTX 1060. The performance of a 1650v2 is slower than a Ryzen 3 4300u at 15 watts…
 
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I’d probably look at a ASRock deskmeet X300 as you can get them heavily discounted just now. Drop in a used 5700, 4x8gb of DDR4 and a 16gb 7600XT, and you’d have something that will beat the T3600 system into a quivering ball of snot while sipping power.
 
jigger said:
The older parts are faster… the fastest AMD APU’s are getting on for 2.5x the performance of a GTX 1060. The performance of a 1650v2 is slower than a Ryzen 3 4300u at 15 watts…
Click to expand...

Fair enough if talking the high end Minisforums, etc. setups but the up to £500 budget with the mainstream mini PCs of the kind this thread is about you are talking around 790M, 890M or lower GPU performance which generally is around 1060 performance, a bit faster in ray tracing and some new features, can be a bit slower in stuff which hits the VRAM or PCI-e bus hard.

jigger said:
The performance of a 1650v2 is slower than a Ryzen 3 4300u at 15 watts…
Click to expand...

1650 V2 has over twice the multi-threading performance of the 4300u - a lot of the benchmarks are of the V1 chip and/or with rubbish RAM for some reason - with some decent latency 2400MHz or faster RAM it puts up significantly better performance and can easily overclock by 25%, though to be fair my Ryzen Z1 Extreme at 5 watt beats it and at max wattage spanks it though I seem to have a rather good chip there with much higher boost frequencies for a given voltage/TDP than average.
 
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Recently went for the lenova workstation, such a night and day difference moving from gmktec junk and miniforums, beelink and the chinaware goods. With Lenova, 3 year warranty. Actual Bios updates and the normal cpu socket LGA1851 so I can swap out proper high quality heatsinks if required.

Will be sticking with mini workstations for my own personal use in future.
 
Did similar recently - after a lot of indecision bought a Dell Micro PC with Intel 265 and 32GB RAM - big difference to these generic brands, just couldn't justify spending that kind of money on Minisforum with the hit and miss reports on support and reliability. Beelink and MeLE I've found OK but a lot of the others I wouldn't rush to use personally.

I would have gone for the MeLE Overclock X5 if it had a better spec CPU though. The 12450H is a bit short of my needs.
 
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