We use them at work. And we are a 24/7 operation. So they never get a chance to rest.
No issues that I am aware of
It really depends on the particular CPU they have in them. The ones with x86 processors usually run low-powered variants, but may still get hot under load. Some do have fans. It just depends.
The REALLY small ones (like Rapsberry Pis / Beaglebones) don’t run x86 and typically have Arm processors and are often fanless (and much cooler, though slower).
An upgraded version of that would be something like the Snapdragon chip inside a mini chassis, like https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/desktops/ideacentre/ideacentre-mini-series/lenovo-ideacentre-mini-x-gen-10-snapdragon/len102d0040 (basically a Mac Mini clone). That one still does have a fan though. Qualcomm has this fanless reference design: Qualcomm showcases frisbee-like ultra-thin Snapdragon X2 Elite mini PCs | Club386
And if you get Apple Silicon (also Arm chips), they really are that cool and quiet. My Macbook Pro has a fan but it never comes on unless I’m gaming at a high resolution. For regular usage and programming, I have never heard it come on. The Airs don’t even have a fan and they’re fine. The Neos just have an iPhone chip inside them and also don’t have a fan. The Mac Mini, however, does (presumably to allow higher performance when needed), though you’ll also never hear it come on in regular home usage.
It’s really a product not so much of the form factor in and of itself but of the cooling needs of a specific CPU / GPU and the use case it was meant for. The Arm chips in general are MUCH more power-efficient (and thus cooler, quieter) than the x86 chips. The x86 chips probably still have the absolute performance lead, but that’s irrelevant for the majority of home and small-biz use these days (since they’re all so overpowered).
The truly fanless mini PCs are basically smartphones inside a box. Your average smartphone is already way more powerful than computers of yore and way more powerful than most home users need. Apple finally decided to put one inside their computers. The PC world was just stuck without good options until recently because of the Intel/AMD duopoly. But now Snapdragon is a thing, with Qualcomm copying Apple’s strategy for the PC world, so that’s quickly changing too.
Some of these newer fanless mini PCs are using a new proprietary solid-state cooling technology instead of fans: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2203172/frore-system-airjet-how-the-pc-fan-of-the-future-works.html
Moves air with magical ultrasound vibes, something something. How it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba2mbeAN8es
I’ve had my MiniForum for about 2 years with no issues. It is about 6" square and 2" high. One thing no one has mentioned is that the power supply is external so all that heat is not inside the case.
It looks like all I need is to make sure the unit has a fan and doesn’t rely on “passive cooling” or features “silent running.”
Question #2 - are the cheap no-name third world imports substandard or are they plain label models of the name brands?
I checked the Dell site and these are pretty nice units. There’s a whole bunch of ports on the back including 4 more USB ports, RJ45 Ethernet, HDMI and DisplayPort. With the addition of a USB-attached remote control and compatible software this would make a nice (albeit expensive) media player. They come in i3, i5, and Intel Ultra 7 (20 core) configurations. At least two of the configurations have built-in WiFi.
But even the cheapest i3 model is three times the cost that I paid for a refurbished Dell Optiplex 7010 business desktop with an Intel i7 processor, which is the best and quietest computer I’ve ever owned. You literally cannot hear it.
Too late to edit, but regarding heat dissipation and fans, my Dell Optiplex is a regular-sized desktop tower, and the reason it’s so incredibly quiet is that it uses a very large fan that rotates relatively slowly, so it moves a large volume of air but not very fast. It may have more than one fan (I don’t remember) but the heatsink over the i7 processor is a giant cone that looks somewhat like the recovery cone (“cone of shame”) that is put on a dog after surgery – the whole idea is “move lots of air, but move it slowly and quietly”. You can only do that if you have a large space to work with, which in turn means the computer is a fairly large box. It’s always a tradeoff of one kind or another.
I’ve used nothing but laptops for more than a decade. Sometimes i plug one into a docking station, and it functions like a mini pc. I’ve never had a computer die from overheating. And except for my power-chugging gaming laptop, they all operate quietly. I don’t know if they have fans, but they rarely use fans, for sure.
I can’t imagine why a custom-built mini pc would have more trouble than a laptop.
That’s why when my laptop started to die, I replaced it with a nucbox with twice the ram, same SSD size and more and better processors. It doesn’t have dedicated video ram, but if/when I decide I need it for gaming, the model I chose supports adding an external GPU.
Wait, are you actually in the market for one, and this wasn’t just a hypothetical?
In that case… what are you going to be using it for? I ask because it determines how much you really need to worry about heat, e.g.
- Basic home office (internet/word processing/photos): Probably not an issue
- Media server & network share: Probably fine
- Home theater PC / Plex server: Might get hot if it ever needs to encode/transcode videos
- Gaming: It’s going to be hard.
