The Mini PC You SHOULD Be Looking At 

Fun Fact: These are the Mini PCs that Chick-fil-A uses for their in-store POS Servers. They're getting upgraded right now so there might be a lot flowing into the market soon.

A single one of those 1L PC’s could run a whole homelab for many of us.

It’s worth noting that any of these mini PCs with vPro on the CPU badge can be remotely managed and monitored, allowing you to remotely turn it on and off among other things. Just make sure the MEBx hotkey is enabled in the BIOS (this is what it is called in my unit), and press Ctrl+P while it is booting to enter the Intel AMT configurator.

I have two of these. When I realized I had a desktop in my home office out of habit but only used it for web browsing and light tasks like word processing and occasional video conferencing, I pulled out the bulky tower in favor of a low profile mini box. We have a second one upstairs available for use as a media server, for playing archived video and audio files as well as streaming off of web services that don't have traditional smart TV apps.

As someone who uses MicroPCs *extensively* in a variety of projects, I use MiniPCs almost as much for general use. They are absolutely fantastic for low power consumption daily drivers, nodes, etc. Due to their widespread use in enterprise applications, they are frequently offloaded for great prices. In thinking about it just now, I cant even remember the last time I did something like use one of my rPis in a similar application. Ive long recommended MiniPCs to anyone who has mentioned to me that they are looking at getting an rPi as a "cheap computer."

The HP elite 800 g3 (and newer) are one of my absolute favorite 1L PCs to work with in my homelab. Great to see others picking up on this fantastic little box!

I think, Xeon didn't work not because of TDP limitation, but because of compatibility. Since Skylake generation, Intel started to restrict the use of server CPUs on home chipsets

I was really tempted to get one of these 1L PCs but settled on the optiplex 7060 sff with i7 8700. Having the extra pcie slots, M.2 and easy installation of 2 sata ssds made it perfect for my proxmox install. Currently running a vm for docker containers, a pihole lxc, plex lxc, and a home assistant vm. Still pretty small and quiet for me since I have it in the basement.

The reason I use an RPi 4 is for portability my portable ham radio outfit, my son got me a mini PC that runs on 12 volts, but its kinda rough to run from battery ( voltage drop ) but im really interested with using one of these little rigs for my home radio station, desk space is a premium for me. Thanks for the good info! Keep up the research!

I had hp 800 Mini G3 with the same processor for almost 10 months. It worked great with YunoHost as a server. Nextcloud, home assistant and other apps worked very nicely

We build corporate network (physical cabling as well as IT Architecture) for our clients in the Southern Cali to Texas area. G3 and Lenovo mini PC are what we use as server / network monitoring station for all our clients. And yes, we used to use TeamViewer but now we use both RDS and Chrome Remote Access.

Good video, thanks! I've just ordered a new mini PC, and it's interesting to see a similarly powered old box being set up. In the UK it's not as easy to get this type of SFF so it's actually not much more expensive to get an N100 mini from a Chinese manufacturer like Morefine, Beelink and Chuwi

I picked up one of these elitedesk mini g4 mini earlier this year for around 140 and that one included a ryzen 2400g. It's been a fantastic mini pc!

We have thousands of these where I work ranging from G1 to G9, mostly in this form factor. Very good product overall.

Love this new discovery of your channel. Thank you for the 1 month skillshare and your channel is now I. My top 20 and I have a feeling I’m going to consume every video on your channel. Can’t wait to dive in. 💜

Very cool! Thanks for talking about the flooded used market 🙂 So many good options to help reduce ewaste and give older machines a new purpose

This is the computer i use as my proxmox server. I have quite a lot of services running on docker. around 15+- LXC containers and 1 VM. 0 issues so far with it. Why i love it is because its so tiny, u can buy 2 more and have a cluster. I kinda paid a bit more than 50$ tho :P (250 euros) All in all i would recommend it

I did exactly this as I wasn't prepared to pay pi scalpers almost double for a model 4. I ended up getting a Dell Optiplex 3046 with a 6th gen I5, 16Gb RAM and a half decent ssd for about £80. Does a great job and runs everything I've thrown at it so far.

