I have a laptop nearing the end of its life with (what I thought was) a good cpu/ram and an integrated graphics card. It was fine at running a DAW but it couldn’t run 10 year old games at a non fucky framerate. I would include its details but I didn’t memorize them and don’t have access to it right now.
I’m looking at replacing it with a minipc because laptops are getting more user hostile but I like the idea of having something I can move around occasionally. So I look on the reddit spreadsheet, and I’m struggling because there often seems to be a gap between the listed specs on the spreadsheet and the actual thing itself (ie “this thing has this gpu” vs “this thing has a slot for you to install a gpu”).
I absolutely need something that will run Reaper or an equivalent well with a billion tracks and add ons at the same time. I would very much like to run ten year old games reliably at a good framerate. And if possible I’d like to badly run a local ai which I understand basically requires a decent standalone gpu, but it isn’t that important because they’re a dumb toy that has no actual use. Is there a minipc that I can buy prebuilt that does that, and if not how close can I get? I don’t know enough about hardware to answer my own question with the spreadsheet sorry.
Dang. I know nothing about Reaper, but I got one of these about a year ago with a Ryzen 7 in it; they’re no longer available, but it was so cheap I swapped out the RAM and maxed it out at 64Gb, because that was fairly cheap, too. I think, all in, I spent maybe $500 on it, with the extra RAM? $390 for the computer, another hundred-ish for the 64GB 3200 MHz DDR4 SO-DIMMs.
With this AMD, RAM is shared between the GPU and the CPU; the CPU has 16 cores. The only game I’ve run has been Factorio, and even in demanding scenarios I haven’t had a stutter. I’m happy to run a benchmark, but I suspect Toms would have better information.
This thing blows my 6y/o XPS (Intel) out of the water on all other benchmarks - mostly compile times, and I’ve been quite happy with these AMD Ryzen chips. I think they’re supposed to be laptop ICs? I don’t really follow the CPU/GPU space anymore. But it’s connected to three monitors running at 1080p each, and it seems up to whatever task I throw at it.
Arch went on no problem, and everything worked.
Wish I could help on the Reaper part. But I really do like these Trigkeys - easy to get into and replace memory and M.2 NVMe port accessible immediately under the backplate. If I were to need another, I’d look for whatever the latest AMD version of this Trigkey is selling.
I think an almost identical product, differing only by case color AFAICT, is sold under a different brand name.
Oh! I just found out you can get the one I bought for $260. Their top line is currently a Ryzen 7 7840HS at just under $500 - and, yeah, mine’s a 5800H. I have no idea what any of these designations mean, but one has the bigger GBs so it must be better, right?
Edit: found a direct comparison.
I don’t know anything about Reaper besides a quick search. Most people say memory is important and I don’t see any mention of GPUs.
Minisforum makes great mini PCs. Get one with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with lots of memory/RAM and storage to suit your needs. The APU is very capable for gaming, plenty strong for 10yr old games, and these also have an NPU for AI work.
https://www.minisforum.com/collections/elitemini-series/products/elitemini-ai370
Thank you. Minisforum seems to be 99% of everything I’m seeing as worthwhile now that I’m moderately far into this.
https://store.minisforum.com/products/elitemini-hx99g-hx100g
Would this be comparable if I didn’t care about the ai stuff?
The dedicated GPU on that is much more powerful than the integrated APU on the other ones I listed. However, since Reaper doesn’t seem to care much about the GPU (from my basic research) you’ll be plenty happy playing old games with the iGPU (it’s very powerful still) and benefit from the NPU for AI with the two examples I gave.
SteamDeck + Dock might work for most of that? Pre-built, can play games (obviously), it’s portable, 16GB RAM + 4 core/8 thread CPU. Use the Dock (or at least a USB-C dock) to hook up a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Can probably run Reaper in desktop mode – though I’ve never tried that personally. Doubt you’d get much in the way of AI on it (AMD, so no CUDA), but I haven’t really kept up with what crazy things people have hacked together in that space lately.
This is an interesting suggestion but I’m moderately worried about having linux as my only os. Low cost though
I’ve heard of people installing Windows on it instead, but I haven’t seen one set up like that personally so not sure what the experience is like. There are also copycats/competitors from other vendors that ship Windows pre-installed if you like the idea of the handheld form factor, but for me the fact that the Deck officially supported Linux was a selling point so I haven’t investigated them much.
Deck has a 2-core, 4-thread CPUEdit: I was wrong, see below
Deck has a 2-core, 4-thread CPU
It’s 4 core, 8 thread. https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech/deck
Huh! You’re right. How confidently I managed to misremember. Thank you for the correction.
