(Part 2) Best products from r/MiniPCs

A mini STX motherboard can be had for $89 and a simple case is is like $34 and you could put a cheap Celeron or Pentium in it. Those have USB c ports built into the front of the motherboard that just poke out of the front of the STX case like raspberry pi's and you plug a power supply right into them. Maybe not super cheap, but you could get a nice set up for possible $250 or less

I briefly considered scraping my pennies and nickels ("pennies" and "5-pence?") together to buy a Thunderbolt-able Skull Canyon NUC and then strap an Akitio Node to drop in (and future-upgrade) a proper GPU.

It would cost a little more than an MITX tower but upgrading would be simpler because MOST IMPROVEMENTS WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE and all parts are super-standardized.

Decided against it only because this machine would run continuously for at least three years and I don't know how these handle obnxious thermals across time and I didn't want to deal with warrantying all that or ever RMA'ing any of it.

Why not get a 120v car adapter and use any computer you want? Seems restrictive to build a computer around a very specific power delivery when you can transform the power to a universal standard.

Something like this might be useful too:

BMK 200W Car Power Inverter DC 12V to 110V AC DC Adapter 4 USB Ports Charger Adapter Car Plug Converter with Switch and Current LCD Screen https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079HPZ9JY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_qtu6CbW7JC9RE

Most definitely. this one I think would suit their needs just fine. J5005 cpu (just as powerful as a i5-5300u), 8GB of ddr4 RAM, 128GB mSATA SSD, with an open SATA port for additional storage, 2 HDMI 2.0, ethernet port, 4 USB 3.0 ports, and a uSD slot. Each hdmi will output 4k@60fps. It also has a built in fan for cooling, and a 2 year warranty, though YMMV.

I was actually going to pick this up for a coffee shop type of desktop, but ended up going a different direction.

Are you by any chance looking for something like these?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/152400783297

http://s.aliexpress.com/baiee63U

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01AT394A4/

Depends on how much you want to spend. A Pi3 would be the cheapest. But it might be easier setup to grab an Android TV box and put an emulator on it. BUt again it all depends on how much you want to spend

Here some Android options:

-1) https://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-SHIELD-Streaming-Player-Controller/dp/B01N1NT9Y6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1527121083&sr=8-2&keywords=nvidia+shield


2) https://www.geekbuying.com/item/H96-MAX-Rockchip-RK3399-Hexa-Core-64bit-4G-32G-4K-TV-BOX-379059.html

3) https://www.geekbuying.com/item/MX10-Android-7-1-2-RK3328-4GB-32GB-TV-Box-386668.html

4) https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mi-Box-Android-TV/54827138

Lead acid batteries are rechargeable (think car battery) but dont use an actual car battery. If you are using an ac adapter already just put a 12v inverter and stick it on the battery. That will handle regulations.

If you want a single box solution

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07H8F5HYJ

This will do 12v and 6amp out but dont expect a ton of time out of it.

I recently bought one of these to mount in a panel at a job site. Its only purpose is to give us a machine to log into with teamviewer so we can access all our (web-based UI) controllers on the network.

It works fine for that purpose, and I can confirm that auto-start-after-power-loss is an available option in BIOS. The only caveat is that if you don't have a monitor attached (we don't), you need a display dummy plug like this to run it headlessly.

You can preorder CHIP.

Raspberry Pi 2 on Amazon.

Here are various versions of the Cubox-i at Newegg.

PS. I'm looking to sell my Cubox i4pro if anyone is interested.

How about this one?
$228 J1900 processor ,8G ram,64G SSD,2 NIC's： https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014J4IRJI，the computer is designed to be easy to disassemble so you can add memory, storage, or other hardware.

You can get a real UPS for not much more than the cost of a power bank (and less than many), and it'll actually work like a UPS is supposed to, switching you from mains to battery and back. A power bank will always run off of the battery, and then charge itself separately. Even if your power bank can discharge while charging (most don't), you're wasting power 100% of the time because the conversion from mains to battery is not 100% efficient.

What I did was built a gaming rig out of a mini itx gaming board and put into a cube case. It's about 1ft cubed. Coolermaster has some nice small cases for itx. Won't find much in a soc config with that kind of video horsepower yet.

The case
https://www.amazon.com/Cooler-Master-Elite-110-Mini-ITX/dp/B00HJOJJ6Q

The board
https://www.asus.com/ca-en/Motherboards/Z170I-PRO-GAMING/

RAM and SSD install was exactly the same as installing RAM in a laptop. There's a slot you feed them into at an angle and then push down. The mSATA requires a screw (provided by Gigabyte) to hold down. The PC also came with a wireless card with Bluetooth that's already installed under the mSATA slot, but you can remove it if you want to install a different card.

Since I planned on this being mainly used for streaming to the device, I got a 64 GB SSD and 4 GB RAM.

There's a slightly more expensive model of the one I bought that supports a 2.5" drive. If you're looking to keep your entire library on there, you may want to look into that so you can add a larger HDD. As I have it, I'm running a 1 TB external off of a USB 3.0 port, which is fine in terms of speed, but it's not quite as compact.

Edit: Make sure you get 1.35 V RAM. I tried it with some old 1.5 V I had lying around and it did not boot.

Couple of options on Amazon that are around the budget.
https://www.amazon.com/Pentium-Processor-1000Mbps-Bluetooth-Support/dp/B06XSDQPB1
https://www.amazon.com/industrial-computer-computers-Qotom-Q190N-multimedia/dp/B012Z2376Y/

Why don’t you search on amazon for “mini pc” and put your max range. Just one example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CJFZ1NL/

Nvidia Shield