Oh man, you have covered a lot ad answered the questions that we have to search for hours and hours to figure it out. Definitely a worth watching for someone interested in building home lab, low watt server, cluster, nas etc.

Great video man. Received a dell 7070 mini just recently loaded it with 64gb and it’s perfect for the next 10 years for my hosting requirements sits nicely next to my ancient hp micro server. Life is good.

A couple of months ago I spent a bit more for a refurbished one to replace the Pi 400 my wife had been using for a couple of years. It worked out so well I decided to step up to the next largest size (the 800 G3 SFF) for a dedicated Plex server. After installing Ubuntu, dropping in our existing 8 TB media drive, and copying over our existing Plex configuration, it was up and running easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Not one of these but a SFF (probably closer to the 1 liter that you have in this video) a friend acquired for free is currently running as a proxmox backup server. Doesn't have much for storage itself but I did mount my network drive on it and the system happily uses that as a data target for incoming backup tasks.

Got one of these and they are absolutely fantastic. Relatively cheap and easy to upgrade to make a very powerful and quiet home server.

They do rock. I have a bunch if them and I mostly just mess about. Couple things to keep in mind are that in some of the generations there are 35W variants and this might not be reflected in the sale (35W are in the SKU if you know the serial, 65W says nothing). Also, under most circumstances you should be able to use a dual drive (NVMe and SATA) configuration.

Great video, especially liked the cleaning montage video. Love this form factor, I picked up an almost new used mac mini M2 on ebay for $350, best desktop computer I've owned by a mile, it takes up almost no space, makes no noise, and puts out little to no heat and it can stream 4k video.

My dad uses one of those as his daily drivers! It was actually an upgrade compared to his old computer, which was almost as old as me!

Thank for this much info, will consider this as a travel media box

I have a pair of these running ESXi in my home lab. I have a 1TB SSD, i7 processor and 32GB's of ram in each, and they have been rock solid.

I have been using these mini PC's (Lenovo) for a number of years now and they work great. One is in daily driver mode at one location and performs perfectly for things like video watching. Easy to work on. I recently picked up a batch for about $50 each including power supplies. One thing to watch out for is whether the hd caddy is included. Those can be a pain to source independently. It varies.

I actually just ordered a Dell Optiplex 7040 Micro with an i5-6600T (same form factor as the guy in your video) for $89 last week! I also got 32 GB DDR4 2400 MHz for only $36. Going to be using it as a power efficient home server to run my Minecraft server and other things. Oh yeah, and great video by the way! :)

Great idea! 😊 I found three of those HP units on Amazon for $90.00 a piece, which was perfect for a Proxmox Cluster. Pihole is running as a container in High Availability "HA" and doing great! Thanks for the tip, and keep up the good work 👏.

I love my Elitedesk G3. Using it as my media PC hooked up to my TV, running Windows 11. I've found myself installing VSCode and doing some work on it from my couch when I don't feel like sitting at my desk.

These tiny PCs are quickly getting more popular, I love it!

I recently upgraded from my trusty PI 4 to an Optiplex 7040, upped the RAM and installed 1TB 2.5" HDD, works absolutely like a charm. Great thing is BIOS has auto power on AC, which means PC will start again in case of power failure.

What you are showing is exactly the process (minus the bios unlocking) that I went through to install my Plex server at home. Got one of those on eBay for cheap. Upgraded the HD and bam! always on. Left the Raspberry Pi alone to run headless a Pi-hole. Great video!

Really liked this video. And, I always love your content. I'm always happy to see another HH video in my Recommendations.

I have been running a 5 node k8s cluster on the Elitedesk 800 g3. I installed a 256gb nvme and 128gb SSD in each and use the SSD as a boot drive and the nvme with rook/ceph for distributed storage. It has been an awesome experience.

A company I worked for had a couple of dozen of these delivered right before covid hit. They became suddenly "useless" as all staff were very quickly issues laptops. A couple of years later, they were still sitting in storage, unused. Our IT guy gave me a couple of them and they're brilliant. I've got one set up in as HTPC in the living room. It's decent enough to play older games, and stuff that's not too demanding like Dead Cells. It streams from my gaming tower via Parsec flawlessly.

