To be honest, what does the office computer really have to be able to do? Mailer, office suite, a video conferencing program, maybe a PDF editor. In addition, a browser for web applications and to distract yourself with a YouTube video from time to time. You don’t need a tower with a thick CPU and a lot of RAM for this, a mini PC the size of a box of chocolates will do the job too – with the right equipment.
We brought six devices from 370 to around 1500 euros into the laboratory and not only tested them under Windows, but also with Linux. As a used PC enters Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny equipped with the slightly older but Windows 11-capable six-core processor Core i5-8400T from Intel. We paid 370 euros for it at the commercial PC processor AfB. We had already examined a similar configuration in a second-hand article. Medion supplies cheap new goods in the form of its Akoya S23004, which we bought in Aldi’s online shop for 399 euros. Intel’s Core i5-1035G1 quad-core processor from the Ice Lake generation, which is now three and a half years old, calculates in it. It also has the smallest SSD. You can get that for a little more Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 2 Tiny in the cheapest version with a six-core CPU Ryzen 5 Pro 5650GE from AMD: It costs around 570 euros in online shops.
HP demands around 800 euros for the Pro Mini 260 G9, which competes with the 15-Watt CPU Core i5-1235U from Intel’s mobile portfolio. It has eight efficiency cores and two performance cores with Hyper-Threading, so the operating system sees 12 threads. The entry-level version of the one that has just been refreshed with the M2 SoC Mac mini are available from 700 euros. It has eight CPU cores – four each for efficiency and performance – and ten GPU cores, but only 8 GB of soldered, non-expandable RAM. Because that didn’t seem very future-proof to us, we bought the variant with 16 GB of RAM for 930 euros. At Cirrus7, we have a fanless configuration in the web shop kit that costs around 1,500 euros Cirrus7 cloud v5 with the 14-core CPU Core i5-13500T (six performance cores with Hyper-Threading and eight efficiency cores, 20 threads), 16 GB DDR5 RAM and 500 GB SSD. This makes it the most expensive, but also the most modern and powerful x86 computer in the test field.
