The audience for these things is people running small home servers that are tired of messing with Raspberry Pis.

I use a CNC router in my shop for woodworking. I used to control the CNC with a laptop but that died and I needed a replacement. I purchased a BMAX and mounted it to the back of a monitor to use as my CNC controller. While I wouldn't do any serious computing on it, it does work well as my CNC controller. It has decent WiFi connectivity, which I need for the CNC. After two years of living in my dusty shop it still is performing well. I think computers like these have their place as long as you don't overestimate their capabilities.

I bought a mini PC with a Ryzen 5 5500u for 199 USD. It converts the Hall Giant TV into a fully fledged PC, these mini PCs are awesome they make any TV a fully fledged PC, just add a wireless USB mouse/keyboard and done-.

I've used those mini PC's a few times in industrial applications, no moving parts and locked up in a cabinet.

These are perfect for basic office use and for people that only need laptop power, but don't want to spend laptop money, ruin a battery, and don't want a large desktop!

At my work, we've found good use for these as a one-trick pony. These little nodes basically run a kiosk; the user taps their ID on the reader and the node grants them access to a beefier machine that runs a scanner (e.g. an MRI). We can't install the software directly on the bigger computer as it interferes with the computer's main function (and we can't control the vendor's maintenance schedule) so we just get one of these that will lock the computer.

The Bmax is a media-box/thin-client. They are not meant to be used for gaming or anything like that. Even as an office-machine these are plenty of capable but that requires an IT-department or at least somebody with some basic knowledge on how to configure windows. At our local technical university they had some real thin-clients and switched to these mini-PC thinclients cause those were just marginally more expensive but far easier to setup and manage (and we were not bound to specific software and hardware vendors).

My mom is 76 years old. I got her a mini PC since her previous computer was like 12 years old. I got the N100 processor with 16 GB RAM all for $159. Not a bad deal. All she does is read emails, watch some videos online and that's about it. No need to spend more money. I even mounted it to the back of her monitor. If you need something cheap to use as a media center, then I would consider something like this. Gets the job done.

I can tell you a use case for these machines that I have experienced firsthand. My aunt works for a medical billing company, and she works remote, so the company provided her with one of these little mini computers because all that has to do is run a couple of web pages and web interfaces, and drive two monitors. These machines are cheap and perfect for that kind of application.

I got one for $280. It has a ryzen 5800h I think with 16 gigs of ram. Has been our Minecraft server for the family for a year and a half. She does her job well 24/7!

Mine sits on top of my telescope and provides all the software needed for capturing images and controlling everything. Couldn’t live without it.

Actually we have good use-case for this mini PCs. In industrial manufacturing plant just shove it behind 4K TV to run monitoring software - production plan, truck turns, HR announcements, etc. In corporate environment you need something that can run Up to date OS (Windows 10 support will end in October 2025) and for easy management capable to join company domain. This kind of PC is perfect.

The n100 chip has been a huge game changer for home servers with its native HEVC hardware encode/decode and highly efficient power usage. You can run an entire Plex stack while it sips power. Connect it to a low power NAS box and it’s a perfect combo

I bought a lenovo ThinkCentre M93P remanufactured last year before a back surgery that made me bed bound for a month and I use it just for internet surfing and UKposts and twitch on my TV. I upgraded the 8 gigabytes of RAM to 16 gigabytes of RAM and the processor. And I freaking love the thing!

Agreed with the fact that they are really aimed at home lab environments. The one that has an eMMC would likely be MUCH snappier as a Linux box than a Windows machine

Jay,the fact that you don't see a usecase for that lowend machine doesn't mean there aren't any. These things are meant for minimal usecases where other options are too expensive and/or where people otherwise wouldn't have bought a pc. Using this as your daily driver, even as a pure office pc...no, I would get the other one for 50 or 60 dollars more. But if you want to setup a most basic domotics server, or home assistant server, or converting an old beamer into a somewhat useable device for watching a movie outside on your porch/deck, or even using it in an office just for remoting into your virtual desktop, that thing is excellent. For those usecases, if it gets the job done in a somewhat decent fashion it's fine, lowest cost and lowest power consumption then is king. Deploying 200 or 500 of those machines in a callcenter for remoting into your VMs, it makes a hell of a difference if they are 109 or 169 dollar.