Generally speaking, smaller PCs are not cheaper for comparable performance; they’re just weaker and have inferior parts (worse hard drives, motherboards, power supplies, etc.). That may be totally fine if size is your primary consideration, but if you more value, say, performance or longevity or noise or thermal performance, they may not be the best choice.
What’s your use case here?
I think the biggest difference you’ll find is not necessarily between different manufacturers, but:
- Which kind of CPU: x86 or Arm
- Which category of CPU they decided to put in: Normal, laptop-grade, laptop low-voltage, etc.
- Chassis design: Airflow and fan size (smaller chassis usually means worse thermals and much louder fans)
No direct experience here so I won’t speculate.
I can say that the Intel NUCs, now owned by Asus, were pretty good mini machines. But pricey.
Also, if you are open to considering a Mac, I’m pretty confident that you will not find anything better in the mini-PC market than the $599 Mac Mini, whether for the price or overall. It’s an incredible bang for the buck, quiet, cool, well-built, with excellent performance; see PCMag, Engadget, Tom’s Guide, etc. I am fairly certain there is currently no better small computer for the same price. It is leagues above the x86 computers of the same price range, especially in regards to thermals. Apple Silicon is a dramatically more power efficient chip than the PC CPUs. (And I think even Snapdragon hasn’t quite caught up yet, though it’s closer than the x86 chips.)
Laptop CPUs are a special category that are less powerful and use less power and produce less heat, because they are designed for a thermally constrained environment. Proper desktop CPUs use like 3-5x more power and generate correspondingly more heat.
Mini PCs can fall anywhere in between those extremes, depending on their particular configuration and use case (like a gaming mini PC will have a beefier CPU and thus be much hotter than an office web browser kiosk PC). They don’t always use laptop CPUs. “Small form factor PC” is a broad category and within it there are many specific sizes and performance (and thus heat) levels.
The size by itself doesn’t necessarily tell you which category the CPU falls into. You have to know (or look up, or ask an AI) the CPU family and suffix to know which power category it falls into.
I wanted to show a comparison here…
Let’s look at this random PCMag “Best Windows Mini PCs of 2026” article: The Best Windows Mini PCs We've Tested for 2026 | PCMag, cross-referenced with some CPU specs and benchmarks. I’m also going to throw the Apple one in there.
Sorted by least to most expensive:
| Computer Name | Default Price | CPU | TDP | CPU Mark | CPU Mark / Watt | CPU Mark / Dollar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Geekom A6 Mini | $549 | Ryzen 7 6800H | 45W | 22836 | 507 | 42 |
| Apple Mac Mini | $599 | M4 10-core | 22W | 23687 | 1077 | 40 |
| Lenovo ThinkCentre Neo 50q Tiny | $778 | Snapdragon X126100 | 30W | 16309 | 544 | 21 |
| MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 2MG | $1130 | Core Ultra 7-258V | 17W | 18940 | 1114 | 17 |
| Asus NUC 15 Pro+ | $1229 | Core Ultra 5 225H | 28W | 28595 | 1021 | 23 |
| Geekom A9 Max | $1599 | Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | 28W | 35085 | 1253 | 22 |
(HP model excluded because I couldn’t figure out their website. Also excluded the $3k+ gaming one.)
Some takeaways:
- The Geekom A6 Mini gives you the best performance for the dollar, but it uses by far the most power (and thus will run the hottest/loudest) of any of the bunch.
- The Mac Mini gives you nearly the same performance per dollar, but uses half the power.
- The fastest one (the Geekom A9 Max) is 1.5x the performance but costs 2.7x the price. (A comparably priced higher-specced Mac Mini will be faster but use a bit more power.)
- The other CPUs have tradeoffs like price or thermals.
And a few notes:
- The Snapdragon should be doing better than that — I think this particular benchmark might not have been optimized for it. e.g. it’s both faster and more efficient than the Core Ultra 7 285V in another benchmark. But that’s also a good thing to consider, because there’s very little written-for-Arm Windows software, so most will be running under emulation.
- The TDP (maximum heat generated under design specs) is an incomplete picture of real-world conditions… the Arm chips are generally more efficient near idle, which home machines generally sit near most of the time, with only short bursts of intense processing to render a new webpage or whatever.
For everyday home use for basic computing in a small unit, I don’t think you can beat the Mac Mini, especially for its price. The A6 Mini will be fast but hotter/louder.
Not in this list, but Intel also has some SUPER low power CPUs like the N100 and N150 that use much less power than any of these, but they are also very weak, with CPUmark scores around 5000.
I did but it was an HP.
I just attribute that to being an HP.
