I would remove the word "inexpensive". Many alternatives cost less. I know people buy Intel for brand, quality and warranty but definitely not price.

I bought for price - a max mini would have been better but ludicrously expensive.

I think the poster above you meant other mini PCs by non-Apple manufacturers.

What would be some of the alternatives? I don't even need a gpu. It will be a home server.

for who accept used PCs: https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/

for who accept Chinese brands (and suspicious Windows license): Beelink, Minisforum, etc

the rest: ECS Liva or ASRock DeskMini?

I’m a big fan of the ASRock deskminis for low power servers - dual 2.5” SATA bays, some have dual NVMe too.

Very nice little platforms with low power draw, and low noise!

I’ve got one of the DeskMini X300 on my desk atm with a 5750GE in it - 8c16t of Zen3 in 35W. It’s competitive with M1 Pro for performance and power draw.

Turing pi 2

We've used both NUC and Gigabyte BRIX at work and the BRIX are far more capable per $ compared to the NUC.

Intel NUC is the BMW of mini PCs, certainly not "inexpensive" compared to the alternatives, even if we ignore the off-brand stuff.

I found NUC+monitor+mounting inexpensive compared to the alternatives about a decade ago. The NUC could be mounted on the back of the monitor, which made mounting cheap and simple. Two cables from the ceiling, one device fixed to the wall, done.

We use them as servers to be honest, so we've never had to worry about additional hardware. We deploy infrastructure on them as portable machines to take to conferences/demos etc which previously was done using in-house built ATX computers.

NUC and their ilk were a game changer and I'm glad to see a way for them to continue.

I'd suggest checking out ServeTheHome, which has been reviewing tons of mini PCs or CNX Software or Liliputing which cover all the SBCs and minipcs that get announced/launched. There are way too many options to list and it largely depends on your exact needs.

Personally, I bought a cheap fanless Chinese (Topton) router (N5105, 4xi225v3) system from AliExpress running OPNsense that's worked flawlessly for the past year or so, but I'd recommend ordering your minipcs through a vendor where you can easily return it (like Amazon) if it's DOA or otherwise doesn't meet your expectations. I'd also skip the small Chinese vendors if warranty support is something you need. Go with a manufacturer that has a local office/support.

Also, depending on what you want your server for, if you want ECC, your minipc options will be extremely limited (a couple Xeon options when I looked). Personally, I went with an desktop Ryzen + ASRock Rack mini-ITX board in a slim case that was still pretty small since I wanted ECC for ZFS.

Running one of those same routers myself, been great. Setting up a friend with a topton N305 box that will host proxmox, about half resources going to OPNSense for routing, while also running pihole and wireguard... it may also share a usb connected HD for file sharing if/until he gets a separate nas.

I do wish there were one of them that included even two 3.5" drive bays so it can run as a forbidden home server doing all the things.

Used NUC, optiplex or others from eBay. If you need just "a" server for home, look for one of those small PCs on the used market. They often appear at very low prices after some company refreshes their office desktops. Replace the storage with something decent and you've got a perfect server.

I’ve gotten used Lenovo ThinkCenters for $30 on eBay. Sure they’re used and have a 3rd generation i3, but it’s the best budget home server option out there! They can easily replace whatever done on a pi and even more.

Yep ThinkCentres, Optiplexes, and Elite Desks go for pennies on eBay.

Got to love used office equipment! I’m a big Optiplex fan and I use one as my daily personal pc for everything. I use ThinkCenters for most of my Homelab due to the fact that I’ve found them the cheapest, but I use Optiplexs when I need something stronger. But I’ve never used an Elite Desk in a homelab, how do they compare to Optiplexs and ThinkCenters?

I've never been a big fan of HP, but they seem to be roughly equivalent to the Optiplexes. The lab I used to work in had dozens of them and they seemed to run just fine without complaints.

That’s good to know, I guess that the shitty HP build quality only applies to consumer intended products. Just another example of why refurbished or used enterprise equipment is the way to go.Thanks!

Depends on your needs, I've been using a Minisforum HX90 for a couple years now. AMD 5900HX, 32gb ram, 2tb nvme drive. Runs great, relatively low power in standby.

at those form factors, they were quite price competitive.

Yes many alternatives cost less, but if you want to tape them to the back of a TV that generates heat and has to be turned on 24/7 to display advertisements, video,..., they were cheapest by far.

Or in meeting rooms to display zoom/teams, ... A raspberry pi just doesn't handle those scenario's

An RPi actually can handle those scenarios in many usecases. A Chromecast devices with a server feed can as well.

I've found in the long term, it can not. In the short term, yes it does work.

Perhaps my failure rate is just high, but micro-mini systems for that use case were much more reliable for me over long time frames.

I've fount the weakest link is usually the microsd cards... I've tended towards usb drives, but ymmv of course. I also switched to intel mini pcs, that offer a lot more when the gouging was happening over covid.

But not as reliably. Especially the Chromecast.

