The price seems pretty good. I don’t really know much about mini PCs. Do you think there is a better alternative?
Update: ok, not price efficient. Noted 👍
You can get a Ryzen mini PC for less than $200. Depends on what is worth to you in cost.
What’s great about Mac minis is that they’re extremely power efficient since they’re ARM machines, so if you live somewhere like in Europe where power is expensive, it can save you a lot of money. They’re usually completely silent too.
Depending on their needs, I’d suggest OP to get a used M1 Mac mini, they’re great value for money.
What’s great about Mac minis is that they’re extremely power efficient since they’re ARM machines, so if you live somewhere like in Europe where power is expensive, it can save you a lot of money.
I want to see numbers. How much is “a lot of money”?
Cheap in Germany for example nowadays is 0,20 EUR / KWh + 15 EUR / month base fee. Most people have more expensive contracts though, 0,30 EUR / KWh and more
I don’t have a Mac Mini, but for always-on systems, the idle power consumption can become quite significant.
- Gaming PCs can consume up to 100W (876 kWh / year).
- My AMD B650 NAS consumes about 17W in idle (150 kWh / year).
- A NUC / Mac Mini can idle as low as 5W (44 kWh / year).
If you pay 0.30$/kWh, running your old 100W gaming PC all the time would cost you 263$ per year. My NAS is 45$ per year…
It also depends on what you need/want from the machine. The Mac Mini doesn’t have any HDDs and can’t run a regular Linux distro, for example.
You may want to check your specs again. The Ryzen APUs are very power efficient and run the same stretch as M3 (reported): 15W-45W
Though the more realistic at the wall measurements of the 2023 Mac Minis pretty much seem to have it pegged at a solid 15W-25W min under normal service workloads. The reported “idle” measurements of the M* chips being at 6W are literally just saying “if it has power”, and unrealistic considering you can’t even run them without a the GPU being engaged somewhat without a fully headless software configuration.
I would disagree with idle power not being important for a home server. Most of the time, your system will be doing very little and wait for something to happen. I also don’t think a typical server has a display attached. Wolfang explains this quite well: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=94&si=zyjEKNX8yA51uNSf