I worked with some refurbished ones of these G3, but the 600 series. You don't have to remove the whole hard drive tray thing to access the M.2, there are two small screws on the metal plate where the dark grey pad is. Just unscrew these and you can access the M.2 . Easy thing 😉 (Oh and to boot from 2.5" drive, don't forget to enable legacy support in the UEFI)

I manage a bunch of thin clients. Very useful. I used a mini-pcie to rj45 to make pfsense boxes. Worked great.

You monster! I've been looking at building a K8s testbed with these for the last week or so, and was finally closing in on the price sweet spot, and now they're going to go up again! :D But seriously, these are great. I have one dedicated to Home Assistant, and it's excellent. 6th gen Intel is the oldest I would go - any older and the power/efficiency isn't there, especially with spectre/meltdown mitigations - as well as NVMe support. You can also look at thin clients, like the HP T640 (with a Ryzen Embedded R1505G) and Dell Wyze 5070 (Pentium J5005/J4105, limited to 8GB RAM). Furthermore, don't sleep on the SFF machines - they aren't quites as compact as the Mini/1L PCs, but some have standard internal power supplies, better cooling/performance and can take a low profile graphics card and full-size RAM. Either way, these can have a surprising amount of 'oomph' for small, used, low-power hardware.

We currently have a bunch of HP 600 G2 mini PCs that are being written off at work. They are pretty similar overall. With the G2s, however, you have to be even more careful of the SATA ribbon cable for the 2.5 inch bay.

Bought one of those for emulation and it works amazingly well. Also great for traveling as you can just connect it to a TV.

We've used these at most of the jobs I've had. They run EMR software well (I've worked with a few different ones), pharmacy software and general work-related stuff. I think they're great!!

Recently I have become a big fan of the ultra small formfactor office PC's for use as Proxmox servers, etc. Especially now that they're getting to the point where loading them with 64gb ram is not a big deal, or expensive.

Storage wise, I think the best that you could do would be to replace the 2.5g network adapter with the 10g adapter that i think they make - and if they don't, you could boot off of a sata ssd and convert the m.2 into a 10g nic and then I would use network storage from an external NAS solution elsewhere on your network. I think these types of systems would make EXCELLENT proxmox or kubernettes cluster compute nodes, but storage-wise, I think it's best to just give it a high speed low latency network connection to external pooled storage. - if you don't care too much about performance, and you have like 10+ port 10g switch, you could theoretically use something like ceph to to pooled storage. i'd boot from sata storage, put large fast storage in the m.2 slot, but ceph should really have a dedicated 10g interface AND at least 7-10 nodes to be performant as storage, but that would make a pretty performant scale-out all-flash NAS if you wanted to do that... would be a fun (if kind of expensive for a homelab) experiment. My current project (waiting on shipments) is 5 optiplex 5060's with i7-8700's with 512gb ssd's that i'm upgrading to 64gb of ram and adding dual 10g (intel x540-t2) network adapters and 2tb m.2 ssd's and bought a 24 port 10g base-t managed switch to in order to do a hyperconverged proxmox cluster on. ceph gets it's own interface, management (and corosync) gets it's own (1g) interface, and applications get their own interface. I'm going to use an unmanaged switch for the management interface (plugged into a managed switch to tag all traffic from that switch into it's own management vlan), ceph gets it's own vlan, and applications get 2 vlans (separating homeprod vlan from homelab vm as this cluster will serve both purposes). it's going to be slow to set up, but it's just about the best train set I can think of :D

I got into 1L PCs about 3 years ago when I watched Serve at Home's videos on the subject. I've recently just started to sell off / donate my arsenal of TinyMiniMicros. Will be keeping a couple for modularity purposes. I got into SFF builds but got bored real quick. I'm back to full-size gaming desktops again. These tiny PCs are bulletproof and pretty capable for their size.

Dude you're awesome, I hear the inspiration from Slum Village in that second song of yours

I think in most cases of someone considering an RPi it's for specific reasons. I use micro PCs when the use case allows it, but even on those the power draw is much higher than a Pi or other similarly spec'd SBC. Pi's are also now more "readily" available in stock (the 8GB pi 4 was in stock for most of the day at Adafruit on Friday). Good video though either way.

