[nextos]

Minix if your budget is $200-400. Cirrus7 if your budget is $500-1000.

There are many other manufacturers. I am biased towards fanless builds, like those two.

NUCs are also a great option, especially if you replace the case with a fanless Akasa one.

[Wytwwww]

> Cirrus7

It starts €599,00 for 2(!) core Celeron. Seems absurd when you can get a Mini for an extra €100 (you can run Linux/Windows in a VM and still get a magnitude or few better perf). Or even an used old NUC or something, you'd need to go back very far to get a crappier CPU...

So the actual starting price seems to be €900-1000 (i.e. if you want an i5..)

The Celeron G6900 has a 46W TDP and seems to be around ~20% (multicore) slower than the <10W N100. Seems absurd that they are pushing garbage like that at such prices (even if its the base config)

[nextos]

Cirrus7 is expensive because you are paying for a very high quality machined chassis & case that act as a massive fanless heatsink. Those alone are pretty costly. The price cannot be compared with cheap NUC clones and mini PCs, nor with Apple.

I am not endorsing any particular brand, but Cirrus7 is not that expensive within the fanless market and the quality of the entire build is very high. They also somtimes offer nice discounts for students and SMEs. There are quite a few comparable brands and also DIY options with cases from Streacom or Akasa. If you want something cheaper, Minix is pretty inexpensive, especially when you take into consideration they offer a decent fanless enclosure.

[Wytwwww]

The higher end configs seem fine even if a bit pricy (still, though the Mac Mini seems like great value if you're fine with the OS situation and non upgradable memory).

I still find it weird/confusing why would a reasonably high-end brand be selling configs with such horrible CPUs (especially perf/watt considering the whole fanless thing).

But I suppose they hardly have any options if they want a socketed MB. Laptop chips would probably be a lot better value (both cost and heat wise) but then it's no longer modular and e.g. Lunar Lake doesn't(?) even support non soldered-memory...

[nextos]

That is a good question. They sell those CPUs to industrial clients. Note cases can be configured to be completely sealed for high-dust environments, and it is also possible to get industrial motherboards with connections that no regular user needs. The fanless market has a pretty good niche in factory deployments. There, lots of software is designed to run 24/7 on cheap CPUs.

Mac Minis, and in general most Apple products, tend to offer great value in the lowest configuration. But upgrades are expensive. It is a bit of the opposite situation. I have not used Macs for very long, and I prefer Linux, yet the cheapest Mini looks quite appealing. When Intel Core 2 CPUs entered the laptop market, it was a similar situation. The cheapest MacBooks offered really great value compared to competition.