I upgraded my storage and ram on my PC so now I have these two extra components sitting around. I kind of want to build the tiniest PC I can. Where can I find some discussion for it?
Or what other things might they be used for that I wouldn’t even think of?
Thanks :)
The SSD you can use on its own, go buy an RTL9210B USB enclosure and you’ve got a nice and fast portable flash drive. I bought a handful of all metal 9210 enclosures on AliExpress for like $10/ea.
Sell the ram for fun money, there’s nothing you can do with it on its own.
There’s no real point to building a PC around 2x4gb ram, you can buy a mini PC with 8 or 16gb for $50 on fleaBay.
Plenty of barebones mini PC’s that you can get for relatively cheap (under $200 or even close to $100). “Barebones” is a good keyword to search for because that means it doesn’t include RAM and a drive.
Look for an N100 or N200 processor if you want something that’s very small and power efficient (but it won’t be powerful enough for many games). Or, look for whatever fits your budget.
Edit: Oh! And make sure whatever you get is compatible with your RAM! What type of RAM do you have?
I learned that lesson recently about RAM. I have DDR4. I don’t care for gaming. I think it could be fun to have a dorky little mini-PC that can do all the PC stuff that I can tote around to show off :P
The biggest thing to worry about is DIMM vs SODIMM. The latter is much smaller, and probably what most mini PCs will use. So if you have full sized DIMM RAM, you might have trouble finding a mini PC that will work.
And even if it is the right size, you’ll still want to make sure that your motherboard supports your specific RAM clock speeds.
It’s not vital to keep the ram since it is definitely bulky when it comes to a mini pc.
I also don’t necessarily need a “normal” case. Could I make something weird? Could I make a shoe-computer?
Could you? Probably. Should you? Probably not.
Realistically unless you’re up for spending at minimum of a couple hundred bucks, you’re not going to get a true mini-pc (unless you want to buy a NUC or something, but that kinda defeats the purpose). Any mini-itx case you’d want (<14L) is going to be around the $100 mark on the cheap end. Unless you really luck out and find a compatible used motherboard on the cheap, youre looking at another $100 minimum. Could get a used 4600g for ~$65, but it’s probably not going to come with a cpu cooler if it’s used. Add in a power supply that fits, that’s another $140 on a good day.
Small form factor PCs are stupid expensive because it’s a fairly niche market that very few people absolutely need.
What I’d personally do is find a used dell inspiron or similar for <$150 and toss that all in it
I definitely know. I already made myself a small form factor case. My cat is bigger than my computer ;)
I like these niche hobbies and the silliness that can go into it. I think I spent $250 on this case and (k, due to covid) it took more than a year to ship. Now its smallness is so large!
Worth it :D
In that case (pun intended), your best bet would probably be to try to find a NUC (or similar) that supports expansion. I think I remember seeing some that did, but it’s been a few years since I’ve looked into that market. I know intel stopped making them first party, so it might be a pain in the ass to find now
Couldn’t post the picture here,
sso I posted it to cats. My cat and my PCnvm. idk why i can’t upload my pic. another time :)
Sure, the sky is the limit. You could also just get a motherboard, processor, and power supply, plug everything in and shove it in whatever container you want.
Get a cheap barebone or a second hand NUC without a drive, a Zigbee USB stick and some ZB lightbulbs and power plugs. Install home-assistant. Automate your home. Warning, it’s very fun and rewarding, but also addictive and totally a rabbit hole that you can keep tweaking and improving indefinitely.
This. On a definitely unrelated note, I wonder where all my money went? I thought it would be easier when I have automatic lights and curtains to fade the house into awake and sleep modes but now I’m trying to solve this new mystery .
Build a pc for cheap and sell it for a shitton more than the parts cost.
Not likely. You’d still have tk buy the rest of it…, and cheaping out on everything., that’s still 50 for the case, PSU, mobo and the cpu is going to go to 100+ very quickly.
Used ram and m.2 cards; cheap everything else… built by a rando… (no offense, OP,) you’d make more selling the ram on eBay or something. (Five bucks, maybe.)
I bet you could make money if you buy some cheap ass components, ~500 for a budget case/mobo/cpu/psu. Slap a decent gpu in it and upcharge the shit out of it like people on ebay do. No GPU for $1250 lmfao
Yeah… that probably won’t sell.
People can put actual dog poop for a billion dollars.
Doesn’t mean any one is going to buy it.
Just an example of how marked up they can be. I’m sure if you put a ~$700 build on there you could make a couple hundred bucks no sweat.
(no offense, OP)
None taken. I am absolutely a rando. Selling the stuff seems like the smartest idea. 8gb ram is so old and “small” anyways :)
I would check the selfhosted communities
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"we had a vote and all my Nazi rhetoric using buddies agreed it was cool”
It’s a 15 year old reference:
https://youtu.be/P0dXtOVi2yo?t=53s
(Original video was from 2008 but uploaded to YouTube in 2011)
I suppose you could fit it into an other old PC that still has some slots free. Lots of PCs have 4 memory banks and people only ever bought 2. Either give it to a friend or if you want to build a tiny PC, search for Mini-PC on Amazon and buy one that has the correct specs and space to fit RAM or go on eBay and buy an old Lenovo ThinkCentre, Fujitsu Esprimo or that form-factor from Dell or HP. But you have to check if it supports your RAM. There are many different generations of RAM, different specifications and some small PCs use laptop RAM which is smaller and uses a different voltage.
It won’t be the tiniest PC, but a proper tiny PC probably has RAM soldered on anyways, like a Raspberry Pi Zero and there are even smaller “PCs”.
All of that may not make any sense… Like buying hardware for $200 and then fitting it with RAM that is maybe worth $12.
Edit: Yeah, it doesn’t make much sense. you can buy a tiny PC for like $170 on Amazon including 16GB of RAM and including a 512GB SSD.
I think you either get something for free to fit this components into, or give it away to a friend or sell it for $20.
Dang, look at that. I would spend way more that $170 fitting my own PC probably.
Sucks that everything is so disposable these days.
Fanless PC as an OPNsense router. Probably somewhere between $100-$500 USD for the chassis and remaining parts depending on what you want it to do and how fancy you want to go.
Look into Damn Small Linux (DSL), or whatever it’s evolved into. It feels very relevant here.
They say “Vista was slow”, right? Try it on your setup and prove them wrong.
You could always get rid of it later on, you don’t have to keep it.