I bought my dad a Chewi Larkbox X for Xmas. I got it in a Black Friday sale for around $169. It does everything he needs it to do: email, internet browsing and Zoom calls. He even has it mounted to the back of his monitor with the kit that came with it. He’s also been tinkering with Linux on it via a USB C drive. I 100% recommend it for anybody in your family over like 70 who you have to help with computers. It has great IO and very few moving parts aside from a fan.

I have two of them. One I turned one into a Linux Debian 12 Owncloud server. It only has 4 GB of ram and a N4200. But I connected a multi drive storage bay with 24 TBs of space and it works perfect! The other one I have has AMD 5500U with 16 GBs of Ram and 512 GB space. I connected a 4 TB external drive to it and use it as my Plex Server. It works like a dream. They are just a really solid solution for building servers that manage media. Thanks for doing this video. I was curious about the N95. Looks pretty darn goodfor the price.

These small PCs have a nice use case for being like a garage PC if you’re always referencing manuals and procedures for car, home improvement projects.

14:00 not you streaming at a higher bandwidth than my entire network connection

I have a BMAX B3. Intel N5095 with 8gb of ram. Has horrible reviews on amazon but it's been working great for me as a Plex server running Lubuntu as the OS. Opened it up and slapped in a 2tb SSD and I was ready to rock.

Super appreciate the streaming gaming pc angle. I’ve been trying to get a solution like that for living room/bedroom for a while and refuse to get a console. Seeing the capabilities of these machine for that task was awesome. Thanks Jay!

I bought a used Lenovo M73 Tiny with an i3-4130T, 4Gb of RAM, and no storage for $20. A small SSD and 8Gb of RAM later I love my mini server setup!

Thank you for showing off how awesome Moonlight / Sunshine is - they need more exposure!

The one thing I wish all manufacturers of MiniPCs and NUCs would do is maybe increase size a tiny bit (taller) and add proper mounting holes so we could put a super low profile cooler with a 80/120mm fan instead of being forced to use those terrible laptop cooling fans as an only option. Silence from one of these would make them perfect for a lot of situations, but instead we get whiny laptop sounding machines. Would put huge pressure on ITX systems if these supported better cooling.

Been buying these for a while for our medium sized company. Work very well!

I also work at a university and we had these types of mini PC bolted on the back of every TV in class rooms, conference rooms and alike. We had the Dell NUCs. Those thinking were expensive. They worked well.

I have one of the mini PCs. I bought it so I could browse the web on my TV. I actually found it to be more useful as an emergency backup. In case something happens and my PC and Laptop are out of commission this will run google suite and allow me to get work done while working on getting my desktop or laptop back up and running. Its also small enough I can keep it in my bugout bag with a flash drive with all my critical documents. All in all, pretty handy to have in a pinch. 🍻

every time i see jay transform into an admiral i can’t help but laugh my butt off. you guys always have the funniest ad reels!

Jay, the problem with those NUCs out of the box is. First thing windows likes to do is run its updates. So it appears to take forever and a day for them to start responding as they should. i bought a BMAX NUC for about £100. Sole use was to take with me on holiday to stream stuff (with a HDMI and foldable keyboard and trackpad) while i was in my room. I used it to backup my holiday photos to a USB stick so i didnt have to use roaming data or crappy wifi service when abroad. However the first thing i did with my BMAX NUC was to swap out the NVME SSD with a blank one and put a Win10 Lite build on it. Without all the fluff that Microsoft likes to pack into its OS, the BMAX NUC worked very responsive and did the job it was bought to do. So for me, it forfilled its use. Didnt have the issues i saw you having. So now it just works as a little streaming box in a spare room for guests.

A friend of mine needed a very basic PC for his barber shop so I got him one of these minipcs, mounted it to the back to the monitor, and he’s been using it for the past 5 years. As a office pc these work quite nicely, has enough power to keep Chrome and Spotify open, and that’s what most people need.

