Which mini PC to get?

I used to use a Dell Latitude as a PC, it was when I was doing my work apprenticeship and it became annoying connecting it up and unplugging it several times a week. I got a cheap barebones Dell Optiplex 3040 off eBay a couple of years ago, I think it was around £40 and filled it up with old parts (I7, 16GB, 256GB SSD), also running Windows 11, certainly not the quickest, but it is great for email, web browsing, Word, Excel.
 
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I've not heard good things about Geekom - supposedly poor customer service and units shipping with malware pre-installed.

I've tended to stick to Beelink and Mele, supposedly Trigkey is basically Beelink and seems to be OK, don't have much experience with Minisforum but supposedly they are malware free as well.
 
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In light of the recent root key vulnerability leading to Secure Boot being compromised has anyone been able to check if any of these cheap Chinese PC are compromised?
 
picnic said:
In light of the recent root key vulnerability leading to Secure Boot being compromised has anyone been able to check if any of these cheap Chinese PC are compromised?
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It wouldn’t really tell you anything either way as the system could be compromised at any point in the supply chain.
 
You can reinstall Windows to mitigate anything bad on the HD but not so much the BIOS, so isn't this a more serious issue? Harder to detect too.
 
Potentially doesn't need secure boot compromised for firmware level malware with these systems - why I tend to stick to the more established names.
 
I picked up a couple of firebat n100's from ali, they were around 80 each deliverd with a 512nvme and 16gb ddr5. It does make me wonder why they are so cheap... They did come with windows preinstalled - appeared clean, however it was wiped. They are surprisingly snappy and just a little larger than a pi.

Triple hdmi, dual lan etc. Not entirely sure what I will do with them yet, I'm fiddling with proxmox to see how much I can get loaded on one. However things like bios updates etc I doubt will be available, they are very popular and have been out for almost a year so I doubt they have a firmware malware, we should know about it by now - maybe.... However it is a risk I guess. Fine for lab stuff, maybe not to run a bank off them.
 
Blackbadger said:
I picked up a couple of firebat n100's from ali, they were around 80 each deliverd with a 512nvme and 16gb ddr5. It does make me wonder why they are so cheap... They did come with windows preinstalled - appeared clean, however it was wiped. They are surprisingly snappy and just a little larger than a pi.

Triple hdmi, dual lan etc. Not entirely sure what I will do with them yet, I'm fiddling with proxmox to see how much I can get loaded on one.
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Let me know how you get on with Proxmox, I was looking at the N100 which is about twice as quick as my currently in production j3455 but considering how much load I'm putting it through I went for a Beelink 5700u (for £250 it's a lot of bang)

Will be migrating NVR, Frigate, Homeassistant, Whisper, Object detection etc etc - so a fairly loaded system - admittedly I am running a coral to help with the workload

 
Blackbadger said:
I picked up a couple of firebat n100's from ali, they were around 80 each deliverd with a 512nvme and 16gb ddr5. It does make me wonder why they are so cheap... They did come with windows preinstalled - appeared clean, however it was wiped. They are surprisingly snappy and just a little larger than a pi.

Triple hdmi, dual lan etc. Not entirely sure what I will do with them yet, I'm fiddling with proxmox to see how much I can get loaded on one. However things like bios updates etc I doubt will be available, they are very popular and have been out for almost a year so I doubt they have a firmware malware, we should know about it by now - maybe.... However it is a risk I guess. Fine for lab stuff, maybe not to run a bank off them.
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Man looks like I missed on on any at that price - will have to keep my eye out!
 
Proxmox / linux etc runs fine on the n100's, no weird issues.
I've setup one running opensense, as after investing in a Glinet Flint2 that turned out to be a complete waste of time and pretty much useless. You need to learn to code to do anything with it, as even basic functions are not covered by the GUI.
The other I am playing with home assistant, nextcloud and other dockers etc.

Only having 2 network ports is limiting, 3 would be ideal, so I have used some 2.5gb usb dongles for admin/access to the baremetal.

You can apparently fit a coral module, however not really looked into it. The coral modules are now quite dated and still pricey. They max out at 8tops or 4 for the usb. whereas even the last gen ryzen systems are around 48. So should be a lot more useful for ai inference.
I'm now looking into some ryzen 7840 / 8840 mini systems that are available - however around £300 specc'd or £220 barebones. Fully local voice assistant, Realtime camera analysis etc should be capable. It's just the time spent tinkering :D

Good choice on the 5700u I've been running various 4700u systems for the last few years, they sip power and can provide huge performance, and have been flawless day in day out.
 
Blackbadger said:
Proxmox / linux etc runs fine on the n100's, no weird issues.
I've setup one running opensense, as after investing in a Glinet Flint2 that turned out to be a complete waste of time and pretty much useless. You need to learn to code to do anything with it, as even basic functions are not covered by the GUI.
The other I am playing with home assistant, nextcloud and other dockers etc.

Only having 2 network ports is limiting, 3 would be ideal, so I have used some 2.5gb usb dongles for admin/access to the baremetal.

You can apparently fit a coral module, however not really looked into it. The coral modules are now quite dated and still pricey. They max out at 8tops or 4 for the usb. whereas even the last gen ryzen systems are around 48. So should be a lot more useful for ai inference.
I'm now looking into some ryzen 7840 / 8840 mini systems that are available - however around £300 specc'd or £220 barebones. Fully local voice assistant, Realtime camera analysis etc should be capable. It's just the time spent tinkering :D

Good choice on the 5700u I've been running various 4700u systems for the last few years, they sip power and can provide huge performance, and have been flawless day in day out.
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check gmktec they have 8840 barebones around 300 quid time to time, agree I ditched my flint 2 just underpowered under vpn wg usage.

The n100s are nice low powered mini pcs for sure.
 
To put a spanner in the works

Consider Ai chips from now on, alternatively an rpi5 + Hailo8 will run LLMs far better than any PC so I'm considering running that as a satellite system..
Core will continue on 5700u

I've also added a coral mini pcie to the mini pc which helps with object recognition under frigate
 
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