back to article A cheap Chinese PC with odd components. What could go wrong?

Confession time: I am fascinated by very cheap PCs. I once bought a Windows tablet for AU$50 ($32) and a couple of years ago bought a brand-new Chromebook listed at $AU99.99 ($63) just to see if it was worth even that modest sum. I never got to test the Chromebook because it was an internet phantom (arranging a refund was no …

  1. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

    Running Linux Mint

    The first thing I'd want to hear is whether it can run Linux Mint or some other Linux desktop distro. Low spec computers usually aren't much of a problem for Linux. I'm still running Linux Mint 19.3 (the last 32-bit version) on an AMD Athlon 64 from around 2005 (for some reason I can't get the 64-bit version to work on it). It's snappy enough not to be bothersome. Although a $25 SSD would grealy improve performance I haven't felt the need to upgrade it.

    The author would do well to include this in their review.

    1. Tim 11

      Re: Running Linux Mint

      What I'm curious about is whether these people who run Linux on low-end hardware are actually using them to do work or are they just using them to mess around or run IOD-type applications?

      I find that once you've got a few copies of VS code and a dozen browser tabs open, the CPU and memory requirements of the OS itself are dwarfed by those of the apps, so the spec of machine you need is pretty much the same for linux as it is with windows

      1. martinusher Silver badge

        Re: Running Linux Mint

        When I'm working I'm only doing software development. I'm a bit old fashioned because while I can use IDEs like VSCode I prefer not to for the most part. I can't for the life of me think why I'd need to have "a few copies of VSCode and a dozen browser tabs open" -- I know many programmers do work like that but they seem to be more the "code first, ask questions afterwards" persuasion, spending inordinate amounts of time chasing down bugs. I do mostly embedded work, though, so the system requirements are a bit different from an applications developer, I suppose.

        What really taxes a system is FPGA development. But even then edits are straightforward and even placement is relatively low demand once the seed's been figured out. Incidentally, these heavy duty development systems tend to run on Linux, the Windows versions invariably use Cygwin somewhere (and they're really fast on Linux compared to Windows.....just sayin'......)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Running Linux for non-Office apps

          "What really taxes a system is FPGA development. But even then edits are straightforward and even placement is relatively low demand once the seed's been figured out. Incidentally, these heavy duty development systems tend to run on Linux, the Windows versions invariably use Cygwin somewhere (and they're really fast on Linux compared to Windows.....just sayin'......)"

          Don't tell the usual IT department types about this or there'll be riots.

          Well that was the way it was when I looked at/worked with tools for FPGA development and similar

      2. matthewdjb

        Re: Running Linux Mint

        I have friends who have no money, can't upgrade. So install Linux for them. Generally Mint. And they're generally happy.

      3. Mike007 Bronze badge

        Re: Running Linux Mint

        They make great mini servers or the ones with multiple Ethernet ports make great little routers.

        I convinced our head of IT to drop his obsession with draytek after finding an excuse to buy a mini pc to run pfsense for a specific project... cost the same, has a better OS. He has now decided we are pfsense all the way router wise...

      4. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Running Linux Mint

        "actually using them to do work or are they just using them to mess around or run IOD-type applications?"

        It very much depends on what you mean by "work". Not all work is CPU or RAM intensive. The one client I visit where I actually sit down and do "work", I rarely need more than Teams, Outlook and a browser running 4-6 tabs at the same time (everything is "cloudy"). But that's Win10 on a current mid-range laptop. At home, I frequently use my ancient Toshiba laptop running FreeBSD and rarely hit CPU or RAM bottle necks, even with <counting> 33 tabs open currently, although I do offload heavy tasks via SSH to bigger boxes up in the attic, since it's not as warm up there and I'd much rather be sat in the lounge with my wife :-)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Running Linux Mint

      I'm curious about whether it came with an OS at all. Obviously the system is all completely legal, so did they include an OEM Windows licence in the price?

