Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Who Needs a GPU When You Have THIS? — $429 Mini PC Deal?”.
Hello there, i’m muse and welcome to tech deals honey. I shrunk the computer. This is a desktop pc tower. In the palm of my hand, is your surprise home office in a tight, makeshift space? Perhaps you just really love miniatures or saving space.
Have i got a fun pc for you and yes i’ll, benchmark some games on it, because that’s what we do here, the term mini computer once meant something very different. This is a picture of an ibm system 38 released in 1978.. It was a 48-bit mini computer designed to serve multiple users via dumb terminals.
What we call pcs today were originally called micro computers to signify that they were much smaller than the mainframe and mini computers. They were replacing in 1984 apple computer released the macintosh meant to replace the apple ii line. It was an all-in-one pc that had the monitor, combined with all the computer parts, all in one small at the time box in 1998 apple released.
The imac which followed up on that idea for a new generation, the idea of a small compact computer, isn’t new and apple for sure, didn’t invent the idea, but these two examples were popular and sold in the millions making them good reference points to carry us forward. In 2005, apple released, the mac mini ditching, the monitor and making the computer itself small and unobtrusive no longer did you need a big honking tower on your desk, just to have a real pc today there are quite a few mini pc options. Apple, of course, has their fifth generation mini based on the m1 chip intel zotac, hp and many other companies have also released windows based mini pcs, which brings us to how do you know which ones to consider well.
That really boils down to a few questions. To ask yourself: what are you going to use it for what ports do you need and are they more helpful on one side or the other? Where would you like it to mount or rest, and can i tolerate owning a computer that doesn’t give off an ever-present rainbow tent to the entire room? Aesthetics are nice, but if you are mounting it to the back of a monitor against a wall that doesn’t much matter and if it looks cool but doesn’t do the job, it doesn’t really matter either. Speaking for myself, i am never fully decided on devoting a new machine to a specific task and know myself well enough to know that at some point i am going to wish like a game on it, because gaming is life.
So i go for the best of all worlds. When i make a tech purchase which is not always cost effective. This machine is not that, but for five hundred dollars it works great for day-to-day use, office work, web browsing, older games and some indie games.
For example, it can sort of run valheim and pretty well run eve online with all graphical features, turned all the way down or off, but failed to even run trailers for some games, while downloading a game and could not even launch bastion or smite. Thankfully, indie games like orcs must die and spirit fare had no problem running. So, if you have a large collection of older games, say five years old from smaller publishers, you may find plenty of entertainment that runs just fine on this. It does not offer anything. In particular that other minis don’t, except that it is only 500 for the same or very similar computing power, the current mac mini is faster and stronger, but at about 700, this is designed for someone needing all the best of the basics for school or work from Documents to surfing the web to streaming music and shows in a compact, pc form being able to switch monitors and take the pc with you is the convenience provided by these without a bulky pc tower. That being said, if you don’t mind the tower, you can get a faster dell tower with more storage and graphics features for just fifty dollars more and for portability.
You can get an acer aspire, laptop with the same computing, power and storage for about fifty dollars more. But let’s look at the computing power and storage, so you can decide for yourself. This little guy is packing an intel 10th generation comet lake i510210u, with 4 cores and 8 threads intel, uhd, iris, plus, 655 graphics, 8 gigabytes of ddr4 ram, a 256 gigabyte ssd and windows 10 pro 64-bit. There are slots for additional ram and ssd, but it is not super easy to access. Here’S how it comes. First, there’s a manual yep, that’s a manual then there’s our mini pc itself, weighing in at just 480 grams or about a pound on the front.
We have the power button, audio jack usbc and two usb 3.0 ports. The bottom has four little non-slip feet: pads the side has a trans flash port and both sides have ventilation slits for cooling airflow. The top has a nice simple, sleek, look with their reflective brand name and on the back we have the lan port, two more usb 3.0 ports, two hdmi ports and the dc power input.
Then we have a mount for mounting it to your monitor. Comes with all the different screws you may need, then we have an hdmi cable, that’s about 3 feet long and a european ac dc power adapter. So we used a travel adapter to us to test it out.
Its cord is about five and a half feet. Long setup was a breeze. Luckily, no other breezes or i might have lost this little guy one pound just blow right away hook. It up turn it on and follow the setup prompts.
However, it did fail to recognize about half of the keyboards i plugged into it and would regularly disconnect from a few of them. Also, i ran out of usb ports between my mouse, my keyboard, my headset and my monitor here. So a few more usb ports would be pretty nice first. I use it to do my normal. Day-To-Day work.
Email word excel youtube and surfing the web. It performed wonderfully. So then i decided to put it to the real test of what i’d inevitably attempt to do on it. I decided to see how it would handle valheim with the presets it didn’t, but when i turned all the graphics and resolution all the way down or off, it actually ran here’s the benchmark at a whopping about 10 frames per. Second, that’s the prime smooth gameplay.
We hope for right, my 2014 laptop handles valheim better than that, but it is an msi gaming laptop and here’s spreadsheet simul, i mean eve online with graphics and resolution turned all the way down or off. It ran at a surprising 60 frames per second, although i must say, without the fire, explosions, etc. It’S not quite as pretty to play, but space still looks awesome. And yes, that is what i played e4.
The outer space travel scenery and with just the presets. It ran, orcs must die at 44 frames per second and spirit fare at 20 frames per second again without turning anything down for the price. This is all right but, like i said before, you could get an actual tower. That’S better or a laptop with the same capabilities, ports, etc.
For about the same price. I’D say it would be well worth it if it were about a hundred dollars. Less expensive 399 would be a better price for what you get. Otherwise, a laptop travels better and can still be hooked up to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. The same way that this can, let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Do you want to see a review of the mac mini? How about the acer, laptop or desktop shown here, or is all of that rather boring, and you want to see an ultimate rgb build with more rainbow lights than a unicorn can handle. You know what to do like this video, if you like it, share it with your friends subscribe.
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