There are so many off-lease mini/micro pc's hitting the market all at once its crazy. A lot of companies probably went to laptop-only setups since so many people are remote now.
I picked up 2x dell micro PC's for my home VM cluster. I think each one cost ~130-ish shipped and have 512gb SSD's, recent gen i5's and a minimum of 16gb of ram (easily upgraded to 32 gb). Also, since they are micro PC's unless they are under load they sip power.
That's the thing, these "Cheap" single-board-computers are getting to the point where it's cheaper to pick up an off-lease desktop.
Yeah, the SBC's are cool but they are starting to out-live their use other than hobby projects where you really want a GPIO.
Yep. I snagged an older i3 desktop from a former employer, 512GB Samsung SSD, 32GB or RAM...it's slated to replace most of the SBCs I have in operation simply because the x86, even as an i3, has more oomph than the ARM CPUs will ever have.
The board can take a 5th gen i5, so I may see if I can upgrade it to it's full power with 64GB.
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