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Comment by Agingcoder | Hacker News Reader

I want one for gaming , that is silent, provides high end graphics, and takes little space ( Mac mini or studio size ideally ). I’m essentially willing to pay extra for a specced up gaming console.

I still haven’t been able to find something that fits the bill - the hardest part to get information on is noise, since most people don’t seem to care about it or just play with headphones. I understand that such a product is hard to build, with a direct tension between power, space and noise.

What has never been clear to me is whether such a market even exists and I’d tend to say no, even if the market seems to be changing rapidly with amd apus ( we’re far from a 5080 , but it seems to be a step in the right direction ).

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I've tried this.

My best solution by far turned out to be long cables going through the wall to a pc in the next room over.

When I was younger, I had a KVM in my bedroom going through the wall to two computers under the sink in my bathroom. lol. But it worked. silence.

Second best recently was a zotac magnus. More for compact though than noise. Bought a noctua replacement fan. works well with headphones.

I do have a silent/fanless zotac server. It works well, but it does fileserving, not cpu-intensive anything.

IMHO it's basically impossible to build such a PC. The small size plus high thermal load of a modern GPU means it cannot be cooled quietly. Intel's line of NUCs had some gaming models back in the day (e.g. Skull Canyon), but the graphics were the Intel midrange GPU and they had tiny noisy fans. Anything approaching Nvidia 4070 or 5070 series and you've got up to 300 more watts TBP heating up the system on top of the CPU etc.

My last small form factor gaming PC was an Origin Chronos. It was great but it was definitely not quiet. The larger Origins offer liquid cooling but I'm guessing it can't be done in that small form factor.

The new APU from AMD can makes it come true. Its iGPU is on par with rtx4060 laptop, which is far from 4070 desktop, but should be enough for 1080p gaming and light 2k gaming.

This is what I would expect from a steam machine – not a RX 7600S.

Depends on what you mean by "high end graphics"

The Ryzen Max+ 395 is in the ballpark of a RTX 4060 (but I believe it's starts to massively fall behind when ray tracing is enabled). It's an iGPU so I would imagine noise is greatly reduced (though probably not silent) compared to machines with dGPUs. However, that's going to cost roughly $2000 so it won't be cheap and will be vastly outperformed by a $2000 desktop pc.

While the 395 is very cool I do feel that the next generation will be an enormous step forward if AMD integrates FSR 4 in their APUs. Neutral network based upscaling makes a huge difference since you can get away with far lower (real) rendering resolutions and don't need any (expensive) anti-aliasing solutions anymore.

There's a bunch of demos on YouTube of people upscaling from as low as 360p and while not pretty, it's definitely serviceable. It might be worth the wait if you're budget constraint or patient!

That would be neat. But sadly thermodynamics gets in the way. I did see a minipc where the graphics card was being cooled by a liquid cooler that had the cooler unit under the desk but its not really a "mini" pc at that point, its a disaggregated pc with separate compute and cooling :-).

Yes, it exists. Ryzen mini-PCs with an M780 can run many 5-year old AAA titles (with caveats) and most indie games at 60fps. We use a 7840HS one as a Steam box, and stream the games to our iPads or the living room Apple TV (because, well, nothing you will find will ever be truly quiet when playing games).

But that was around $700 a couple of years back on sale, and these days you are looking at $1000+ (with 20-50% increments if you need a better GPU or multiple NVMe slots), plus the new Ryzen AI chipsets command an additional premium.

I’d give it 2-3 years for things to settle down and discrete GPUs to be come a thing of the past.

When I was thinking about this k came to the conclusion you need a high specced mini pc, route out oculink from it and run an external GPU. For daily you'll have a powerful CPU with a decent igpu, and gaming will go to the external dgpu.

Otherwise you're stuck with lower performing gpus, as normal ram at least in its current state won't be able to approach the bandwidth necessary to keep up with a full fat high end gpu. And nobody is making mini pcs that work like laptops with normal dgpus so you're stuck with igpus with the normal solutions

You want mini ITX. The T1 is a good starting point if you want to explore options: https://formdt1.com/

http://move.rupy.se/file/radxa_works.mp4

Radxa CM5 + Waveshare CM4 Nano

Packs a punch at very low power...

You probably need a tiny Nuctua fan on it if you're going to play HL2 on it.

It's ARM so it will take a while for titles to be ported, but studios better realize this is the platform of the future.

Currently game engines are clueless.

I can recommend ETAPRIME on YouTube. They go through various mini/budget builds, and test new hardware. I agree with the noise benchmark, however. I bought a budget AMD card last year and it was loud af. Promptly swapped it out for a 4060 and have been happy since.

I keep a Legion Go in my media center. There's a USB-C hub connected to power, HDMI, and peripherals when I want to play docked. Or I can unplug one cable and play handheld.

The kickstand means it takes up very little space in a cabinet. It does have a fan, but it's great for what it is.

I have a beelink gti14 with the ex pro docking station with a 4090 mounted on it. Basically a gaming PC on mini-itx-ish form factor. The loudest thing is of course the graphics card. It does the job as a gaming PC alright.

Linus the Tech Tip man has all his gaming PCs in a rack in his basement and runs a specific kind of KVM to the gaming room. I think it was a fiber connection?

If you don’t mind to DIY, consider assembling a mini-ITX PC.

You are going to be limited by your GPU, I think. The power and heat requirements for a high end GPU are going to be hard to fit into a small enough form factor.

Silent, high-end graphics and small form factor is not possible. You can pick at most two of the three. (Silent and high-end-graphics is still difficult.)

if you don't mind single cable out of your console then your wish can be implemented with a powerful as you need gaming machine in another room. Or in the same with some noise canceling cover and/or watercooling.

Something like this? https://rog.asus.com/us/desktops/mini-pc/rog-nuc-2025/ No idea about the noise though, and personally I despise the design.

Nintendo Switch

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