I replaced my homelab server rack with 3 of the bee mini/bos ones. Saves about 40/month in electric bills and it just works like a dream with proxmox and containers

Not to promote another youtuber here, but ETA Prime reviews these mini pc's, sbc's, and low profile gpu's. He is also really into retro gaming and emulation. Fantastic youtuber that is in more of a niche part of the pc computer.

Let's go! Minipcs are awesome for what they can do

Set mine up as a retro emulation/mid range game device with a 2TB SSD and it's perfect. They are also very portable if you ever wanted to take it over a family/friends house. (Beelink SER5 MAX)

I have a Minisforum HX99G. I bought it barebones and put 64GB RAM and 4TB of nvme drives in it. It's pretty good.

I love my blink* (edit: not bmax, oops) minipc that I use for dedicated servers for Games like Palworld, Satisfactory, etc, running in docker containers. Its fantastic.

Sometimes i wonder that what type of computers exists in Jayz world? 1. 98% computers with only the high end graphics, 2. 1.5% of eWaste (like this video) and 3. 0.5% everything else. Jay: You can do better like these percentages show.

I bought one similar to the better one you have. It was to replace my dads really slow Dell desktop that had a low end laptop processor. Just used for internet browsing and watching stuff and running just a couple simple programs. It's snappy and has a good picture. Perfect for his needs. I plan on getting one to put on my shop TV for when I need to look something up out there.

I use one of these mini PCs hooked up to my TV. I use steam link to remote play anything from my main PC. I also use it for streaming youtube, netflix etc. Great for a living room "smarter tv" type system. I plan on getting NAS for my home which will even further make these mini PCs worth it.

Got my parents to buy a Beelink SER5. Fantastic little system for their needs. Very happy with it.

Another use case is astronomy. People attach these to telescopes to control the mount, a camera, and any other accessories. They load special software to control the equipment and then log into them across a WIFI network.

Bought one of these for a construction cjobsite trailer. Intel N95. 8gigs. 256ssd. And its connected to a used 4k tv. It runs chrome and displays the project blueprints. Much more convenient than the massive rolls of paper plans. I've tried 4k UKposts playback on it and it does fine

Thank you for doing this review. The BOSGAME is precisely what I need. I just ordered one using your link. I do some competitive gaming and mainly used Team Speak in the past, but now all the cool kids want to use Discord. For some reason, Discord causes frame stutters with my gaming primary system, so I plan to use this little microcomputer exclusively for running Discord external to my main computer OS with a USB Yeti headless and then connecting the BOSGAME’s audio out into my main computer’s audio line in using a ground fault isolator to make sure there is no audio no interference. Thank you for the video.

we have so many of mini pc's as the b max at work, runing simple linux terminal client to serv as a terminal for windows rds server for the employee.

12:12 I love to see Jay do video entirely with this voice.

We use a one of these as a remote-access node for our warehouse. They can remote desktop into it (over a VPN) to access the order system. Its been great. Mounts under the front counter and nobody knows its there.

Hey Jay, good to see you all sparkly again, hope you are feeling better and doing well.

The good is that it's tiny and clean, but people say it's all about the movement and proper usage. The bad is that it's way too expensive. For instance, for the same amount of dollar, you could build a system that's 100% better than the mini pc counter parts

I have one to “borrow” software online

I run a few of the N95/N100 mini pc's in a lab for Kali Linux. We've done both local installs and client version set to run VMs on a lab server. They work well for what we wanted and stay out of the way by mounting on the back of a monitor.

I bought the bossgame and it was delivered 2 days before this video went live haha love it! And not a bad little system at all. Got it as a "shipping pc" for my small business. It easily handles that and ofc watching jays videos

I would like to see a mini pc with a AMD cpu and what that can offer =D

"14th gen CPU, sorry, 12th gen CPU." As everyone tries to determine a difference across the majority of SKUs

I got one of these kind of mini PCs with the idea of having a PC that replaces a laptop since anywhere I go to now has access to a screen. Also for emulation that I can run on my TV. So far for something that's $260, it works great. Even can do PS3, Wii-U and Switch emulation which I did not expect.

