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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

That's a strange offering. An Xbox CPU with a broken GPU, no video, and a slot that only accepts weaker graphics cards. What's the target market?

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There’s a surprisingly sizable market for small, moderately powerful x86 solutions. These end up inside a lot of integrated solutions ranging from digital signage to the control boards inside of various pieces of equipment.

A lot of small tech companies write software first and then figure out what hardware to run it on later, which ends up being some variation of these compact solutions that can be bought in volume and usually have a certain availability lifetime that can be counted on.

In short, me.

Running Qubes, my VMs have no access to a GPU in any case. So, the cheapest thing that can drive a monitor is all I want to plug in anyway.

That presumes Linux can be persuaded to run on it. The article suggests not, but offers no hint (that I found) why not.

$300 would be pretty expensive for what you get imo.

$300 gets you (apparently) the motherboard, 8GB of ram (non-upgradable, I assume the 16GB version costs extra), and 8 Zen 2 cores.

A Ryzen 3700X is $280 from a respected retailer in my search. And the lowest cost mini-ITX AM4 motherboard is $100, so I mark it down as motherboard for $40 and ram for free, not a bad deal given current prices.

16 GB isn't quite enough for a comfortable Qubes experience, although my laptop squeaks by with that. So, pass.

Yeah... at least throw a couple fast network interfaces on it to make it a useful server. But as is, it's a head scratcher to figure out a good use.

Cheap OEM office PC? They don't need fancy graphics, will only run Win10, and the 8 core CPU is probably adequate. Maybe they had a high defect rate and this might avoid offset the fab costs, if they can sell them at a profit. And given the high cost of real CPUs and GPUs right now, this might have a place. That was probably the reasoning of whatever market analysis that went into this decision.

Even cheap GPUs are $70+ these days though, sadly. Would be nice if someone would build something new for low end instead of gt 710 as well.

Yeah its sad how bad GPU inflation has got :(

> the 8 core CPU is probably adequate

What does a “cheap OEM office PC” need even 8 cores for?

…I just realised I’m old now. People do actually use those cores for keeping loads of browser tabs open.

*sigh*, remember when office PCs only needed to run Office 97 and maybe Netscape 4?

Bro, I remember when multitasking became possible.

It’s windows 10 only though. For all 13 people who run windows servers.

Presumably it's "Windows 10 is the only officially supported OS", which is very different from "only runs Windows 10"

Someone who needs 8 Zen2 cores, I guess. But everything else on the board is below average if the price is really around 300.

Why not just sell the chip itself?

The chip won't fit in any existing socket, so you need the custom motherboard with it.

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