Show HN: MiniPCs.zip – Charting the Pareto frontier of Mini PCs

110 points by yathern 6 days ago

The overall idea is to chart out the thousands of Mini PCs by benchmark and reveal the Pareto Front so you can get the most Compute per Dollar. Definitely a labor of love as I have a number of Mini PCs for my "homelab" (TrueNAS, piHole, Plex, basic stuff). It uses Gemini to extract specs from listings (since they're not often strongly categorized).

Quick blog post here: https://luke.zip/posts/pareto-pcs/

walrus01 - 5 days ago

The same N150 CPU mini PC with 12GB RAM I bought on Amazon a year ago seems to have considerably increased in price, as a result of the RAM price surge... Even though what's soldered onto its motherboard is probably the cheapest possible ddr4-2666 or similar.

thekevan - a day ago

I bought 2 Beelink s12 PCs just under 3 years ago and paid $254 total for both. (N95, 8gb ram, 256 ssd)
The same PC is now shipping with a 480 ssd but is otherwise the same and selling for $300 - $319 depending on the day.
yathern - 5 days ago

For sure - prices are bizarre right now - though if you sort by memory, there's some holdout units that have like 32GB of memory for $250 (though other poor stats)

ectoloph - 5 hours ago

I like the little Mini PCs.

I have a GMKtec nucbox with an Intel N100 and an M5 Plus.

The biggest issues with them are around firmware and power consumption, especially idle. It's hard to get them as low as some of the bigger vendor devices.

The M5 plus sometimes resets its fTPM and won't boot without user input until that is resolved.

I can get the nucbox to idle around 4-5w and the M5 plus idles closer to 8w.

Most of the BIOS options are hidden or obscured for power saving.

The worst offender though is Beelink which idles at closer to 30w in the GTi14.

pockybum522 - 4 days ago

This is extremely useful and cool. I dream of having visualizations like this for anything I buy that has specifications.

spelk - a day ago

This is so cool. Thanks for doing this. I was able to get the Optiplex 7050 with the i5-6500T and 8GB of RAM (no SSD) for $40 USD about 2 years ago, shocked it's $100 USD now! I brought 8 for some reason, this makes me feel better that I at least purchased it during the glut.

yourusername - 4 days ago

Why do you use a TLD that is commonly blocked?

pockybum522 - 4 days ago

Kind of crazy to me that anyone would block an entire TLD. This timeline is bizarre. How often and with what services do you find zip blocked? Genuinely curious
- yourusername - 4 days ago
  
  My employer blocks it on our work computers. Looking around it seems like this is commonly done because one of the main uses of the .zip tld is to spread malware by faking links to zip files using "/" look alike characters and other URLs that look like download links to zip files.
  - ErroneousBosh - 4 days ago
    
    Well by that token we should probably also block the .com TLD since that is actually an executable file suffix.
    
    zzrrt - a day ago
    
    Modern 64-bit Windows doesn't execute .com files, unless the user installs an emulator or something.
    
    neuroticnews25 - 12 hours ago
    
    It does execute PE files with .com extension.
  - yathern - 4 days ago
    
    https://luke.zip/posts/zip-defense/
    I get asked this a lot, so here's my defense!
    
    AuthAuth - 21 hours ago
    
    I had little opinion on .zip but this convinced me to go figure out how to block .zip tld. Why would someone risk all those attack vectors when there is so much available on the many other tlds. I could see myself getting caught by many of them.
- NooneAtAll3 - a day ago
  
  this timeline is bizarre because someone allowed TLD with common filetype name be created
  ideally it should've been killed the moment it was created to become a lesson for everyone else
  - nok22kon - a day ago
    
    so I guess you would also support killing another TLD with a common filetype:
    https://ohmyz.sh
  - jstanley - a day ago
    
    That ship sailed when ".com" was created.
pypt - 20 hours ago

We run https://aero.zip, works fine, not once anyone complained about it being blocked. There was a study somewhere that .zip TLD actually gets less malicious registrations compared to other TLDs.
- leoedin - 9 hours ago
  
  The whole TLD is blocked by my work firewall. I imagine you don't get complaints because the few people who are blocked just don't know what you do. How would they even complain if they can't access your website?

tomaskafka - a day ago

Nice homage to MiniPCs - I have a fanless N150 box with usb-c HDD as a carefree NAS/docker host for years.

yodon - 5 days ago

It would help if you actually explained what the color means.

