PC Suggestions

KCarpenter12

KCarpenter12

n00b
Joined
Nov 9, 2017
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50
What’s a good small PC to use for Linux? I don’t need a lot of horse power. I have been using a raspberry pi which is usually great… but I want a little more power than that.
 
What's the use case? Is this just to tinker around with and learn? Running services for home? Gaming/emulation box? Other projects, e.g., IoT-like stuff?

A common inexpensive go-to is used/refurb Lenovo Tiny, HP Mini, and Dell Micro desktop unit off of Ebay (just be sure to also get the PSU). Something c. 6th-Gen Intel can be found for ~$150-200. Serve The Home has a number of articles on these and newer units.
 
Really depends on what you want to do with it. If you just want to mess around or run some services that don't need much hardware, get a corporate mini/micro office PC used off of eBay.

Mini doesn't work for me since my Linux box doubles as a file server. Need a bigger case for disks, so it's in a mid-2000s Lian Li all alumnimum full tower I had lying around. That's actually overkill since I don't have that many disks, but it lives in the basement so I don't care about size. The rest of it's an i3-10100 on a cheap ATX board with 16GB of ram. Also have a 10Gb NIC in the vid card slot and a couple M.2 SSDs... the disks can't hit 10Gb but the 2TB SSD I use for fast network storage can easily. Other SSD is a small one I use for the root filesystem and boot off of.
 
Used Dell SFF OptiPlex? You can get Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake ones for pretty cheap.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
6th-Gen Intel can be found for ~$150-200
Click to expand...
I recently got my wife a barebones 10th gen/i5 HP EliteDesk for $125, from the buy/sell forum here...does everything she needs it to & then some. I gave it 32GB ram & a WD 750x, which I already had sitting in my parts box :)
 
If you want something with low power draw, a N100 mini PC pulls less than 15W. I just bought a dual NIC one to use for a router at my house.
 
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