Find the best deals for mini PCs on eBay and Amazon. With many of them entering the used market, this tool helps you find
a cheap mini PC based on your needs. Prices are updated a few times per hour.
Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.
Nice, but I wish there was a “Reputable Brand” or “Warranty” filter.
A lot of these boxes are made by the same OEM, and branded a thousand different ways under various names specifically for price fixing on large marketplace portals online - different colors, different cases, but same features without a warranty.
A lot of these fake brand names come out of companies who simply change names once they hit a certain number of bad reviews on marketplaces. Same shitty hardware, different brand name. Beelink and Minisforum are legit, but ‘KingHive Pro’ is probably made by ‘MiniKing’, and also sells things under “GamerKing”, for example.
I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.
I was mainly looking for used ones like Optiplex, Thinkcenter etc when I made this. Hence those brand filters. Thought they were a much better deal than a beelink, so I guess the site is optimized for that. Oh also can you send the link for the KingHive Pro listing? Might be able to filter out brands like that.
I have a few services running on Proxmox that I’d like to switch over to bare metal. Pfsense for one. No need for an entire 1U server, but running on a dedicated machine would be great.
Every mini PC I find is always lacking in some regard. ECC memory is non-negotiable, as is an SFP+ port or the ability to add a low-profile PCIe NIC, and I’m done buying off-brand Chinese crop on Amazon.
If someone with a good reputation makes a reasonably-priced mini PC with ECC memory and at least some way to accept a 10Gb DAC, I’ll probably buy two.
I’ve been running OPNsense as a VM in Proxmox for a year on an AliExpress box that doesn’t have ECC. If I might ask, why do you have a requirement for ECC?
Before this box, I ran a Dell R230 with pfSense but got tired of the noise and 40 watt power draw.
I’ve had zero issues without ECC, so I’m just curious about your need for it.
There are really two reasons ECC is a “must-have” for me.
I’ve had some variant of a “homelab” for probably 15 years, maybe more. For a long time, I was plagued with crashes, random errors, etc. Once I stopped using consumer-grade parts and switched over to actual server hardware, these problems went away completely. I can actually use my homelab as the core of my home network instead of just something fun to play with. Some of this improvement is probably due to better power supplies, storage, server CPUs, etc, but ECC memory could very well play a part. This is just anecdotal, though.
ECC memory has saved me before. One of the memory modules in my NAS went bad; ECC detected the error, corrected it, and TrueNAS sent me an alert. Since most of the RAM in my NAS is used for a ZFS cache, this likely would have caused data loss had I been using non-error-corrected memory. Because I had ECC, I was able to shut down the server, pull the bad module, and start it back up with maybe 10 minutes of downtime as the worst result of the failed module.
I don’t care about ECC in my desktop PCs, but for anything “mission-critical,” which is basically everything in my server rack, I don’t feel safe without it. Pfsense is probably the most critical service, so whatever machine is running it had better have ECC.
I switched from bare-metal to a VM for largely the same reason you did. I was running Pfsense on an old-ish Supermicro server, and it was pushing my UPS too close to its power limit. It’s crazy to me that yours only pulled 40 watts, though; I think I saved about 150-175W by switching it to a VM. My entire rack contains a NAS, a Proxmox server, a few switches, and a couple of other miscellaneous things. Total power draw is about 600-650W, and jumps over 700W under a heavy load (file transfers, video encoding, etc). I still don’t like the idea of having Pfsense on a VM, though; I’d really like to be able to make changes to my Proxmox server without dropping connectivity to the entire property. My UPS tops out at 800W, though, so if I do switch back to bare-metal, I only have realistically 50-75W to spare.
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Nice, but I wish there was a “Reputable Brand” or “Warranty” filter.
A lot of these boxes are made by the same OEM, and branded a thousand different ways under various names specifically for price fixing on large marketplace portals online - different colors, different cases, but same features without a warranty.
A lot of these fake brand names come out of companies who simply change names once they hit a certain number of bad reviews on marketplaces. Same shitty hardware, different brand name. Beelink and Minisforum are legit, but ‘KingHive Pro’ is probably made by ‘MiniKing’, and also sells things under “GamerKing”, for example.
I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.
I was mainly looking for used ones like Optiplex, Thinkcenter etc when I made this. Hence those brand filters. Thought they were a much better deal than a beelink, so I guess the site is optimized for that. Oh also can you send the link for the KingHive Pro listing? Might be able to filter out brands like that.
Those were just made up brands, but you can see what I mean if you look through Amazon, eBay, Alibab…etc.
From your own tool you can see these brands stand out:
Some extra context: https://news.risky.biz/risky-biz-news-acemagic-mini-pcs-shipped-with-pre-installed-malware
‘AceMagic’ AKA ‘AceMagician’ AKA ‘AcePuter’ AKA ‘AceMini’ depending on your market.
Those amazon links are hand curated, and those are good brands and models. I’ll be on the lookout for those shady brands, thanks!
Awesome! I was looking for one to gift to my cousins
I have a few services running on Proxmox that I’d like to switch over to bare metal. Pfsense for one. No need for an entire 1U server, but running on a dedicated machine would be great.
Every mini PC I find is always lacking in some regard. ECC memory is non-negotiable, as is an SFP+ port or the ability to add a low-profile PCIe NIC, and I’m done buying off-brand Chinese crop on Amazon.
If someone with a good reputation makes a reasonably-priced mini PC with ECC memory and at least some way to accept a 10Gb DAC, I’ll probably buy two.
I’ve been running OPNsense as a VM in Proxmox for a year on an AliExpress box that doesn’t have ECC. If I might ask, why do you have a requirement for ECC?
Before this box, I ran a Dell R230 with pfSense but got tired of the noise and 40 watt power draw.
I’ve had zero issues without ECC, so I’m just curious about your need for it.
There are really two reasons ECC is a “must-have” for me.
I don’t care about ECC in my desktop PCs, but for anything “mission-critical,” which is basically everything in my server rack, I don’t feel safe without it. Pfsense is probably the most critical service, so whatever machine is running it had better have ECC.
I switched from bare-metal to a VM for largely the same reason you did. I was running Pfsense on an old-ish Supermicro server, and it was pushing my UPS too close to its power limit. It’s crazy to me that yours only pulled 40 watts, though; I think I saved about 150-175W by switching it to a VM. My entire rack contains a NAS, a Proxmox server, a few switches, and a couple of other miscellaneous things. Total power draw is about 600-650W, and jumps over 700W under a heavy load (file transfers, video encoding, etc). I still don’t like the idea of having Pfsense on a VM, though; I’d really like to be able to make changes to my Proxmox server without dropping connectivity to the entire property. My UPS tops out at 800W, though, so if I do switch back to bare-metal, I only have realistically 50-75W to spare.