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Small PCs are nice because they don’t take up a lot of space, and can often be mounted to the back of a display, under a desk, or a wall mount. But one thing PC makers often sacrifice when making mini PCs is connectivity: most mini PCs don’t have as many ports as you’d typically find on a larger computer.
The HUNSN BM34 (also sold as the Partaker B15) isn’t most mini PCs though. This small fanless computer has three video outputs on the back, as well as two EtherneFt ports, mic and speaker jacks, a DC power input, and two antenna connectors. And on the front? There are eight USB ports.
Before you get too excited, only two of those USB ports support USB 3.0 speeds up to 5 Gbps. The rest are USB 2.0 ports, which will only be capable of data transfer rates up to 480 Mbps.
That means you’re probably not going to want to plug external storage devices into those ports unless you’re okay with the slower speeds for copying data to and from those devices. But they should be fine for most peripherals like keyboards, mice, game controllers, webcams, audio interfaces, and other hardware.
And it’s not like you need an external device for primary storage: the computer has room inside for an M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe SSD, an mSATA SSD, and a 2.5 inch hard rive or SSD.
The system also supports up to 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory (there’s a single SODIMM slot). The two Ethernet ports support Gigabit speeds, and the computer also has a wireless card with support for WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2.
The computer is powered by an Intel Processor N100 chip, which is a 6-watt, 4-core, 4-thread Alder Lake-N processor with support for speeds up to 3.4 GHz. Designed for low-cost, low-power systems, the HUNSN BM34 certainly fits the bill.
Available from Amazon for $200 and up, the system takes advantage of that low-power processor to offer a fanless design. The computer’s 170 x 125 x 50mm (6.7″ x 4.9″ x 2″) aluminum chassis should be able to dissipate the heat without the need for any moving parts, enabling silent operation.
According to the Amazon product listing, the computer is also designed for 24/7 usage, which means it’s probably made for use in commercial or industrial settings. But it could also make a decent home media or file server, among other things.
It also supports Wake on LAN and LAN PXE boot, allowing the system to automatically restart after a power loss.
For the $200 starting price you get a barebones model with no memory, storage, or operating system. But it only costs a little more to add those things: prices range from $237 for a model with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD to $310 for a 16GB/1TB version.
You can also pay $317 for a model with 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive.
via FanlessTech and CNX Software
I had an Alder Lake 12th gen N200 processor in a Neosway mini and it didn’t do as good a job as the 11th gen Neosway Celeron N5105 I wanted to replace for CPU-intensive applications. I tested it with Playon which records a stream from On Demand Services and with Chrome and Firefox based app called Video Download Helper recording a 4K video stream. The Celeron worked at about 80% to 90% CPU with a constant Turbo Speed of 2.8 (the rated maxx) It was a 2 GHz base speed. The N200 (Pentium) was a 1 Ghz and ran at 90% to 100% including flat lining at 100% and never getting to 2.8 Turbo at all and having the app fail. I also raised the power and Turbo limits to 30 and it lessened the flatlining at 100%, I sent it back. I was surprised and disappointed.
So close to being a nice wireless router mini file server. The photo of the front face – I am imagining all the USB2 ports replaced with ethernet jacks – the cutouts are already there! Then it would be perfect and purchased immediately. Otherwise that N100 processor and graphics seems too underpowered nowadays to use as a decent desktop machine or HTPC.