      1. PhilipN Silver badge

        Re: Running Linux Mint

        Link says Windows 11 Pro

      2. JQW

        Re: Running Linux Mint

        I came across a review of a similar system a few months back that came with a Volume License Key installation of Windows 10. They had also hacked the Windows installation to prevent Windows Update from automatically running to stop it phoning home and getting the installation of Windows invalidated.

        1. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

          Re: Running Linux Mint

          That's bound to happen with these cheap Chinese trinkets. It also wouldn't surprise me if it came equipped with spyware.

          Best thing to do would be to wipe it clean and install Linux Mint on it and hoping they didn't plant firmware in the BIOS.

    3. sabroni Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: All together, one, two, three!

      Can you wipe it and put a PROPER OS on there?

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: All together, one, two, three!

        Can you wipe a simple disk in a standard X86 computer? As it happens, yes you can. I don't know about this box in particular, but there are only about a hundred devices out there with exactly the same spec but differently shaped boxes, and they mostly run Linux just fine, so I'm guessing it runs well.

    4. EricB123 Silver badge

      Re: Running Linux Mint

      "I came across a review of a similar system a few months back that came with a Volume License Key installation of Windows 10."

      Sounds like a laptop that I bought in Asia once. After a month of use I got a message that I needed to verify my Windows License, and displayed a watermark on my desktop to nag me into compliance.

    5. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Running Linux Mint

      The author would do well to include this in their review.

      Yeah, and what about a free pony for each reader?

  2. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Nothing in front

    > The rear panel features a pair of full-size HDMI slots, a single USB 2.0 slot, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a microphone input. On the left side of the machine are a power button, another USB 2.0 port, and > a pair of USB 3.0 sockets. On the right is a VGA port. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are within.

    >

    > This is a bad arrangement because the machine can end up with cables poking in many different directions.

    So, very much like the wildly popular Raspberry Pi series.

    1. sabroni Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: So, very much like the wildly popular Raspberry Pi series.

      Except it's about 8 times as expensive. And Pi's dont have ports on both sides of either the short or long side of the board.

      So not very much like a rapberry pi at all if you think about it for a second before you hit "Submit".

      1. ChrisElvidge Bronze badge

        Re: So, very much like the wildly popular Raspberry Pi series.

        My PIs have ports on all 4 sides

      2. Pete 2 Silver badge

        Re: So, very much like the wildly popular Raspberry Pi series.

        > So not very much like a rapberry pi at all

        Maybe it passed you by, but we were only talking about the cabling arrangements. I had hoped the quoted text gave enough of a clue.

      3. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: So, very much like the wildly popular Raspberry Pi series.

        We're not talking about expense. If we were, I could start talking about benchmark numbers for the different processors, the speed advantages of the SSD in this one, or so many other points of differentiation. Just talking about ports, a typical desktop setup will use ports on two sides of a modern Pi: power input and display output on one side, USB keyboard and mouse and possibly Ethernet on the other. Meanwhile, for this computer, literally all those things can be plugged in on the back unless the power port is somewhere else, as that wasn't mentioned. The USB ports on the side can be used for more temporary peripherals. That doesn't guarantee that you'd use that setup, as your keyboard and mouse would have to share the one USB on the back to get there, but even if you didn't, you're still using the same number of sides in the same arrangement as you would for a Pi. Only if you need multiple USB devices without a hub and VGA will you have cables on opposite ends of the box, just as if you want to plug something into the GPIO interface, you'd have cables on both sides of a Pi. Are they really so different?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nothing in front

      > So, very much like the wildly popular Raspberry Pi series.

      Or like my HP Z series laptop dock.

  3. FatGerman

    The inclusion of VGA, the odd choice for an SSD, and the fact it's now out of stock, imply to me that this is an industrial PC motherboard that has been rebadged to use up some end of line stock.You won't get any support or updates and the company will probably disappear in short time. You need to stop buying this crap, you're only encouraging them :)

    1. Enric Martinez

      Valid point.

      Specially with all the refurbished and second hand stuff that you can find.

      Plus, they are usually serviced by local companies, even the ones build in China.

