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

by yathern • 1 month ago

115 46 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

yathern9• 1 month 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)

thekevan• 27 days 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.

yodon2• 1 month 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?

yathern9• 1 month 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

yodon2• 1 month 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.

dthakur• 1 month ago

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

Gathering6678• 1 month ago

Failed to load listings (500)

yathern9• 1 month ago

Fixed!

yourusername2• 1 month ago

Why do you use a TLD that is commonly blocked?

pockybum5223• 1 month 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

yourusername2• 1 month 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.

NooneAtAll3• 27 days 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

pypt• 27 days 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• 27 days 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?

pixel_popping• 1 month ago

500.

pockybum5223• 1 month ago

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

catbot_dev• 1 month 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.

tomaskafka• 28 days ago

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

esafak• 27 days ago

Could you also plot various Mac Minis for reference?

yathern9• 27 days 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

spelk• 27 days 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.

flo123456• 27 days ago

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

thomasfromcdnjs2• 27 days ago

The mobile experience is horrible otherwise really awesome.

yathern9• 27 days 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

thomasfromcdnjs2• 27 days 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.

ricardobeat• 27 days 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• 27 days 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.

ectoloph• 26 days 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.

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

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