PC Tech Thread

In the market for a mini pc that can be wall mounted , plug-and-play for Zwift. Mine only work slowly for TrainerRoad but wanted to do something for social for this dreadful winter.

Any eBay link or website?

I'm on my second HP, my first HP SFF 600 G1 worked flawlessly for a decade ( @cake is now using it as his WFH desktop). I only upgraded to this as I wanted to try W11 and needed an 8th gen intel for native support.

I added a Low Profile GPU for 4k video and some sofa gaming, Its totally silent too.

My parents have a Dell one, which has also been flawless.

(I highly recommend this for people with older relatives btw. You can remote into the machine and just load whatever they want to watch instead of trying to remember how the menus work on their TV to direct them to whatever streaming service they need.)

See my previous comments to @hippy

Why not just an Apple TV?

huh didnt know zwift ran on apple tv, thats cool.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/285338769682 £190 w/ 16GB

How long were you waiting for that 85 quid deal?

Two other points i'll make about these machines whilst I remember, enterprise grade stuff is normally expected to have high up hours (loads of people dont turn off their office PC's) so the PSU's tend to be way better than consumer stuff, and they almost always have had a windows digital licence applied so you get legit windows 10/11 pro for free

A few weeks, I had a saved search. There is 15% off these buyers atm with the code JANJOY15:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/e/coupon-offers/computers-accessories?_kwdomcat=58058&_bkw=sff

Loads of options:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/126267848905
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/126275565257
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/126266305793
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/115710830111

Yup, I'm running the same previous gen 4k version as linked and it's flawless.

These look pretty chunky, do they have desktop components in it? I have been running an Nvisen
mini PC for a couple of years now but that has laptop components.

Nice one. I guess 8gb is the sweet spot for these.

Which probably makes dropping £400 on a GPU pretty pointless.

I do enjoy the occasional game.

Gaming is dependent on the GPU - they're not just for displaying the image, but also for doing a lot of the processing.

It'll mostly be for work (fairly computationally and memory heavy)

Obvs dependent on what type of work, but if doing stuff that is parallelised, you might consider whether GPU processing is better for you. All the VRAM & CUDA cores for all the things, not just image processing (if you're training up a LLaMA model or equivalent, for example, you'll need 10+GB VRAM).

i3, i5, i7 - what practical difference are we talking here for streaming video?

and if I want Win11 without doing reg bodging, is it just any 8th gen version of one of these?

Like, there's i3s with Win11 installed already for 140 or pay another 100 to get an i7?

8gb is the sweet spot, but used ram is cheap.

You'll have to check the specific CPU online to see what video/codecs it can easily work with, I wasnt that bothered as I knew I would be adding a low profile gfx card which would easily deal with anything I needed.
This is the W11 CPU list:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-intel-processors

Anything over 8th gen (for W11) will easily do 1080p no problem, not sure about 4k.

Edit: I had a i5 4th gen in my old one and that would play 1080p video without problems.

Thanks spotter.

Not into Apple atm.

@spotter would be the GPU ok with this? https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/115710830111?var=415848756069

https://support.zwift.com/en_us/supported-devices-to-run-zwift-H1Cj9QbeB

Obvs check the Ziwft minmum specs before buying anything:

https://support.zwift.com/en_us/supported-devices-to-run-zwift-H1Cj9QbeB

But if you just want Zwift soul's idea of an apple TV maybe better as it prob has lower power, cheaper, and def smaller footprint, but maybe not as flexible for other things you may want to do.

Not into Apple atm.

You don't need to be 'into' them though. You can get a speedy TV box for £67 at the link I shared that will never cause you any setup headaches / driver issues etc. Why spend any more?

Outside of an appleID for the store, you need nothing else.

Min spec is integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000. This was included in the Ivy Bridge processors of 2012 (3rd generation of core, e.g. Core i7-3770), so anything newer than that should be supported*

*I've never used zwift, so I have no idea how graphically demanding it is. You many only get lowest settings if you get something older, but i have no idea how imporant this is in Zwift. Also, see my comments above about 8th Gen intel if you want W11 natively.

Cheers, I'm not phased about 4k, so I'll have a poke around the 'bay for a while and see if I can work out what's going on. I like the look of the all black HPs so I'll probably just limit my search for one of them. That will free up the grrl's laptop for sofa use nicely.

Yeah thats the best way, reseach what model/spec you want and then set up a saved search qne keep an eye on it till you know what constitunes a good deal.

Yeah, llama is the type of thing my research revolves around (although bert has been what I'm working with at the moment). But more often than not I find time becoming an issue when creating the fucking mahoosive matrices/vector space models before the fun stuff. I'm not sure a GPU is particularly useful in that case (but parallelisation very much is). But I'm likely to be wrong. Tbf, I've never learned how to shift stuff off the a GPU anyway.

My concern is more about dropping £700 vs £1300 on a PC that will mostly see the improvements when gaming (I suspect). I just need to pull the trigger and stop worrying about it.

What libraries are you using - Most do all the GPU offload invisibly, no?

For the big matrices - pickle that ting.

If you've got 8th gen then pretty much nothing.

Some of these SFF ones use mobile CPUs rather than desktop ones but even 8th gen i3 can do 4k.

Rbert uses tensor flow via reticulate. If tensor flow automatically offloads to gpu you may have just solved a massive pita I've been having with it! My old amd gpu may not be up to snuff. Will need to look into this when I've got time. Thanks! (I ended up doing some analysis using glove embeddings recently because bert was shitting the bed and I ran out of time).

Most need Nvidia cards, akaik.

I'm not really using any of them in anger just yet though- just fucking around with stable diffusion.

After I've (finally, lel) finished my dissertation, I'll be training up a LLAMA2 model (among others). It's for a commercial venture, though, so money will be thrown at it, and it'll be trained on leased and scaleable GPU.