Thanks for the kind words @migrator
So I’ve worked with this one before. For a friend who owns a small business and the needed to replace a full-size tower with something small because their storefront cashout area is small. What I can say is that after 1 year it has no issues yet. It’s a lot smaller than the photos make it seem, so I was able to mount it behind the 24" monitor. They are indeed very powerful. It runs Win 11 and runs a pretty heavy POS application. This was the model I purchased on March 19th 2024.
Reviews suggest that this one should work with Linux:
I didn’t realize that they were trouble to make work with Linux. Have not tried. My go-to device has been the ThinkCentre Tiny by Lenovo — works like a dream with Linux. I buy them on Ebay for ~ $200.
You can see my the ThinkCentre pictured and reviewed a bit here:
I own 2, one failed after 4 years due to lightning strike, so I replaced it with this model off eBay:
I have not got around the review yet. But it would be 5/5. From power, cooling, noise, compatibility, ports, etc. etc. It’s 100% a mini server.
Well, only for small models like < 8b. Unless you have like 64 GB of RAM and even then, CPU process is slow, so only the smaller models work without to long of a delay. I’m running the deepseek-r1:8b on the other ThinkCentre Tiny. It has 16 GB of RAM: DeepSeek Local: How to Self-Host DeepSeek (Privacy and Control) - #3 by hydn