I love these new styles of your vids. Keep it up

The mini PCs are very useful and used everywhere! I see them at the DMV. (Lenovo) Car Dealerships and repair (Lenovo) Many other stores used instead of dedicated POS machines. I bought one for my wife, she just needed it for some work stuff. My daughter needed a computer for school, and I don't have a lot of money lying around, so it gets here school work done. My current and previous server were mini PCs. Mostly because they are running all the time and are low power. Usually in the 6 to 9 volt range. My original server acted as a printer and web development server. My newer laser printer has networking built in, but I still sometimes use my old color inkjet. The newer server, which is now 9 years old, also acts as a Minecraft server. Sure it drops some ticks, but works pretty well most of the time. They definitely have their uses. Heck, my main machine is still rocking an I7-4770k. Programming, graphics editing, video editing, gaming, etc. Yes, I badly need a new computer, but that takes money. Maybe next year when Microsoft ends all support for computers before 2018.

We actually use them in our plant for connecting to terminal servers. Cheaper than Thin Clients, smaller than thin clients, easier than Pi's. We also are trying some out on web based MES systems, but generally have to buy more powerful ones for that.

A lot of their existence is I think just geared towards being the simple, ultra compact convenience that they are. We used to run them at my workplace attached to the rear of large TV's for public facing info displays.. that was pretty much it, but they did what they needed to do.

Just got a minisforun mini PC they have 80% of desktop PC performance and also small footprint I attach a core x eGPU I'm super happy with the setup

I actually was looking for a mini pc moonlight setup for the living room TV. Its amazing that you made a video for it.

I would hate to admit this on the street, but, I got one of those Bosgames for streaming my online movie services. I janked mine though. I drilled holes in the sides and cut the top open and put a Be Quiet 120mm fan on it. Wrapped it with carbon vinyl and stuck it to the back of my living room tv. It works pretty good. Wireless mouse and mini-keyboard at the lazy boy. Turned my living room tv into a smart TV. Jank? Yes. Better than paying $3,000 for a new TV for now.

The Boss Game is nearly the exact same case as the BeeLink mini-PCs the company I work for uses for our register computers. Some of the ones we have are 4th gen Ryzen 5s, and the rest are 5th gen Ryzen 7s. They all have at least 16gb of RAM. They do a great job for what we use them for. A few of the office personnel use the Ryzen 7 BeeLinks and those work well with MS Office (Excel mainly). For business mini-PCs seem to do a great job, but the processor needs to be a decent one.

I had an Alienware Alpha for years as my main PC. It was just slightly larger than these mini PCs but had a discrete GPU. There are definitely a ton of options whatever your use-case

They use these in offices where they have a virtual workspace on a server. It is common in many companies to have a small server for the whole office to access and then have these used as access points.

I purchased a GMKtec mini PC with the N100 chip, the base model that I upgraded to 16GB RAM and added additional storage. It has been a surprisingly capable little thing.

I got a mini PC with an Intel N100 a few months back. Took a little bit of tweaking the settings, but it's a great little media PC. Also used for streaming Steam games from my gaming PC in the other room. Not amazing for twitch-reflex games, even with a wired connection, but fine for anything slower.

I bought a Bmax B4 with an N95 for 180$ like 6 months ago. I have a more powerful pc but needed something for 4k playback on my tv and it's awsome, no lag or tearing. It can even handle running a server for lighter games (vanilla minecraft,unturned). Though i guess the debloated win 11 image (tiny11 by NTDev) helps.

I use one of these boxes (minisforum) for my own inhome wireless audio streaming setup via Voicemeeter. I can connect bluetooth and audio 3.5mm, combine them in voicemeeter and then have audio in each room. As well as remote control via Foobar.

we use them in industrial sites for displays of production numbers or alarm messages for operators or as clusters for displaying camera feeds to operators.

Something like this is a perfect collab for people like: serve the home, hardware haven, raid owl. These are super awesome homelab pcs at the price point of a high end Roku or Apple TV

I have one of the N95 based mini PCs and it makes a nice Jellyfin server. The iGPU has QuickSync, so it can encode at about 8 times real time without problem. It encodes about the same speed as my 5600X system does using CPU encoding. Granted, it's a lot slower then real GPU encoding, but at less than $200, it works. Haven't tried it out with anything over 1080p.

