I'd been thinking for a while now that I wanted to upgrade my desktop PC here at home. The old AMD 6800K was getting a bit outdated and frankly it makes a TON of heat in my room (100Watt CPU). Got to thinking that I'd try out one of the new 'Micro' PC's that are flooding the market. My brother had mentioned that he'd picked up a few BeeLink ones for using around the house for various things.
Essentially what these things are is a laptop crammed into a box. They have a few more options, such as the multiple display outputs etc. There are a few things you can upgrade on these, Memory, the internal SSD, and there is a slot for a 2.5" SSD that can be added if you choose. They also come pre-loaded with Windos 11 Pro with no bloatware at all installed, which is nice. You could also run Linux on them if that's your jam.
I ended up going with the SER5 5500U. It is based on a 15 watt laptop CPU. Certainly not bleeding edge, but it is about 70% faster than my current desktop and makes about 1/5th the heat. I'm having to move my big spinning drive to an external enclosure, but that's not a big deal and I won't have an optical drive unless I stick one of mine in an external enclosure, but I couldn't tell you the last time I burned a BR or DVD anyways, so that can wait.
So far it has been a win win. A $259 computer that is sitting here running 3 monitors that is about the size of a couple decks of cards. Using the Dispay Port/HDMI/USB C outputs and off it goes.
So far, I'm plenty impressed with this little thing. Certainly a lot cooler in this room.
With a VISA sitting on top for scale:
Old CPU, New CPU:
Essentially what these things are is a laptop crammed into a box. They have a few more options, such as the multiple display outputs etc. There are a few things you can upgrade on these, Memory, the internal SSD, and there is a slot for a 2.5" SSD that can be added if you choose. They also come pre-loaded with Windos 11 Pro with no bloatware at all installed, which is nice. You could also run Linux on them if that's your jam.
I ended up going with the SER5 5500U. It is based on a 15 watt laptop CPU. Certainly not bleeding edge, but it is about 70% faster than my current desktop and makes about 1/5th the heat. I'm having to move my big spinning drive to an external enclosure, but that's not a big deal and I won't have an optical drive unless I stick one of mine in an external enclosure, but I couldn't tell you the last time I burned a BR or DVD anyways, so that can wait.
So far it has been a win win. A $259 computer that is sitting here running 3 monitors that is about the size of a couple decks of cards. Using the Dispay Port/HDMI/USB C outputs and off it goes.
So far, I'm plenty impressed with this little thing. Certainly a lot cooler in this room.
With a VISA sitting on top for scale:
Old CPU, New CPU:
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