I just bought something just like this pc for around $60. I’m happy to see that this is a good mini pc for and home lab activities. (HP ProDesk 600 G3 Mini i5-7600T w/ Charger, 128GB SSD, 8GB DDR4 RAM, Win 10 Pro)

I love those PC’s, have purchased 20 or so in the last year. They make for amazing thin clients/lightweight application servers!

very popular business model mini PC..... my work place, as well as previous employment, both used these. These are super easy to come by. And I intend to use both the M.2 and SATA.

While Skylake CPU does not have hardware 10bit HEVC, with my testing it is still sufficient for jellyfin 4K 10-bit HDR transcoding. You just have to use the CPU for decoding, and QSV can be utilized for tone mapping and encoding the 8 bit stream (in software transcoding, the CPU has to do all the dec and enc work and tone map doesn't work). I tested my i5 6500, it transcode a 4K 10 bit HDR 50 Mbps file to a 1080p 8 bit HEVC and the speed is around 30-40 fps. The i5 6500T shown in the video is less powerful so I'm not sure how that handles transcode. I sold the 6500 and opted for a Coffee Lake QTJ2 with UHD 630, much better experience. Why is this relevant? In my area Vancouver BC, PC, PC parts and especially mini PC with 7th+ Intel are being scalped on local marketplace while 6th gen are priced reasonably. Not sure its because Netflix 4K support? or Win 11? that caused price disparity. And ebay is no good due to high shipping cost to Canada. If people are on a budget, Skylake is an interesting option. Anyway I look forward to your jellyfin machine video!

We've been running these HP minis as our standard office PC at the medical college where I work for about 3 years. I was a little suspicious when we changed from full towers to these tiny PCs but they have been great. And they free up a lot of desk or floor space compared to a SFF or full tower.

I got an 8th gen Intel one running my Jellyfin server. I wanted that newer iGPU for encode/decode support so that's why I went 8th gen. The thing works like a charm.

Great vid, again ! :) Very usefull. That machine is very good. The only thing missing is a PCIe X1 for an additional NIC card ;-)

Worth mentioning: vPro minipc's can be managed with Intel AMT and the M2 A&E port can be converted to a M2 M and hold another NVMe SSD.

It really just depends on what you are using your computer/server for. The RPI4 is a pretty powerful little guy that can handle most home server needs. The benefit things like the RPI4 have over a minipc is power consumption. A RPI4 might cost you a few dollars a year to run. A minipc is probably going to cost you at least a few dollars a month. Also, I might be lucky here but I've never had a RPI die on me. They are extremely reliable, especially if you invest in a solid microsd or flash drive.

Cleanliness is next to ... Nice video and intro into the hp Elite line. Hadn't seen it yet. Yep, for the price, some flavor of Linux, beats the pi hands down. Thanks

Love these! The only issue is managing the bulky power adapters if you run more than a few

Looking in the "for parts" section is a good strategy. At least for electronic test equipment, tons of people sell working things "for parts" because they either didn't test it or can't validate calibration, both of which I've had good luck taking chances on. With how reliable PC hardware tends to be, I suspect that there are decent deals to be had for hardware that people just didn't want to bother testing

Definitely worth checking them out, but different to a Raspberry market. Starting with power consumption, they are miles apart. specially if you want to leave it on all the time.

Starting with the G6 elitedesk you can even get a dedicated gpu (like a 3050) which is awesome. Hopefully they will come down in price eventually. The new dell optiplex 7010s come with 180w instead of 90w power adapters as a recent change also. I work with all of these machines daily at work

Those little fellas are awesome. 6 months ago I was actually in the same boat - I had an older pi but wanted to run an app that required a newer generation, which was nowhere to be found for a reasonable price. Found one of these G3 refurbs on Amazon with an i5 @ 3.2ghz, 16GB RAM, 1TB NVMe m.2, wifi and Bluetooth modules, Windows 10 Pro for $200 (it's $25 cheaper now).

Have two HP G3 800 MINIs. Fantastic, silent and low powered machines. Yes, they are refurbished! Edit: 4:35 - You can flip levered latch on top of the 2.5mm drive enclosure, then unscrew 2 screws to get access to the M.2, Wifi adapter slots. Agreed it is not tool-less,, but it is much better fiddling with the SATA ribbon cables.

