Tiny/Mini/Micro PC experiences

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race2c

New Member
Oct 14, 2020
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SF Bay Area, CA
Adding my experience here.

After following Patrick (and the STH team) on youtube related to the TMM segment, ended up picking up a M920q (with a 8600t/8gb/no nvme/and ~3 years warranty) a few months ago. It replaced a full blown desktop (4790k/z97m/16gb/etc) that was/is a glorified htpc/streaming client.

Once recieved, I put in a 1tb nvme in it, reinstalled W10P, and using the old Logitech K400. Everything is going swimmingly. Great device with low power usage, low profile and appearance. Eventually, I will upgarde the NIC in it. One of the main reasons, I went with m920q is due to the riser and slot. Eventually, this will allow a hard-line connection to my TrueNas/networking setup.
 
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drag3nis

New Member
May 27, 2021
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Hello,
Is there any option to add E3-1245 v5 to Lenovo M710q/M700 ? Would it work with higher power PSU?
 
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mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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New Zealand
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Aluminat

Member
Jul 5, 2019
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After few gen (G5 to G8 I think?) with HP fiberNIC optional slot, does anyone actually got it?

Me by myself still searching it on 2nd market but still no hope yet. Not even a picture
 
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Parallax

Active Member
Nov 8, 2020
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London, UK
jolly said:
Any experiences with the m90q gen 2's?
Or What's the current suggestion if I want to pick up a few nodes especially if I would like them on at least 10 G
Click to expand...
I think anything from the Mx20q generation onwards will be more than fine CPU-wise, but you will need to be careful on heat from the 10G card.

Note it's a bit of a catch 22, you would probably want to have significant storage onboard if you're connecting at 10G, but with the card occupying the SSD bay the storage will all have to be NVME with associated cost.
 
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mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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Sick of not being able to watch HEVC movies in 4k so just purchased a Dell Optiplex 7070 with a i5-9500T
Coffee Lake CPUs are just horrendously priced may as well buy a complete system for a little more
I'll see if I can revive my i3-9100T that I used in the Lenovo M900, might be a small chance it will work in Coffee Lake Mobo
 
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custom90gt

Active Member
Nov 17, 2016
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Thanks for this post btw, looking for SFF builds for PFsense. This makes searching ebay easy.
 
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xbliss

Member
Sep 26, 2015
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I was wondering if I could leverage one of these used cheap ones for the following scenario:

What are latest/ last Gen of CPUs Chipsets (Mobile, Desktop/ Workstation) from Intel AMD still support & can run Win 8.1? As is or Mods w/o W10 push?

xbliss said:
What are latest/ last Gen of CPUs Chipsets (Mobile, Desktop/ Workstation) from Intel AMD still support & can run Win 8.1? As is or Mods w/o W10 push?

What are the latest/ last Gen of CPUs Chipsets (Mobile, Desktop/ Workstation) from Intel AMD still support & can run Windows 8.1? officially or with some tweaks? With MS & OEMs not crippling it to push Win 10?

I will be getting a laptop or 2 in 1 in the next year 2022 or so and I'll likely make the desktop into a Home machine/ Small NAS.

Currently and will continue using Win 8.1 as long as possible. Hate Win 10 but will run a side instance VHD for tiny things once in a while.

What are the best Laptops / Desktops I could look into?

PS:
What am I reading about Microsoft doing some blocking business?
Is that just Windows updates? I can manually download and do cumulative updates every 3 months so I don't mind.
What else are they (MS) fiddling with?
Click to expand...
 
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xbliss

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Sep 26, 2015
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Last edited:
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ReturnedSword

Active Member
Jun 15, 2018
526
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Santa Monica, CA
I’m considering moving my Plex setup to a lower wattage system. I briefly moved to my Synology DS1821+ but the Ryzen V1500B really struggles on even 1080p transcodes.

Right now I’m obsessing over the EliteDesk 800 G6 w/ GTX 1660 Ti. At a minimum I think I need a 7th Gen NVENC (Turing/Ampere). The EliteDesk is a bit pricey though :( Another thought was to go with a proper mATX all-in-one box with integrated 10 GbE and a full fat GPU. But that would be in the way of me downsizing the power consumption of my lab.

Mainly I’d like to use NVENC, with a powerful enough CPU as fall back for software transcodes as needed. I’d love to gather any ideas from implementations everyone is doing.
 
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Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
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How many 1080p stream you need?

I3-7xxx or i5-7xxxx or higher cpu model, should handle many 1080p stream easily.
 
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ReturnedSword

Active Member
Jun 15, 2018
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Santa Monica, CA
Probably less than 6 1080p streams. What I’d love to do is standardize my library to 4K Remux and have that transcoded from 4K to 1080p as needed. I’m aware QuickSync is pretty good, but the quality preset isn’t as good as a 6th or 7th gen NVENC AFAIK.
 
zer0sum

zer0sum

Well-Known Member
Mar 8, 2013
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ReturnedSword said:
I’m considering moving my Plex setup to a lower wattage system. I briefly moved to my Synology DS1821+ but the Ryzen V1500B really struggles on even 1080p transcodes.

Right now I’m obsessing over the EliteDesk 800 G6 w/ GTX 1660 Ti. At a minimum I think I need a 7th Gen NVENC (Turing/Ampere). The EliteDesk is a bit pricey though :( Another thought was to go with a proper mATX all-in-one box with integrated 10 GbE and a full fat GPU. But that would be in the way of me downsizing the power consumption of my lab.

Mainly I’d like to use NVENC, with a powerful enough CPU as fall back for software transcodes as needed. I’d love to gather any ideas from implementations everyone is doing.
Click to expand...
You can save a little more and go with a 1650 Super (not plain 1650) as they are also Turing :D
Although I get excellent results with a tiny little Nvidia Quadro P400 as well :D
 
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