MiniPC finder

[luke.zip]

Last week I set up another Mini PC (this just for a couch gaming setup, though I have a simple N100 NAS and a half dozen others lying around) - and in order to find the best deal, wanted to plot the price of MiniPCs against their performance in both GPU and CPU. Ended up spinning up a whole website that does it - and would love your feedback - check out MiniPCs.zip!



Basically, it scans Amazon and eBay twice a day (and hoping to add BestBuy, Newegg, potentially AliExpress soon) and extracts out the CPU/GPU, Storage, and RAM for each entry, and plots it out. Items are colored based on the distance to the Pareto Frontier (basically how good it is for the money) on the chosen "dealscope" dimension.

It's not 100% perfect for finding and comparing on every stat (EG RAM speed, transcoding support, etc) - but it's really good at finding some dirt cheap MiniPCs - or some strong budget gaming ones. More info on my blog post here.

 

[Monoman]

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[WhiteNoise]

This is is great. I am not I would use this to make a purchase directly, however it is good gauge of the market.

I frequently use CPUmark, what did you use for GPU performance?

I think a graph that shows CPU performance vs iGPU performance for each APU, (regardless of prices, or minipc) could be interesting in itself just to compare what each APU can do.

 

[luke.zip]

I frequently use CPUmark, what did you use for GPU performance?

Thanks! I used G3DMark for GPU Performance - though a lot of intel chips didn't have entries, I use some heuristics to estimate them - basically comparing specs of the iGPU to similar intel chips that have benchmarks. Any user concerned with GPU Performance will likely find a PC that uses a non-heuristic benchmarked chip (Ryzen or one of the well-known Intel ones). I add a disclaimer when it's an estimate.

I think a graph that shows CPU performance vs iGPU performance for each APU, (regardless of prices, or minipc) could be interesting in itself just to compare what each APU can do.

Not a bad idea - probably would have that as a separate page altogether, but would be fun to see.

 

[WhiteNoise]

I like CPUmark for the CPU part, but my gut feeling is that G3DMark is not reflective of the GPU performance.

The 5090 has twice the hardware (CUDA cores, memory bw) of the 5080. The 5080 has twice the hardware than then 5060ti.

GeForce RTX 5090 vs GeForce RTX 5080 vs GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB [videocardbenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

Maybe the GPU compute is more credible. Alternatively, You could try to pull the graphics part from 3dmark. Which reminded me of https://bestvaluegpu.com

 

[luke.zip]

I like CPUmark for the CPU part, but my gut feeling is that G3DMark is not reflective of the GPU performance.

The 5090 has twice the hardware (CUDA cores, memory bw) of the 5080. The 5080 has twice the hardware than then 5060ti.
GeForce RTX 5090 vs GeForce RTX 5080 vs GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB [videocardbenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

I think for AI or other raw compute GPU loads you're probably correct - but for Gaming it appears fairly accurate. The benchmarks you linked include FPS for various games & G3DMark, and they match pretty closely. Maybe the best approach is to import a wide array of benchmark types and let you compare among them, if it's not too intimidating.

 

[WhiteNoise]

but for Gaming it appears fairly accurate

It's not fairly accurate. There's no way the 5080 is just 8% behind the 5090. It's not an accurate representation. I don't know if you have ever run Passmark yourself, the GPU part of the benchmark is clearly ancient.

 

[luke.zip]

Ahhhh I see what you mean - fair enough! Some people from Passmark reached out to me about the site, so I'll ask their input as well - thanks for the heads up

 

[eduncan911]

This is fantastic. Thank you so much! I've been on the ropes for two for a while, but never pulled the trigger as I didn't know if there was more GPU performance hiding in another mini PC. This solved it. (and glad to see my pick was the best performance for the budget - and maybe a bit cheaper too!)

 

[nmpu]

Basically, it scans Amazon and eBay

Just curious, is this all literal scraping or are you using API calls?

 

[joeribl]

@luke.zip i was filtering for Lenovo and i noticed that there are some M75s in the results. Those are SFF models and not TMM.

 

[Skinny Skeeve]

This is pretty awesome. If I had one request it would be to filter for systems without RAM and/or SSD, i.e. a barebones configuration.