2nd one and above is great stuff for people who do office work or just browse the web. Cheap, functional, runs windows, got some ports and hooks up to a bigger monitor. Quickswap of harddrives and RAM makes mini PCs like this easy for both home-users and companies to either stick in a bigger stick of ram to buy a year of life, or swap drives if one either fails or you need to get rid of the old one for policy reasons For the price, unmatched.

Bought the Trigkey G5 N100 16+500gb when it was on sale for $180. Good little unit that can do dual 4k/60hz. Good way to make any TV/Monitor a 'SmartTV/HTPC' for the Office/Bedroom/Kid's room where you can run AdBlock ;) Also great for little home servers or maybe firewalls if so desired.

So I use a couple of these fanless Mini PCs for controling my Astrophotography rigs. And I use a Beelink with a Ryzen 5800H and 64Gb of Ram for image stacking, it uses the same layout as the Bosgame. They are probably all just rebrands. They are great for a lot of purposes, especially with Remote Desktop working so well. One thing I don't trust is the Windows install. A couple youtubers have found some suspicious things in the Default disk Image, so I always do a fresh install of Windows on them.

I have a Gemini Lake NUC, upgraded to 8GB RAM and the SSD as opposed to the EMMC drive and its perfectly usable.. I use it for KODI and DirectTV on Chrome...

I literally ordered a slightly dated HP Elitedesk G3 today as even a $120 refurb machine out powers a Pi 5. In my case I picked one up for an emulation box. I was debating on the Pi 5 but honestly by the time you get the pi, case, cooling, a sd card, a charging cable, ect you're at at least $140, from what I was seeing most starter kits are closer to $160. I couldn't justify the price for what you get. They're very cool devices and I have a Pi 3 as a Pihole and a Pi 4 running OctoPi for one of my older 3d printers.

I got a nice used one kinda like that thick boy for $65 on eBay. I got it just to run media player and store my mp3 collection. I plan on running it into my home theater. Cheap and easy!

I bought a BMax B1 Pro after seeing it on Explaining Computers. It has sufficient power as a media player, and for copying files to and from HDDs thanks to the four USB3.0 ports. I knew it wasn't high end, I bought it to work in the background while I do other things. I might turn it into a NAS as some point.

I use a Beelink SER5 (5700U, 16gb ram, 1tb nvme) mini pc for home office work, have it vesa mounted to a monitor on my desk next to my gaming pc setup. Is plenty fast for my uses. I just like having a separate setup from my gaming rig to do my work on.

I been waiting and hoping you would review mini pc's. Thanks...finally!? ll do a review on a mid range and high end mini pc as well.

I find these things perfect for computing away from home. Just bring it along with the proper cables, it doesn't consume much space at all, and you can hook it up to the hotel TV when you get THAT ONE email from a coworker while you're on vacation. Sometimes your phone and/or laptop just isn't the right tool for the job.

with the VESA mount, a more upgradable "all-in-one" for a relative.

I purchased one similar for the more powerful one as I do a lot of remote desktop work for my job and I use it for that instead of using m laptop as it takes up less space on my desk.

i've used these mini pcs as plex servers. just the tiny pc with a big USB storage drive. has worked great. i have heard that others connecting remotely to it that there has been stuttering on 4K content, but i honestly think it was more due to the device they were streaming to

I was expecting this to be one of those tiny Dell Optiplexes or Lenovo units or Asus Nucs. Those are actually fairly decent for their size and good spec. Decent upgradability and some of them even have usable CPU sockets. They tend to not be any cheaper than a full-size desktop but their perfect for acting as an android box or a minimalist look for someone who just needs to browse the internet. Super common in offices because they're energy and space efficient and they're fast enough for the use-case. These tiny low-spec ones, I'd personally put Linux on them and use them for browser games and cloud-based office work. Basically a chromebook at that point though.