Yeah, pi is too expensive, was looking for orange pi instead but i found second hand wyse 5070 4x celeron J4105 8gb ram and 120gb ssd with the same price, so i get that instead it only spend 5w with 8 docker instances on it

A 1L server with a connected DAS supporting JBOD works perfect for a ZFS NAS setup. I have been running mine with a Lenovo 6500T mini PC in a RAID-Z for 3 years without any issues. For even further space saver you can get a 2.5 inch DAS and run that with ZFS mirror on two SSD's with a NUC. Have a friend that has been running this setup for the past year. You just need to make sure that most of the common codecs are supported on the GPU if you want to stream.

Bought both m910q and 800 g3 last week for ~$60 each with 7500T & 8GB. Added crucial p3 500GB for $10(after coupon) from microcenter and have very fast WFH PCs. FYI with Wifi cards. Cards like Intel 9560ngw or ax201ngw are CNVI/CRF and only works with 8th gen or higher cpu/dedicated motherboards. You will want to get cards like 9260ngw or ax210ngw.

On second thought, don't forget pis(s)

I’m tired and I thought the thumbnail said “forget piss” 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

We use the 800 G2 version in the school I'm working at. I love these small machines, although we are going to phase them out for individual PCs instead (replacing chromebooks).

I watched this video on one of these machines which I bought when electricity became expensive. In the UK they sometimes turn up in Computer Exchange, a used equipment retailer, though the thought that one is assisting in the fencing of boosted gear is ever present. I estimate it's paid for itself by now and it's perfectly adequate for most stuff; I fire up the big rig when I want to cut video or play games. Obviously, it's a bit anaemic in the GPU department, but it can just about run something like Genshin Impact.

I like - no, live for - cleaning montages!

I bought two used EliteDesk 800 G4 minis a few years ago with the i5-8500T cpu (35 watt). I put ESXi on both of them. One runs a domain controller and my NextCloud server and the other is for a test lab. I leave the first one running all the time since the power draw is so low compared to my other "big" servers which only run when I am working. I put 40GB RAM on both as well as an m.2 drive and a 2.5" sata drive. They have been working flawlessly since I have purchased them.

I've got two of these machines I use at work, traded in a more powerful PC at each of my sites for one each of these, primarily because of the 3 built in display port adapters. Most workstations out there come standard with just two, or perhaps two and an HDMI. Was nice to have straight DP to DP on 3 monitors, with a tiny form factor to stash the box. Much neater presentation IMO.

This is a great video. I had an AI project a year or two ago that Pi 4 wasn't strong enough for, and at 200$ a pop (at the time). So I bought one of these mini PCs. Just had to learn about serial communication to an Arduino but what project doesn't involve some learning? (They all should). So much power and for the time, at a cheaper cost. Didn't know you could get a Coral add on for them, even better!

I do really like small SBC's, but you're video really is a great option. Example, I have old hardware I cobbled together running klipper for my 3d printer. Nothing about klipper that needs to be on an arm chip. Works fine on x86.

This seems like a great way to do server hosting for older games like Battlefield 1942 and such. I'd thought about doing something like that but I didn't really want to buy some big 'ol server tower, this would be more than doable.

Thanks, very informative.

Right before I left my previous job about a year ago we upgraded our ageing HP EliteOne 800 G1 fleet with about 120 HP EliteDesk 800 G8 mini PCs with i5-11500T processors, and I was really impressed with them, they can have so much power in such a small package, and I really want one for my next home server to replace a micro-ATX desktop PC from 2010 with an i7-870 in it which draws a fair bit of power.

My proxmox system has been up for almost 8 months using this machine ( i3-7100T). It hosts all our local servers including 5m, old wow, and red dead. We also use it as non critical NAS. Its my goto for virtual lab machines, retro VM's and just pure reliability. It sits inside our alarm panel box, is always there, and comes in handy re-installing steam library files. With the initial investment in 16GB ram, a very fast Nvme , and wake on lan, its been very good for us.

these small machines, are very solid, and useful for a ton of applications, personally i recommend running something like alpine linux, as docker host, and just dockerrize all the services you need, most of the services that is useful can usually be fetched from the docker site, and easily modified with little effort. dns blocker, samba, hostapd are very easy to setup, just to name a few.

i have been using a tiny PC similar to that one for a NAS for the past couple years. 8 GB RAM and a 4TB Drive. I run transmission-daemon and mini-dlna on it. It downloads videos then broadcasts to my LAN as long as you have VLC installed you can watch. I love it! mine are lenovo m-73. i found a few of them at yard sales for cheap a while ago.