    2. Phil Kingston

      For the low low price these can be had for now with discounts, there's definitely a place for them. Router, media server, sandbox, heck daily driver for most of what I do at moment. One of theirs, as a lightning deal, could be had for AUD115 the other day https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/807667 that's ~60GBP.

  4. clochard

    $200-$400 isn't that cheap

    I've been using a £140 Trigkey Green Mini PC for over a year now and it's been great. I removed the 256GB m.2 Windows 10 drive and installed a Kingston SSD with Linux Mint. The 8GB RAM is sufficient for my needs. For some reason Americans have to pay more for everything except iPhones.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: $200-$400 isn't that cheap

      A while back I bought a really cheap system similar to the one that is in the article. IIRC, it was £89 on offer on Amazon and produced by a company called Beelink.

      I had no great expectation that this system could be used for any heavy duty applications like application development or running VMs. It really uses a low end laptop Celeron, a J3355 running at 2GHz with two cores, although it has SpeedStep technology (or whatever it is called now) so it is often running much slower than that. It uses the display adapter in the CPU, and is reported as an i915, so not that performant, but it's well supported by pretty much anything you run in it.

      It came with Windows10 installed and activated on 64GB of eMMc memory, but I put in a 128GB M.2 SATA card (it had to be SATA, as I don't think it supports NVMe). I'm still using the 4GB of memory that it was delivered with, but it has a single SODIMM slot, although I don't know the maximum capacity. It has a Gigabit Ethernet and 8023ac Wifi. I think it has Bluetooth, but I have that turned off in the BIOS.

      I was looking for a silent, small system that I could put a Linux distro on to act as an always on headless server in a corner of the house to drive an old, non-WiFi enabled printer, as well as anything else I thought of, but unfortunately it's not silent. It's quiet, but still noisy enough when busy to be noticeable.

      I've ended up using it as a Devuan test system. It's currently running Daedalus installed without significant problems from the normal install media, and it does it quite well. It drives a single 1080p monitor reasonably smoothly. It runs and renders Youtube videos reasonably well at this resolution, although I have seen it stutter once or twice. Setting it up was a little awkward, as it would not identify Linux boot media until I turned the Secure Boot features off, and by default, when secure boot was off, it didn't actually want to see the eMMc memory as a location to install Linux to, but that's no big problem (there is a setting I discovered in uEFI/BIOS settings that did enable this to work, and it also affects the microSD card slot).

      As a basic general purpose system for a non-technical person, I would say that it is capable of providing what is needed when running Linux. I could use it as a system bolted to the back of a telly with a wireless keyboard and mouse, to give a basic television access to some more services, but I could use a Raspberry PI for that more cheaply.

      Windows was sluggish, and even though it has an activated licence, it has difficulty putting the latest Windows 10 update on (it comes up with a generic "Update failed" after spending nearly an hour downloading the update, and rebooting), not that this bothers me. I would not consider using this system for Windows. It's too slow, and can't take Windows 11 without hacks.

      So it's a bit of an enigma. It's moderately capable when running Linux, though it would not really suit most people here. If all you wanted was a system to do some web browsing and play a few videos in the living room using the telly, then it may have a place. I just wish it was fanless. But there are better options around for a daily driver. I suspect that the slightly more expensive systems with better processor, if given enough RAM and a suitable SSD would be better, and almost certainly would run a Linux distro at least as well as my system.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        Re: $200-$400 isn't that cheap

        I don't know why I posted that AC.

        Well, except for the fact that I got that it has a SODIMM socket wrong, It doesn't have one, so the built in 4GB is all I'm going to be able to use on this system.

        It doesn't seem that long ago that 4GB seemed like a lot of memory, thinking back to 'my' first PDP-11 that had 2MB of RAM. How time flies.

      2. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

        Re: $200-$400 isn't that cheap

        I was looking for a silent, small system that I could put a Linux distro on to act as an always on headless server in a corner of the house to drive an old, non-WiFi enabled printer, as well as anything else I thought of, but unfortunately it's not silent. It's quiet, but still noisy enough when busy to be noticeable.

        That sounds like a use case for a Raspberry Pi.

        edit - and then I read the rest of your comment...

