Mini S12

i started off with a very overkill i5 gaming Motherboard (i had recently upgraded my gaming rig and had it laying around) 16GB of RAM -> upgraded to 32GB as i added services and noticed the system load 256GB SSD for the system -> upgraded to 1TB as I added services 1TB HDD for media (i delete stuff

A $150 BeeLink S12 Pro includes a 512gb M.2 with Win11, 16GB DDR4 Ram and has a spare 2.5” drive bay to add an SSD. We have several of these little systems. Ram can be expanded to 32GB. We’ve put both 2TB and 4TB M.2 drives in and an 8TB SSD drive. My son uses one with Proxmox hypervisor and pfSense

Depends but yeah… especially for anything mobile id rather have the laptop. For desktop PC use a reputable laptop Brand will typically have better hardware. For ‘server’ use however laptops generally suck IMO mainly due to heat and cooling. I don’t generally use any mini pc for anything important… b

I got heavily into emulation so I built a little batocera machine from a Beelink S12 Pro. Not a bad little machine if you want to go that route, though I haven't been able to get the newer modded 2K5 to work on it. I'm just playing with default rosters.

It requires so little. I have $1000s in a basement rack and a small cheap $150 BeeLink S12 Pro N100 mini oc sits there on a shelf as a dedicated Plex/Jellyfin server. It streams a dozen music streams and a 4K 24/7. I can watch another 4K movie in my office theater while the kids are streaming tv sho