Ditch power-hungry 500W tower desktop PCs. Discover how modern Mini PCs handle Proxmox homelabs, silent living-room 4K media, esports gaming, and localized LLMs at under 35 Watts.
Slash 24/7 homelab electricity costs to pocket change.
Direct PCIe 4.0 x4 pipe for near loss-free external GPU gaming.
Ideal for dedicated OPNsense, pfSense, and TrueNAS nodes.
Mount behind your monitor via standard VESA brackets.
Filter across distinct micro-architectures based on your primary workflow.
| Graphics (iGPU) | Intel UHD (24 EU) |
| Memory Architecture | 1x DDR4/DDR5 SODIMM (Up to 32GB) |
| Storage Exp. | 1x M.2 NVMe + 1x 2.5" SATA |
| Idle Power | 5W – 8W |
| Est. Barebone Cost | $120 - $180 |
OPNsense Firewall, Pi-hole, Plex DirectPlay, lightweight Proxmox cluster nodes.
| Graphics (iGPU) | Radeon 680M (RDNA 2) |
| Memory Architecture | Dual-Channel DDR5 (Up to 64GB) |
| Storage Exp. | 2x M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 NVMe |
| Idle Power | 10W – 14W |
| Est. Barebone Cost | $310 - $420 |
Heavy 4K multi-monitor productivity, software compilation, medium Docker stacks.
| Graphics (iGPU) | Radeon 780M (12 CUs RDNA 3) |
| Memory Architecture | Dual DDR5 5600MHz SODIMM |
| Storage Exp. | 2x PCIe 4.0 NVMe (Raid 0/1 support) |
| Idle Power | 11W – 16W |
| Est. Barebone Cost | $490 - $680 |
Native 1080p AAA gaming, external eGPU docking, Ollama local 7B-13B LLM inference.
| Graphics (iGPU) | Intel UHD 32 EU |
| Memory Architecture | 1x SODIMM DDR5 4800MHz |
| Storage Exp. | Up to 4x M.2 NVMe + 2x SATA |
| Idle Power | 9W – 15W |
| Est. Barebone Cost | $220 - $310 |
High-bandwidth TrueNAS SCALE box, multi-tenant router, localized NVR security server.
| Graphics (iGPU) | Radeon 890M (16 CUs) |
| Memory Architecture | LPDDR5X 7500MT/s (Soldered 32/64GB) |
| Storage Exp. | Dual M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 |
| Idle Power | 12W – 19W |
| Est. Barebone Cost | $790 - $1,050 |
Ultra-fast local model fine-tuning, 1440p gaming, intensive creative studio workflow.
| Graphics (iGPU) | Intel Arc Graphics (8 Xe-cores) |
| Memory Architecture | Dual DDR5 5600 SODIMM |
| Storage Exp. | 2x M.2 PCIe 4.0 |
| Idle Power | 11W – 17W |
| Est. Barebone Cost | $520 - $720 |
Intel QuickSync 8K AV1 transcoding, media engineering, desktop virtualization.
| Graphics (iGPU) | Radeon 890M (16 CUs, up to 3.1 GHz) |
| Memory Architecture | DDR5-5600 SODIMM or LPDDR5X (Up to 128GB) |
| Storage Exp. | 2–3x M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 (chassis dependent) |
| Idle Power | 6W – 10W |
| Est. Barebone Cost | $720 - $1,400 |
Local LLM inference, 1080p–1440p gaming with upscaling, software builds and creative workloads in a compact desktop.
| Graphics (iGPU) | Radeon 8060S (40 CUs, up to 2.9 GHz) |
| Memory Architecture | LPDDR5X-8000 256-bit, soldered (64GB or 128GB) |
| Storage Exp. | 2x M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 |
| Idle Power | 10W – 18W |
| Est. Barebone Cost | $1,500 - $2,800 |
Local LLM inference on 30B–120B models, ROCm/AI development, 1440p gaming without a discrete GPU, heavy multi-core builds.
| Graphics (iGPU) | Intel Arc B390 (12 Xe3-cores) |
| Memory Architecture | LPDDR5X-9600 soldered (X-series) or DDR5-7200 SODIMM |
| Storage Exp. | 2x M.2 PCIe 4.0 / 5.0 (chassis dependent) |
| Idle Power | 5W – 10W |
| Est. Barebone Cost | $850 - $1,600 |
Quick Sync media servers and editing, efficient always-on workstations, 1080p gaming on the iGPU, on-device AI with OpenVINO.
Tell us what you plan to run and your budget ceiling. We'll match you to the ideal silicon architecture with thermal & reliability warnings.
Essential engineering details to consider before hitting "Order" on Asian imports and OEM barebones systems.
Because Mini PCs pack 45W-65W laptop processors into a 4x4-inch chassis, cooling topology is paramount:
Connecting external desktop graphics cards (eGPU) has evolved significantly:
Should you buy with RAM & SSD pre-installed or barebones?
Clean power delivery determines clean desk setups:
Step-by-step guides with copy-paste commands.
Turn a 6 W mini PC into a 24/7 homelab hypervisor: install Proxmox VE 9, switch to the no-subscription repository, pass the iGPU to a Jellyfin container and tune idle power.
Use the Radeon 780M iGPU in a Ryzen 7 7840HS / 8845HS mini PC to run quantised 7B–14B models with Ollama on Linux, using ROCm and a larger UMA frame buffer.
Turn an N100/N305 mini PC into a 24/7 NVR: run Frigate 0.18 in Docker, decode camera streams on the iGPU with VAAPI and run YOLOv9 object detection through OpenVINO on the same GPU.
Turn a two-port N100 box into a full router: write the 26.7 VGA image, install to the SSD with ZFS, assign WAN and LAN, then harden the WAN side and keep a restorable config backup.