And apparently hard to buy. I was just reading an article speculating that they have been snapped up by AI companies looking for cheap processing power. The article says the ones that don’t have much RAM are still available, but the beefier ones are mostly sold out.
And smaller PCs designed to be as powerful as their larger counterparts are more expensive, often considerably so. Anyone who has ever built a small form factor PC can tell you that you pay a premium for the case, low profile fans, CPU cooling, etc versus full-size options.
I read someplace that some people are buying the Mac Mini and running a local AI agent.
(And though this is a slight hijack, I’ve also read that the MacBook Neo is a really good notebook computer for $600. I’ve been on the lookout for a small, inexpensive notebook computer to travel with and the Windows models are generally a whole lot more than this.)
I’ve always thought it was weird that people (in general, not the people in this thread) have this intuitive bias that often think that smaller computers should be cheaper. It’s a lot less prominent than it used to be. But I remember people saying stuff like a decade back like “$800? For a phone?! Ridiculous! You could get a laptop for that much!” as if $800 for a starting price for a laptop was totally reasonable but for a phone is ridiculous. I’ve also seen people seem to suggest that paying more for a laptop than a desktop is ridiculous. I think they might have a very simple heuristic is saying if it’s smaller, then it’s less, and less should be cheaper.
But it’s obvious with a little bit of thought that less is harder, more expensive, when it comes to computing. If you had a unit that hypothetically performed a certain level of computation, and you had all the room and thermal management a full size desktop offers, you can basically make parts as big as you practically want and not have to think about doing any thermal management.
But cram that same amount of computation into a small form factor like a laptop? Suddenly you need that same computational power to come from smaller parts with lower electrical draws with thermal constraints. Why in the world wouldn’t that cost more? It’s harder to design.
And then phones are a new level on top of that - you want to take the computational power of a significant desktop and put it in your pocket? It SHOULD be extremely expensive to do so. It’s actually amazing that smartphones are as cheap as they are. They should cost more than laptops and desktops. It makes sense that a giant pile of steel costs more than a small pile of steel, that’s a commodity. But miniaturization is expensive. When you’re trying to cram more capabilities into a smaller space, you should expect that to be harder to do, and more expensive. In that case, less is more.
Not that I’m saying that everyone in the thread is engaging in this bad heuristic, but the last few posts reminded me that such thing exists
Exactly. It’s a “miniaturization tax” you end up paying.
Yeah, it’s amazing. I just replaced my partner’s Intel Core i9 MacBook Pro with this and the experience couldn’t be more different. That thing was always hot and loud and this thing is cool and quiet. Fanless as well. It’s actually faster than my M2 Max for some single threaded tasks, apparently.
No Chromebook or cheap PC laptop comes close to this experience. I’m debating buying a second one for myself as a travel laptop… my Macbook Pro is an excellent machine, but it’s chunky and heavy. The Neo is tiny and svelte, similar to the Air but half as expensive.
The Neo is also running into supply constraints and they may not be able to keep up with the demand. Better get one soon if you want one.
They use binned iPhone CPUs (funny, huh?), which there is a finite supply of. Their popularity surprised even Apple. Then combine that with:
Huh, that’s too bad, but I’m not surprised. All the electronics from computers to Xboxes and Playstations are getting harder to buy, and RAM prices have skyrocketed.
But at least we get AI cat photos in exchange.
I agree with what you’re saying, but the thing that breaks the “miniaturization tax” is sacrificing performance for smaller size and lower price. This is the “good enough” performance standard, and is the root of all the people in this thread asking “what are you going to do with it?”
A small, low performance, low power computer is often cheaper than a larger, faster computer. An old large computer with similar performance as the small one will be cheaper, and also use more power.
I have several small computers based on the Intel N100 processor, which I think is the descendant of the old Intel Atom processor. It is completely adequate to display multiple HD streams from security cameras, and with 8GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD, and a Windows 11 license were $135 (during the Biden administration).
One other point about small computers and heat. They usually use external power supplies, like a laptop, which moves a constant source of heat out of the case.
“Wait, are you actually in the market for one, and this wasn’t just a hypothetical?”
It looks like I am, very involuntarily. The last Windows update crashed my computer. The Geeks did a full Windows reinstall. Not only did it not help, but the damn thing doesn’t even power up now (the power comes on but nothing happens)
So I’m looking for a Windows PC on a budget. I’m not a gamer, and limit my high end needs to a little Photoshop and such. I noticed many of the lower end models are minis,hence the OP.
But after reading the comments, it looks like I should give up my long-standing prejudice against remanufactured/refurbished and go for an older, but more powerful model.
Thoughts?
I’d recommend you seriously consider a Mac mini (the low RAM ones are still available) or a Macbook Neo, if you can afford one.