ASRock DeskMini X300

I’m a big fan of the ASRock deskminis for low power servers - dual 2.5” SATA bays, some have dual NVMe too. Very nice little platforms with low power draw, and low noise! I’ve got one of the DeskMini X300 on my desk atm with a 5750GE in it - 8c16t of Zen3 in 35W. It’s competitive with M1 Pro for performance and power draw.

I got a similar priced, but slightly larger form factor, an AsRock X300 mini-STX. A silent Noctua fan, 64GB RAM with an AMD Ryzen 5700G (about 77% faster than the Intel N200 in this mini pc) it idles at 12 Watt but can go up to 133 Watt if required. I think the mini-STX form factor is more serviceable and doesn't take up that much more space. It's "fanless" on idle but can spin up the fan when it needs to. You can get a lot more bang for the buck with a custom build.

I decided to buy a Mini-STX (AsRock X300 64GB RAM/Ryzen 5700G) and wait for a good laptop to become a available. It's still portable, much better performance/price ratio and you can buy a good (portable) high brightness matte display of your own choice. It may not be portable as in battery portable, but it's small enough to go in suitcase.

I've measured 11-15W idle power usage on a Deskmini X300 with a Ryzen 7 5700G, which is not bad for a socketed desktop CPU.

OOI, why System76 for those? As far as I can tell they're just off-the-shelf NUCs, and System76 are ~$200 more for a sensible spec than buying the NUC, some RAM and a good NVMe drive yourself. How do you find them for noise? I had an 8th gen NUC that was unbearable under high CPU load - I replaced it with a slightly larger ASRock DeskMini X300 with Ryzen 5750GE and Noctua AM4 cooler that is silent, even under full load.

The Deskmini x300 is good. Takes everything from 2400g up to 4750g (or whatever it is). 2x nvme ssd and can fit 2x 2.5 drives. You can also buy barebones for ~$150 (everything but storage, RAM, and CPU). Had x300 for quite a few years but have started playing games again, so decided to trade in for a desktop...but will probably go back if RDNA 2 is good/x300 gets updated for it (imo, the iGPU on the 4750g is terrible...RDNA 2 is way better). Great for running VMs on though, can take a Noctua NH-L9 so is quiet, far less space-intensive.

i use a mini pc as my daily driver. the deskmini x300 with 5700g cpu/32gb of memory with 512gb nvme for boot.i sold my PC since i didn't use it as much as i thought and this mini pc CPU is even faster than the desktop one (ryzen 3800x)

Finally one can buy these! The sibling model, ASRock's DeskMeet X600, should exhibit a roughly equal power consumption profile, but offers support for proper ECC UDIMM in up to 4 slots, which makes it a premier choice for a cheap, powerful, reliable and flexible (SOHO) server platform. Even the previous generation - with AM4 CPUs and DDR4 memory - of these ASRock offerings were easily enough for most users' needs (my wife still has a DeskMini X300 with a Ryzen 5 5600G as her daily driver).