Thinking about picking up a mini-pc for living room gaming for the family, to replace the old desktop computer that’s been filling the role but has developed terminal hardware issues as of late.
Main usage is emulators, up through PS1 at least, but would also love to leverage a hefty but long-neglected steam library too, so probably going with a Bazzite setup on this one. Had Batocera on the other one, but it was pretty annoying to get anything outside of retroarch to run, and a few times updates caused major issues I had to ssh in to fix.
Have been interested in the GMKTEC systems, but their stock is decimated and what they have left has jumped in price a lot, so I’m considering going with some wild no-name brand to get a higher tier cpu for a similar price. AMD only, of course. Trying to stay under 200 with ram and sdd included - looks like 3500u is pretty common in that range, but with a no-name I’m finding even 5700hs in that range too.
Anyone else have experience going this route? Not too worried about the shopping aspect, just the experience of running a device like this.
Could try getting an old used business workstation like a thinkstation or a dell, check if they have the option to install an external GPU enclosure.
Definitely! Did that for the homelab. Other goals here include something more streamlined for the living room setting, and reliability cuz the kids are going to be crawling all over this thing.
External gpu enclosure goes huge on price, but yeah good for expandability. Looking at a unit now with an amd 4800u for <250, which is probably about what most enclosures I’ve seen run for, let alone the actual card. Some day though…