These systems make excellent emulation PC's using retroarch or batocera etc to play all those old games we're so fond of, especially as raspberry PI's are getting more expensive and these systems getting cheaper. Love the show 💘

We run quite a few in an automotive manufacturing environment for workstations. We even use a few of the crappy intel compute sticks. They all function fine for the daily workload of the data collection system we run. For us, it's all about the cheapest option that doesn't slow an operation down.

The n95 and n100 Intel mini machines are actually great as a media server, they have pretty amazing 4k encoding for their size, and paired with a hard drive enclosure it can make for a pretty affordable media server.

I would use it as mini-server to manage my home internet, using pfSense, for example. Complete control over all connections, router-level adblock, VPN and such. Add a couple of WiFi antennas and a switch and you have a budget-friendly router/server combo.

The use case for those is very simple, I have bought 3 so far, nothing quite that low end, but I use them for home servers and one for my router.

I've got Acepc AK1 for about 6 years. I use it to watch movies, youtube, etc. I've put a spinning 1TB 2,5" drive in it (it was lying around) and MSata 256GB for the system instead of the ridiculous 32GB EMMC. It has 4GB of RAM and that is its biggest setback

The original market for Mini PCs was as thin clients for business apps or point of sale/kiosks, and that's probably where the major market still is. I personally use one as my Plex server even though the rest of my home lab runs on RaspberryPis since it's has hardware video encoding built into the processor. If I didn't have an old iMac, I'd probably use one VESA mounted to the back of a monitor for our kitchen PC which mostly runs Paprika for recipe management and updating our grocery list in Numbers.

these are really great for upgrading or moding a one up arcade, or even making a retro game station or pc

Mini PC's with AMD 7840HS or higher CPU and 780M integrated graphics. Might not game on ultra settings but will give you some really shocking game performance for the price add to that hardware support for encode and decode AV1, H264 and H265 and you have a very capable home computer that will support light to medium gaming. The ones in this video are good for digital signage or a thin client to RDP into a proper system/server.

They use these in hospitals for the nurses workstation on wheels (WOWs) they connect to a server for electronic medical record, lab, pharmacy, notes, whatever..theyre powerful enough for local use and everything else is offloaded

I bought a Minis Forum mini pc last year, been very happy with the super tiny form factor and 1080p gaming it can pull off in anything but the newest titles, it's a great little indie game/older game PC for being the size of 2 slightly flattened soda cans :) I use it as my multi media PC in my living room, it has already paid for itself in the savings on my power bill compared to streaming everything from my gaming PC to my TV via Steamlink, so if you're considering a mini pc, and want some oomph, I can personally recommend going for a high-spec AMD APU one. Mini PCs in general also has the advantage of letting you completely bypass all the nonsense and crap your TV comes with, never plug your TV into the internet and let the mini PC handle it all, I personally got mine cause I was sick and tired of Samsung running unskippable unmutable ads on the homescreen on my TV, my plan was to eventually get an External GPU enclosure to connect to it, but they seem to have completely vanished from the market here in the EU, I can't for the life of me find them, the only listings I can find are Razer Chroma X which are like 500€ for the case alone, and they are out of stock >

I bought the n100 version it was pretty good for basic use. I did go into the bios and put it to 30 watts vs the 20 it was originally setup with.

I recently bought a mini pc with a Ryzen 3750h and Vega 10 graphics. I upgraded the memory to 32GB and the stock Intel Nvme ssd wth my XPG 2 TB Nvme SSD which was in my previous pc. It runs most of my pc games from 5-10 years ago and some emulators fine at 1080p. I bought it because I didn’t want to have a regular pc anymore and I do my gaming on my Xbox series S, Xbox 360 and PS5 for the most part. Congratulations Jay on 4 million subscribers and thanks for the video.

I ended up with a Beelink S12 Pro for $179 on Amazon. It has the Intel 12th Gen N100, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, and Win 11 Pro. I have two external USB 18TB HDDs and the PC handles 4K/HDR/DV passthrough on the Plex server installed on it without any issues. It's obviously pretty slow, but it has taken everything I could throw at it with Plex nicely. No real complaints.