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Desktops and mini PCs

Asus Chromebox

6owners with an opinion
80%of verdicts positive
1/1positive/negative since 2024
1.5 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for value and performance.

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Likes itOwned 1.5 years
I bought a used Asus Chromebox cn60 for $22, it has a 1 x Celeron 2955U @ 1.4 GHz tossed in 16gigs of ram for an additional ~$15 and a 256gig m.2 ssd for ~$18. All in under $60 for an x86 based cheap low powered home server running Debian. Running several docker containers for over a year and a half now, rock solid. Runs pihole, home assistant, an imgur clone for my wife and all runs through a cloudflare tunnel. Rescue old hardware!
Doesn’t like it
I tried to use an ancient Asus Chromebox as my main desktop for a while, maybe three years ago. Old dual-core celeron processor, I wanna say 8GB of memory but it might have been 4. The only usable browsers were very-light WebKit ones, and even then, more than three tabs was no good, and heavier “webapps” weren’t an option, unusably slow. Firefox and Chrome were unusable, period, and “lightweight” options based on their engines are not very lightweight at all. It had to be WebKit. Wild that with the early ‘00s Web I could browse far more capably on machines 1/10 that powerful. [edit] I mean, it was a chromebox by brand but I was running Void Linux on it.
Likes it
If you don't need a stupid amount of compute power you can find even cheaper alternatives. I bought a used Asus Chromebox CN60 for $21, put $20 of ram(16gigs) in it and a $20 256 gig ssd. All in, ~$61 minus shipping and I have a small home server running CasaOS. Same as the Zima Board, I have it running Home Assistant, PiHole, a MariaDB instance & an image hosting website for my wifes project. It happily hums away running on a Cloudflare Tunnel. It's excellent! I had to set up my Cloudflare Tunnel manually but it has since been added as an app to the app repository. https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS-AppStore/issues/158
Neutral
I donated monthly to MrChromebox for more than a bit. Before COVID hit, I used his firmware and ~20 1st Gen Asus/HP Chromeboxen (upgraded RAM to 16G and 128/256GB SSD replacements, i7-4600U Haswell, cases stripped off and heatsinks added to the new SSDs) to create a physical K8s lab. I no longer need to run that kind of lab, but I still use those a few of those nodes for running services at home. Proxmox/Docker/K8s/Win Server/etc, a bit more power draw, but x86-64 and since they "expire", you'll see a periodic flood of devices to places like eBay.
Likes it
You don't have to but I used MrChromebox's firmware on a C710, C720, and 2 Asus Chromeboxes. The project has been around about 10 years. I think it if was not trustworthy we probably would have heard something by now. I remember using the SeaBIOS firmware from them around 2014. Since then I've updated all machines to the UEFI firmware and now they can even boot Windows. I run the latest Fedora distribution on all of them and they work fine.
Likes it
I do not own any Chromebooks yet, but have a bunch of Chromeboxes, which essentially are the same thing in desktop small form factor, and liberated all of them over the years using the unscrew+script method described at https://mrchromebox.tech . They may not be very fast, especially the older ones, though still have their use. I turned for example a Asus CN62 (CPU: i3-5010U) to a Kodi media center, and it flies compared to the Raspberry Pi4 I used before. Only drawback compared to the RPi is the lack of native CEC support, which I solved by adding an external Pulse Eight dongle. https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter
Likes it
Many of those options are cheap to buy but expensive to ship. One pi clone was $30 on Amazon but shipping was also $30. Desktop thin clients/mini PCs and a 3rd party Arduino clone connected over USB for the GPIO are cheaper than most of these options and give you more performance. I’ve used a ASUS Chromebox CN60 and an Inland clone from a micro center for a project. The CN60 cost me $28 a unit on eBay. Picked up a few of those for various projects. Skilled engineers might be able to tap into the gpio on the motherboard. HP EliteDesk 800 G1 Desktop Mini PC was going for about $50 on eBay. Also have a few of those and support dual monitor. I would go this route over RPi. I’ve sold all my RPI’s on eBay and will never go back. Don’t be fooled by the marketing Pi Foundation does. You don’t need their products.
Likes it
> It's super expensive though! It's reasonably priced considering the features. Look at what cost mini PCs with multiple Ethernet ports, and the following one is one of the cheapest in the EU (other links appreciated). https://www.ipu-system.de/ > What would you really need this for that you couldn't use a $35 Raspberry Pi 4 for The RPi is unobtanium almost everywhere, and costs more than twice, which makes it the very last choice for any use. Also, performance is quite poor compared to the Celeron used in that product. Here's a comparison. Benchmarks should be always taken with a grain of salt, still they give a rough idea of the differences. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3667vs4297/Intel-Celero... Last year I moved my Kodi media player from a RPi4 to a used Asus CN62 2nd gen Chromebox whose CPU isn't that far from the linked mini PC, and the performance boost was huge. I've just looked at Ebay listings for a used RPi4 and it easily goes to €100 and above for the 4GB model; it's just crazy (and wouldn't happen if the RPi was really available at the advertised prices): the Chromebox cost me half of that, delivered. That miniPC has two Ethernet ports, which makes it better for use as firewall than a single port system. External USB adapters are not a good or reliable workaround. > (and slap in a cheap SD card)? SD cards can fail spectacularly. Any device running important services should boot off reliable media, which SD is not, especially when not mounted read only…