Paying extra for reliability is absolutely worth it.

I bought it for Price

The Intel NUC Celeron systems could not be met for price if you also needed Windows. To beat the NUC Celeron on price you had to drop to ARM and use Linux but if the software you needed to run only supported Windows that was not an option.

the Celeron NUC's where GREAT for Line of Business use cases where the computer was running a Screen, or Single windows Application

Needing that much horsepower for a screen or single application is a sign that anything requiring Windows should be automatically disqualified.

I used to feel the same way about kiosks, POS terminals, etc. but… if you have an organization whose bread & butter is C# desktop apps and Windows development and they’re looking for, say, qty 10 units, you’ll have a really hard time justifying the training and NRE costs to do anything but Windows.

I 100% agree that it’s not the technically optimal solution. But don’t discount the idea that, given an existing set of people and skills, it can definitely be the local optima organizationally.

Yup, exactly this. I tried deploying such system on low powered ARM systems that could technically do it. It was a nightmare from a support and compatibility standpoint. Also the vendor would support the hardware for significantly less time than Intel would support their NUCs.

The maybe dozen NUC's I needed were not a very substantial hardware cost. You bought a Celeron NUC and they just worked even if you didn't have the most experienced staff supporting them or the best software running on them.

If you're going to be deploying a thousand such systems, sure, of course you shouldn't use NUCs.

> If you're going to be deploying a thousand such systems, sure, of course you shouldn't use NUCs.

I'd probably argue that, barring specific requirements that these might not cover, the NXP i.MX6/7/8 would probably be my default for something like this in volume. ~Motorola~/~Freescale~/NXP have been incredibly great stewards of the platform and provide significant lifetime guarantees for their parts (like 10+ years often). Plus you can generally run mainline kernels on them unless you're doing something special that requires something from their vendor branch.

For just running a screen not only is Windows a massive waste in terms of resources and costs, but so is a NUC. A Raspberry Pi (equivalent) is more than sufficient.

Depends on what the screen is doing. We deployed a system with multiple Raspberry Pi's running Chrome in kiosk mode, each driving a TV showing different data.

For one of them we had to switch from a Raspberry Pi to a small NUC to display a page with 3-6 videos running. The pi could show 1 or 2 videos but with all 6 going, it was very stuttery playback.

I'm actually surprised it handles two videos without issue... It's a good option a lot of the time. When the scalping got bad, I started using the cheaper intel boxes, smaller than NUC but more powerful than rpi and included a case and enough storage.

thanks for not reading my comment as I clearly said many apps do not have ARM or Linux compatibility

There is exactly zero reason for an app whose only purpose is to be shown on a screen to be Windows or x86 specific. It can be due to obsolete development practices or obscure vendor requirements, but still..

The main reason is that hiring a bunch of new developers will be 100x more expensive than spending a little extra on a Windows/x86 machine.

Sure the are...

1. LoB apps need to be run not just on a computer that only shows a screen, but in other contexts, there is no reason to develop a whole new app just for that purpose.

2. Developers who are only used to working with Win API's like WPF, DotNet, etc. or other frameworks that are windows only Why would we want to employ whole new dev team just to maintain that app separate from the apps that run on our Laptops and normal computers

3. Management Tools. If my entire fleet of computers is managed by ConfigMgr and controlled by Group Policy and Compliance Setting why would I want to spin up a completely separate management system like Ansible or something just to control these machines when I could have them integrated into my existing tool set of which my helpdesk and everyone else is trained to use?

I can probably come up with 5 or 10 more reasons

Decent Intel NUCs are ok price-wise, but definitely not cheap. A decent Linux-preinstalled box for my kid's Minecraft needs was about 800£ (non-basic Entroware Aura) here in UK.

It's a good machine technically speaking: perfect for lightweight gaming, office stuff, browsing, etc. But I suspect that a comparable mini PC from asian vendors would be twice as cheap and just as good. A laptop would be even easier.

I have tried a couple of pretenders and they were not up to the 24/7 load I have lined up, random reboots and lockups, maybe it was bad luck, maybe it was thermal management, either way the NUC keeps trucking.

Yeah, it does feel, look and work solidly.

Just pointing out that "cheap" is not the best description of these things :-)

There are Intel NUC laptops, or as they call them kits, I'm not sure what the details are. They're sold and branded by third parties but the guts are the same, except maybe the RAM and SSD (very minor customisation anyway). When I was looking I ended up with one since it was a pretty good price compared to the competition, I wanted one with a serviceable GPU for occasional games.

I considered those, but I think something like the Shuttle DS line of fanless mini-computers are nicer (especially since they have two Ethernet ports). See for example:

https://www.shuttle.eu/en/products/slim/ds20u7

A drawback is that Shuttle has less frequent updates than the NUC, and it's harder to find them in local stores.

Personally I liked the zotac zbox line of sff fanless machines.

But the akasa line is pretty interesting if a bit more diy.