OT: Small desktop for Mint

[John Rumm]

Rough guesstimate:

RAM £56 SSD Samsung M2 NVMe 256GB £53 AMD Ryzen 5 5600G CPU £230

So about £509 inc VAT

(The m.2 posh wifi and BT card with external aerials is about £20, but a bog standard USB wifi for £5 - £10 would do the trick)

If you don't mind a more cuboid form then:

is a bit less at about £150

Not unreasonable prices for that spec in the current climate... you can trim a bit going up to larger small form factors boxes - but not huge amounts. Eg, a ready built HP 290 G3 SFF PC, i5-10500, 8GB, 256GB SSD, WiFi, Bluetooth, No Optical, Windows 10 Home, 1 Year on-site is currently about £475, and then you would need to add another £20 of RAM to get to spec. (but you do get a copy of Win 10 home you probably don't want!)

[Paul]

That's the MiniITX Pico supply concept, which takes as input, some sort of adapter similar to a laptop supply.

This is an example of a 12V 15A wall adapter. This is just for scale. It's kinda big. This one happens to be wrong on both ends.

If you don't actually need 150W inside the chassis, then a smaller wall adapter might be purchased.

The Pico can have a UVLO (Under Voltage Lock Out), intended to protect battery sources from being run flat. The wall adapter has a few different output voltages (can't see a selector switch), to suit the cutoff point of the Pico and not cause the thing to glitch the power, under load.

It helps to own a clamp-on DC ammeter, make some measurements of the power consumption when fed with a regular ATX, before shopping for a Pico. Any rail could be a limit on a Pico project, so you have to make sure the Pico you're buying, really has the current flow where it is needed. Buying the Pico, sight unseen, will usually result in you having to buy a second one. Attention to details matters with this small stuff. Thermals and power, matter.

Paul

[The Natural Philosopher]

try again.

Try watching a Webm Vorbis /VP8 encapsulated video.

Apple is very restricted on what video formats it will play.

You havent noticed probably because You tube and iplayer dont use those formats.

It does if the applications on it no longer work... Its the same with linux, except that old hardware is still supported ...

I had to upgrade stuff here to get skype to work. And skype said 'sorry, old code no longer allowed' and stopped working until I did.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

How noisy were the fans? I'm on the look out for an expandable but not big physically desktop, which I can play with, but as it will site near me and I do audio editing, I'd rather like it to be pretty quiet. Brian

[Tim Streater]

Yes, that's not bad at all- thanks.