Looking for something small yet mighty? The TUXEDO Nano Pro was just announced and not only is it tiny, it seems like it will pack quite the performance punch with AMD Ryzen.
Officially labelled as the "TUXEDO Nano Pro: The Nano Pro - Gen11", they say it's "the perfect digital signage solution for digital media content in advertising and information systems as well as a home media station for the living room or an ultra mobile home or work PC". Smaller than a shoebox, diagonally about the size of a standard pen - it really is quite small (110 x 118 x 48 mm).
The base configuration with the AMD Ryzen 3 4300U and AMD Radeon graphics chip starts at an entry-level price of €640 EUR and includes 1x8 GB 3200 MHz DDR4 RAM, a 250 GB Samsung 860 EVO SSD, Wi-Fi 6 AX200 as well as TUXEDO_OS 20.04 LTS pre-installed.
You can customize it with better processors like the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and AMD Ryzen 7 4800U, up to 64GB RAM, a 2TB M.2 SSD, a secondary SATAIII drive up to 4TB and a choice of different Linux distributions. Some of which are easily upgradable too with RAM and storage easily accessible with the removable base plate.
A pretty reasonable number of ports too including HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.2a, two USB-C 3.2 Gen2 ports with DisplayPort 1.2a, two Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports (1x 1 Gb, 1x 2.5 Gb) as well as 3x USB-A (1x USB 3.2 Gen2, 2x USB 2.0).
If I wanted to hook something up to my TV that wasn't a Raspberry Pi, I would definitely be looking at something like this.
Check it out on the TUXEDO website.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: mirvI'm curious about the airflow through it, and what kind of noise any cooling system might make. The #1 reason I use an RPi for multimedia is that it's silent. The #2 reason is very low power draw (important given how things are currently going, pun intended).
Quoting: Avehicle7887€640 for entry level is a steep price. With that amount you can get a Deskmini X300 with a desktop 5600G CPU which makes for a much faster mini PC.
Quoting: torhamI imagine this system uses too much power for my taste, details are a bit sparse but it comes with a 90W power supply. All I want to do is watch video on my TV, I don't play games on it, so it doesn't make sense to run a system that draws this much power. Intel has systems that are ~15W, but AMD doesn't have anything competing in this space.
Quoting: SolitaryThe RAM options are not good. 3200Mhz CL22? And the basic model only has one stick? Oh, boy...Had this article still open from yesterday, reloaded just in case - jackpot!
To answer all comments at once: I upgraded to a cirrus7 incus, a fanless PC using the ASRock X300M-STX (Mini-STX format, smaller than Mini-ITX) motherboard from the DeskMini X300.
1. It's silent (to the point you can hear the headphones pick up static noise at night when apt displays lines).
2. It can power and cool the Ryzen 7 5700G at ~90W peak power usage. The case acts as heat sink, directly cooling APU, VRMs and SSDs. Actually, the 120W DeskMini X300 power brick is borderline there, when combined with additional components.
3. That specific motherboard is key because ASRock is the only one to make them with the A300 (and now X300, adding some overclocking options) "chipset", which is essentially a laptop motherboard without Southbridge for desktop APUs, meaning the APU runs as a SoC with as low as 7W (complete system) at idle. Alternatively, look at AMD's embedded APUs, dual-cores as low as 6W (still Zen-based though) or octa-core Zen 2s configurable down to 10W.
4. Just like the Nano Pro, Mini-STX means no space for full-size RAM DIMMS, so CL22 is completely normal, sadly, as that's the current standard when you look for DDR4-3200 SO-DIMMs.
Definitely not for everyone though. Each case is individually manufactured from a small local company from where my family comes from, meaning outrageous prices and only shipping to EU/UK/Switzerland.
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