Great video. Maybe I'm alone in this but hopefully sooner than later we'll start seeing more arm/Risc-v based pcs in this form factor too. 👀

Thanks for alerting us to this. I got a unit with 8G of RAM and power adapter for $70 plus tax! In my case, I have plenty of spare SSDs, and I'll be using it as a MythTV Front End system.

Great information. More please!

I had the HP 800 G5 with i7 processor and 16 GB RAM as a work device in the office (supervisor/quality analyst) with three monitors and about 10 very large programs running constantly and I was always impressed by this small box. My boss had a much higher-end Sony notebook and the little HP was far superior. When my father (70 years old) needs a new PC, he gets a refurbished HP 800 from me. That is completely sufficient for him.

the knowledge i never knew i was missing. thank you. i guess i watched enough of ltt and jays vids that yt let me see this finally:}

Last year I purchased a mini-Lenovo to make it a media pc for streaming (MLB-TV) on my large screen TV. I installed Linux Fedora. Works like a charm. Its nice because its actually smaller than the Xfinity cable box. Its much better than constantly connecting your laptop to the TV for streaming.

Ironically, I just worked on the prodesk AMD of this yesterday at work. I am remodifying the hard drive caddy to hold a small fan and then will add air flow through the top part of the case as they get super hot.

My local thrift store ended up with a pallet of these Elitedesk 800 G3s and I love 'em. Got a mix of the i5-6500T and i5-6600T models. Throw a M.2 and some extra RAM in one of these machines and you've got a great Docker or Kubernetes host. I had 4 in a Proxmox cluster with about 3 VMs and half a dozen LXC containers.

There is a product called "Un-du" that is outstanding for removing sticky adhesive labels and such. It is very gentle and evaporates quickly. One of its intended uses is for removing old scotch tape and residue from photographs. I have used it for that many times and it never leaves any marks or effects. It can usually be found at Walmart (crafts section, I think), or ordered online (unless you unfortunately live in California, where you are SOL).

got a HP EliteDesk 705 G4, upgraded to 32gb of ram, and added a hdmi port for about 200 total. much less heat generated, my AC does not need to kick on as much. I only use my full desktop when i need more compute power, got a KVM switch for going between the two.

I have one of these HP mini pcs. It's great ... it drives my big screen TV and also acts as a "laptop", when traveling.

I grabbed one of these of Amazon, for retro game emulation. Im very happy with it.

Excellent video..! Thank you..!

Before buying a used one it's a good idea to ask the seller if the Absolute Persistence Module has be activated or not. HP makes a nice workstation stand to mount it and a monitor to, which is what I did... brand new stand in box for $25 and $50 for the pc itself. I love the setup as a laptop replacement. Just need a new compact keyboard now and some small speakers which should tuck nice under / in back of the stand.

we get alot of those elitebooks in where i work and while working pretty good they tend to have alot of issues that pop-up out of nowhere and even had alot of them refuse to turn on anymore (~10% of them) usual issues tend to be: front usb ports (you want to be really careful with them), power issues (sometimes refuses to turn on), usb power issues when using all 4 usb ports on the back (simply wont power fully), graphics issues (dying integrated gpu giving glitchy display) the good thing tho is they tend to have a slot for both ssd and hdd and 2 slots for ddr4

I have a Lenovo model running off a 12-120 inverter in my trunk. Use it to run android auto up to a USB touch screen in replacement of the radio. These little things are great and I can stream no man's sky anywhere I want now.

I have 3x RPi 4B 4GB, pre-C19. One is my audio server and handles jack and a 30 band EQ with room to spare. This way all my machines can use the same high end stereo output (at the same time). One is a file server, currently 2x 12TB drives in a ZFS mirror. One is for projects and mostly off. My two main machines are a pinebook pro and system76 pangolin.