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Show HN: MiniPCs.zip – Charting the Pareto frontier of Mini PCs

84 points by yathern ago | 30 comments
The overall idea is to chart out the thousands of Mini PCs by benchmark and reveal the Pareto Front so you can get the most Compute per Dollar. Definitely a labor of love as I have a number of Mini PCs for my "homelab" (TrueNAS, piHole, Plex, basic stuff). It uses Gemini to extract specs from listings (since they're not often strongly categorized).

Quick blog post here: https://luke.zip/posts/pareto-pcs/

walrus01 |next [-]

The same N150 CPU mini PC with 12GB RAM I bought on Amazon a year ago seems to have considerably increased in price, as a result of the RAM price surge... Even though what's soldered onto its motherboard is probably the cheapest possible ddr4-2666 or similar.

thekevan |root |parent |next [-]

I bought 2 Beelink s12 PCs just under 3 years ago and paid $254 total for both. (N95, 8gb ram, 256 ssd)

The same PC is now shipping with a 480 ssd but is otherwise the same and selling for $300 - $319 depending on the day.

yathern |root |parent |previous [-]

For sure - prices are bizarre right now - though if you sort by memory, there's some holdout units that have like 32GB of memory for $250 (though other poor stats)

spelk |next |previous [-]

This is so cool. Thanks for doing this. I was able to get the Optiplex 7050 with the i5-6500T and 8GB of RAM (no SSD) for $40 USD about 2 years ago, shocked it's $100 USD now! I brought 8 for some reason, this makes me feel better that I at least purchased it during the glut.

pockybum522 |next |previous [-]

This is extremely useful and cool. I dream of having visualizations like this for anything I buy that has specifications.

yourusername |next |previous [-]

Why do you use a TLD that is commonly blocked?

pockybum522 |root |parent [-]

Kind of crazy to me that anyone would block an entire TLD. This timeline is bizarre. How often and with what services do you find zip blocked? Genuinely curious

yourusername |root |parent |next [-]

My employer blocks it on our work computers. Looking around it seems like this is commonly done because one of the main uses of the .zip tld is to spread malware by faking links to zip files using "/" look alike characters and other URLs that look like download links to zip files.

ErroneousBosh |root |parent |next [-]

Well by that token we should probably also block the .com TLD since that is actually an executable file suffix.

yathern |root |parent |previous [-]

https://luke.zip/posts/zip-defense/

I get asked this a lot, so here's my defense!

NooneAtAll3 |root |parent |previous [-]

this timeline is bizarre because someone allowed TLD with common filetype name be created

ideally it should've been killed the moment it was created to become a lesson for everyone else

jstanley |root |parent [-]

That ship sailed when ".com" was created.

tomaskafka |next |previous [-]

Nice homage to MiniPCs - I have a fanless N150 box with usb-c HDD as a carefree NAS/docker host for years.

flo123456 |next |previous [-]

Very cool site. Thanks for making this. Would be awesome to have data on energy consumption as well. :-)

yodon |next |previous [-]

It would help if you actually explained what the color means.

What is yellow? What is green? What is blue? Are they relative to their CPU column? Relative to the pricing row? Absolute?

yathern |root |parent |next [-]

Colors are distance to the pareto frontier for the given setting for "dealscope"! Easily noticed when axis and color are set to the same dimension (EG CPU) - but setting to different things allows you to visualize two dimensions (three, with price) without needing a 3D chart. I found it really useful to find outliers, but I realize it's a bit nonstandard!

Oh - and colors are grey-blue to red, with red being pareto optimal

yodon |root |parent [-]

It's great that you understand the chart. Yellow being more optimal than green is very far from intuitive to the rest of us. We read green then yellow then red as a sign of DECREASING fit. And a bunch of blues next to that green to red progression reads as "no data" or "not relevant" or something.

It's great that you have the data. I'm sure that took a lot of time to obtain. Spending a few more percent of your total time making the presentation of the data intuitive to others is almost certainly the highest ROI thing you can do at this point, if you want your site to be useful enough to get enough visitors to pay for the cost of acquiring the data.

Feel free to tell me that red is the lowest Pareto value and that's why you made the frontier red, or whatever. I'll still respond that the details of the presentation matters enormously to adoption, and the current presentation is very far from optimally intuitive to those of us who didn't personally develop the data.

yathern |root |parent |next [-]

Oh for sure - your feedback is totally helpful, I agree the colors are not obvious (especially red being good), perhaps my tone sounded dismissive but that was not the intention at all - symtom of a quick response from my phone! I'll definitely work on improving the readability of the colors and what it means (tricky to find the balance between nerdily over explaining how it works)

ozmaverick72 |root |parent |next [-]

If there was a key explaining what the colors meant that would be great. And maybe the option to select colors or pick between a couple of alternatives - i think in western culture green is good but in Chinese i think they normally think of red as the best - just being able to swap between those two defaults would probably be enough - thanks for your hard work - much appreciated

kristopolous |root |parent |previous [-]

the color allocation is closer to chinese symbolism than western. You don't need to change it, just describe it somewhere, probably with a rainbow strip, maybe bottom right, like a scale symbol on a map.

yathern |root |parent [-]

Oh good point - I was thinking more like "how hot is this deal" (and thus red == best) as opposed to just "good or bad".

Now when clicking on the 'dealscope' button there's a little modal which tries to clear it up a bit.

viccis |root |parent |previous [-]

>Yellow being more optimal than green is very far from intuitive to the rest of us

Disagree. Yellow as a progression away from the green/blue (that fade away into gray) towards red is quite obvious.

pockybum522 |root |parent [-]

Yeah. It was so obvious to me I didn't think about it until I read the comments. Makes sense that it would trip some people up, though.

dthakur |next |previous [-]

Nice work. Clustering around N95/N100/N150 visible.

Gathering6678 |next |previous [-]

Failed to load listings (500)

yathern |root |parent [-]

Fixed!

esafak |next |previous [-]

Could you also plot various Mac Minis for reference?

yathern |root |parent [-]

I intentionally have them excluded - I guess because my use case is mostly gaming, homelab, plex server type stuff. But people use them for OpenClaw and whatnot right? I'll add em back in

pixel_popping |next |previous [-]

500.

catbot_dev |previous [-]

This is exactly the kind of chart that gets better the more suspicious it is of its own inputs. Since Gemini is extracting specs from listings, I would love to see a small confidence field or "last verified from listing" date next to each point.

Two fields that would make the Pareto view easier to trust:

1. New vs refurbished vs unknown. Mini PC listings blur that line constantly. 2. Power draw at idle and under load, even if it starts as a rough bucket. A box that wins on dollars can lose badly if it is going to sit in a homelab for three years.

The CPU/GPU/storage/memory toggle is nice. It makes the site feel like a tiny buying lab instead of another affiliate table.