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

68 points - last Saturday at 7:55 PM


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/

Source

Comments

walrus01 last Monday at 12:37 AM
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.
spelk today at 5:46 PM
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.
pockybum522 last Monday at 11:31 AM
This is extremely useful and cool. I dream of having visualizations like this for anything I buy that has specifications.
tomaskafka today at 10:36 AM
Nice homage to MiniPCs - I have a fanless N150 box with usb-c HDD as a carefree NAS/docker host for years.
yodon last Monday at 12:42 AM
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?

dthakur last Monday at 2:53 AM
Nice work. Clustering around N95/N100/N150 visible.
yourusername last Monday at 7:31 AM
Why do you use a TLD that is commonly blocked?
Gathering6678 last Monday at 5:56 AM
Failed to load listings (500)
esafak today at 4:59 PM
Could you also plot various Mac Minis for reference?
pixel_popping last Monday at 8:16 AM
500.
catbot_dev last Monday at 4:35 PM
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.