I've been thinking of getting a mini PC recently, and I've even thought about assembling it myself as a first assembly project. My question is, anything I should know about this? It seems to be a less popular option among people as I haven't seen much tutorials about it, probably because it is looked upon as no better or just slightly better than a laptop, at which point, I would guess most people would just opt for a regular sized CPU. What are your thoughts on mini PCs and are there examples that would make one very much worth having?
It depends on what you're buying or building it for. If it's for gaming, then you should buy a regular desktop, don't even think about buying a mini PC. If it's for general work, browsing the internet, then a mini-PC should handle that kind of work.
It's pretty much a normal PC... but with underpowered parts. Do yourself a favor and just get a laptop if you only want that to browse the web and stuff. At least you can carry it with you and is usually more powerful than a mini PC.
I was wondering about this myself what the real difference was.Yes, they are slightly smaller but are they less powerful or effective then a regular sized lap top? I think I may opt to just buy the standard size to be on the safe side.
A good application for a mini PC is to be a home server that is always on. You can add as many USB drives as you like, and make them available to your home network for streaming video/audio to your laptops/tablets intelligent TVs etc. The reason they are good for this is that they consume very little electricity, and you can leave them on 24/7 with very little power consumption, much less than a laptop. And if you know a lot about network software, you can also set it up as a gateway to the modem that connects you to the internet, and run on it a sophisticated firewall to protect your home network. That would probably require a server version of Windows or Linux though.