What is yellow? What is green? What is blue? Are they relative to their CPU column? Relative to the pricing row? Absolute?

yathern - 5 days ago

Colors are distance to the pareto frontier for the given setting for "dealscope"! Easily noticed when axis and color are set to the same dimension (EG CPU) - but setting to different things allows you to visualize two dimensions (three, with price) without needing a 3D chart. I found it really useful to find outliers, but I realize it's a bit nonstandard!
Oh - and colors are grey-blue to red, with red being pareto optimal
- yodon - 5 days ago
  
  It's great that you understand the chart. Yellow being more optimal than green is very far from intuitive to the rest of us. We read green then yellow then red as a sign of DECREASING fit. And a bunch of blues next to that green to red progression reads as "no data" or "not relevant" or something.
  It's great that you have the data. I'm sure that took a lot of time to obtain. Spending a few more percent of your total time making the presentation of the data intuitive to others is almost certainly the highest ROI thing you can do at this point, if you want your site to be useful enough to get enough visitors to pay for the cost of acquiring the data.
  Feel free to tell me that red is the lowest Pareto value and that's why you made the frontier red, or whatever. I'll still respond that the details of the presentation matters enormously to adoption, and the current presentation is very far from optimally intuitive to those of us who didn't personally develop the data.
  - yathern - 5 days ago
    
    Oh for sure - your feedback is totally helpful, I agree the colors are not obvious (especially red being good), perhaps my tone sounded dismissive but that was not the intention at all - symtom of a quick response from my phone! I'll definitely work on improving the readability of the colors and what it means (tricky to find the balance between nerdily over explaining how it works)
    
    ozmaverick72 - 5 days ago
    
    If there was a key explaining what the colors meant that would be great. And maybe the option to select colors or pick between a couple of alternatives - i think in western culture green is good but in Chinese i think they normally think of red as the best - just being able to swap between those two defaults would probably be enough - thanks for your hard work - much appreciated
    
    derefr - 19 hours ago
    
    There is; click on the "CPU DEALSCOPE" button on the page and it shows a legend, while also letting you change what the primary axis of color-coding is. (Though oddly, the x-axis itself doesn't change, so random dots end up colored after changing this.)
    
    kristopolous - 5 days ago
    
    the color allocation is closer to chinese symbolism than western. You don't need to change it, just describe it somewhere, probably with a rainbow strip, maybe bottom right, like a scale symbol on a map.
    
    yathern - 5 days ago
    
    Oh good point - I was thinking more like "how hot is this deal" (and thus red == best) as opposed to just "good or bad".
    Now when clicking on the 'dealscope' button there's a little modal which tries to clear it up a bit.
    
    derefr - 19 hours ago
    
    > "how hot is this deal" (and thus red == best)
    If that's the intuition you want, then wouldn't it be natural to use the blackbody radiation spectrum (a.k.a. "color temperature")? Red hot -> white hot -> blue hot.
  - viccis - 5 days ago
    
    >Yellow being more optimal than green is very far from intuitive to the rest of us
    Disagree. Yellow as a progression away from the green/blue (that fade away into gray) towards red is quite obvious.
    
    pockybum522 - 4 days ago
    
    Yeah. It was so obvious to me I didn't think about it until I read the comments. Makes sense that it would trip some people up, though.
- 5 days ago

[deleted]

ricardobeat - 21 hours ago

It's wild that the 128GB RAM machines have completely disappeared. I feel like I'm in possession of a sacred item, having bought a Ryzen 9 system just a month or two before the craze hit.

Computer0 - 20 hours ago

It has been hard to find 64gb sticks since they launched ime. I had much better luck building 96gb machines. Haven’t looked since the ram crisis.

dthakur - 5 days ago

Nice work. Clustering around N95/N100/N150 visible.

flo123456 - a day ago

Very cool site. Thanks for making this. Would be awesome to have data on energy consumption as well. :-)

Gathering6678 - 5 days ago

Failed to load listings (500)

yathern - 4 days ago

Fixed!

thomasfromcdnjs - a day ago

The mobile experience is horrible otherwise really awesome.

yathern - a day ago

Thanks for the feedback - horrible how? It works fine on my Android but someone else said similar that uses iPhone, just not sure exactly what the issues was
- thomasfromcdnjs - a day ago
  
  I'm on Google pixel 10 xl, everything could be nicer in general, the chart isn't very smooth when scrolling around etc
  But the main problem is I can't seem to reliably click on a node, it works occasionally but if I find one I want to click on, it either takes ten taps or some I couldn't just open what so ever.
  - yathern - a day ago
    
    Ahhhhh I'm guessing that's a Device Pixel Ratio issue I completely forgot to consider (EG rendering 4x pixels than it should makes it slow, and the nodes smaller). I'll play around with it, thanks for the heads up

esafak - a day ago

Could you also plot various Mac Minis for reference?

yathern - a day ago

I intentionally have them excluded - I guess because my use case is mostly gaming, homelab, plex server type stuff. But people use them for OpenClaw and whatnot right? I'll add em back in

pixel_popping - 4 days ago

500.

catbot_dev - 4 days ago

This is exactly the kind of chart that gets better the more suspicious it is of its own inputs. Since Gemini is extracting specs from listings, I would love to see a small confidence field or "last verified from listing" date next to each point.

Two fields that would make the Pareto view easier to trust:

1. New vs refurbished vs unknown. Mini PC listings blur that line constantly. 2. Power draw at idle and under load, even if it starts as a rough bucket. A box that wins on dollars can lose badly if it is going to sit in a homelab for three years.

The CPU/GPU/storage/memory toggle is nice. It makes the site feel like a tiny buying lab instead of another affiliate table.