Mini Computers

[Zema Bus]

Despite the A/C I've been dealing with heat in the room I'm working in on 114 F days, and I deduced that the culprits were the two tower machines in the room with me. One is a machine I use for stuff in support of work, reference material, web searches, continuing education, as well as personal email, music, and podcasts. But this machine is overkill for what I've been using it for, and the exhaust heat builds up in the confined space. The other one I just use to play YT videos when I get up to take breaks from work to walk on the treadmill, which helps me get through the day since I'm sitting all day and it keeps me alert. I saw these cheap mini computers, they're like the Intel NUCs except affordable. The one that replaced the i7 machine is an AMD Ryzen 5 5650U (mobile processor) 6 cores with hyperthreading, it's basically laptop guts in a tiny box. It came with 16 GB memory (upgradable to 64 GB) and a 500 GB no name NVME with Windows 11 preinstalled. I got a Crucial 500 GB NVME and put it in the 2nd slot, then installed AlmaLinux 10 with Plasma 6 since I won't have to mess with it again for years. I've been using it this week and it does everything just as well as the big machine did and for a lot less power and heat. This one was $240 plus $35 NVME.

Drives are under a heat sink:

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The other one is an Intel N-150. It has 4 cores with no hyerthreading - they're all 12th gen E-cores, the exact same E-cores used in 12th gen desktop processors. This one also has 16 GB memory and I installed a 2nd 500 GB NVME in this one too. This one's a lot weaker but still works good for the purpose. The onboard sound was tinny sounding so I plugged in an external USB sound adapter & plugged the speakers into that which gave it good sound quality. This one was $115 plus $35 NVME.

No heat sink on this one, and no thermal pad on the drive that came with it. WIFI card is under the 2nd NVME drive:

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Testing it in Windows 11:

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It came with a FORESEE drive lol!

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They've made a big difference in the room temperature.

[Grogan]

Nice job, for the conditions. PCs do throw quite a bit of heat, it's like having a heater in the room. I'm in the basement and get a lot of the cold air conditioned air falling from upstairs (and it's been hot enough at night for it to run) but without that it's too hot in here. In the spring/fall/winter times with the heat on, I open a small window that's right above me on the wall, otherwise it gets too hot in here, especially while playing games.

That's not much more than what you'd spend on a Raspberry Pi kit, and the NVME because you can (unlike the raspberry, where you have to get a ridiculous, cumbersome attachment lol). That's compact enough, too.

I would almost rather eat mayonnaise than have to put that together though. That looks quite horrid to work on

[Zema Bus]

Thanks Grogan, yeah it's amazing to have that much capability in something so small.

[Zema Bus]

These little machines have old school BIOS's.

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[Grogan]

Nice, old school BIOS menu interfaces are much easier to navigate than the fancy pants GUI's now. There were literally confusing things I found in mine that were non intuitive, like setting the fan speed curves and stuff. I had to click on something that didn't look active (and as far as I could find, a mouse click was the only way to get in there) and then start typing.

[Zema Bus]

Yeah I was happy to see that, surprising in a machine with a recent processor.

I didn't have time last weekend to install Linux on the Intel box, priority went to getting it installed and configured on the one I use for work related stuff. So I ran the Intel box with Win11 all week, and Win11 didn't fail to annoy with it rebooting to install updates x3 at inopportune times despite my clicking the dialogue box button to do it later, which it defined as about 10 mins later. So I went into the group policy editor to change the behaviour (and hoped that it honoured the settings). Today I installed AlmaLinux with Plasma, same as I did on the AMD box, and of course I had to enable the EPEL and RPM Fusion repositories (pulls from Fedora repositories) and install codecs and ffmeg. When I hooked it back up (had to work on it elsewhere) the sound was super low. After playing around with it for a while I unplugged the speakers from the USB external sound adaptor and just plugged them in directly, and the sound worked perfectly! Under Windows it sounded tinny when the speakers were plugged in directly but worked great with the external adaptor. Under AlmaLinux it's the complete opposite. At least I know there's nothing wrong with the onboard sound after all.

[Grogan]

Alma 10 will be pretty static, just updates with non breaking changes until 2030

[Zema Bus]

For these use cases that's the idea

[Zema Bus]

Lately I've had trouble with the Raspberry pi 4 working with the radio streaming site. At first I thought it was just a temporary issue with the site, but it wasn't temporary, and the site worked just fine with any X86_64 machine I tested it with. I considered trying the RP5 but I want to use that on the TV, and I could end up having the same issue for all I know. So, I got another mini computer for that since I know that's going to work. This is a cheaper one, only 8 GB RAM and only one RAM slot, only one drive slot, and it only supports sata m.2 SSD's rather than NVME's, but it was under $100 (and upgrading the RAM to 16 GB is still cheaper than their pre-installed 16 GB model). I'm going to replace the 128 GB drive but in the meantime I just plugged in an external USB NVME drive enclosure I had. Also this screen is a little larger than what I was using with the RP4, I got it about 7 years ago, it was intended to be used with a Raspberry Pi but I couldn't get the one I had at the time to work with it (RP3 I think) so I put it on the shelf and forgot about it, until rediscovered it after moving. I also added a wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse, and relocated the AM/FM radio, so it looks a lot cleaner now.

That's AlmaLinux running off that external NVME drive:

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I have NoMachine installed so I can access it from my regular machine in a window whenever I need to work on it, install updates etc.

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[Grogan]

That's strange that the one audio streaming site doesn't work. Perhaps the WiFi drivers cause packet fragmentation or something... can't fit square pegs in round holes on some routes. (might the black hole detection setting have helped?)

Code: Select all

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_mtu_probing

Anyway, I'm sure that's better than a Raspberry Pi

[Zema Bus]

It would work OK for about 4 or 5 mins before the audio would stop and a dialog box would appear with a message saying roughly "an error has occurred with the playback" and under that a button to report the error. It seemed to be a server-side error message. That site seems to be very script heavy, I thought it might have something to do with that. The sound quality is noticeably better now with the same speakers. It wasn't bad before, but I noticed the improvement.

[Grogan]

Sounds like it's getting out of sync and the stream fails. Possibly it uses UDP/IP and that's less forgiving for data correction.

Oh well, the mini computer will be more useful, overall. It probably has a better graphics adapter than the Pi's as well.