      3. Yankee Doodle Doofus Bronze badge

        Re: $200-$400 isn't that cheap

        I recently purchased 3 Beelink mini-PCs to use for setting up a Proxmox cluster. I haven't gotten that far yet, as I've been playing around with them while running Windows and Linux. The model I purchased are using Ryzen 5800H processors, and for the price (between $300 and $400 depending on the seller and the RAM/storage configuration) they seem to be very capable machines from my testing. The one odd thing about them that I have noticed is that though they come with Windows 11 Pro preinstalled and they seem to have a valid license, if you wipe them and reinstall from the standard Microsoft ISO, you can not re-activate Windows. Beelink (a Chinese company) will send you a link to their custom Windows installer and/or a license key if you contact customer support, but I've not seen this sort of thing before with any other OEM installations, so I do wonder if they are actually legit Windows licenses. This doesn't concern me too much, though, since my intended use case is not as Windows workstations.

        1. david 12 Silver badge

          Re: $200-$400 isn't that cheap

          if you wipe them and reinstall from the standard Microsoft ISO, you can not re-activate Windows

          Volume License, local network activation. You need to connect to their Key Management Server, not the MS one. Or use the alternative method.

    2. SVD_NL Silver badge

      Re: $200-$400 isn't that cheap

      And it's also the price range where refurbished office desktops make sense. You can get a Dell optiplex micro with 16gb ram, 256gb ssd and a 9th gen i5 for around €250-300 here.. and most of these companies give 1 year warranty too.

      (Although from my experience you'd probably want the SSF, those last longer, but the micro is more similar in size to the NUC)

      Oh, and you preventing e-waste by re-using a perfectly good PC! Those Chinese PCs are likely leftover embedded systems or industrial boards too, but it's still additional manufacturing and shipping.

  5. bregister

    try the linutop

    It's French,

    it's solid,

    it's mad but great fun.

    http://www.linutop.com/index.en.html

    1. NightFox

      Re: try the linutop

      Yeah but that's what people say about the 2CV.

    2. Phil Kingston

      Re: try the linutop

      Lost me at "French"

  6. Howard Sway Silver badge

    The 16 GB of RAM identifies itself as being made by "KINSOTIN"

    To be honest, that could have been the whole review because anything like this being churned out by the knock-off factories is an instant disqualification in my book.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Prejudices are such fun.

      I'd probably want to see the RAM and markings before I dismissed it as "knock off" but prejudices are fun aren't they.

      1. Gene Cash Silver badge

        Re: Prejudices are such fun.

        > prejudices are fun aren't they.

        Well considering KINSOTIN would fit in fine on Amazon with all the cheap Chinese knockoffs made by "companies" with alphabet soup names...

        And do you REALLY think a company would misspell it's name that badly? Seriously?

        Also see "On MicroSD Problems" http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Prejudices are such fun.

          15 seconds with Google will give you pictures of Kinsotin RAM and it looks fk all like a knock off of Kingston branding.

          But y'know, that workout you're getting by leaping to conclusions and exercising those prejudices must be doing you the world of good.

        2. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Prejudices are such fun.

          So if the name looks like other names, then the companies must be the same quality? Is it just not being a simple word or common name in English that makes it one of those? All you can tell from the name not sounding familiar is that you don't know about the company. It could be the worst of counterfeit operations or the next powerhouse in the product line, but you don't know where it will fall on that spectrum. Given that this is probably a Chinese company, this could easily be a three-syllable Chinese name using a couple different romanization systems. Had you not heard of them, Samsung would sound like it fits in with other brands, but you wouldn't assume that Samsung-made RAM is terrible, would you?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Prejudices are such fun.

            Pretty much exactly my point, if you've not heard of the name then you can't assume anything, to do so is prejudice.

            They could be a tiny back street enterprise or the budget brand of a huge manufacturer, even the next up and coming major player.

            What I don't see from any of the scant info available is that they're trying to rip off Kingston, that just seems to be guesswork because their ne starts with Kin

            1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

              Re: Prejudices are such fun.

              So you can't see how "kingston" becomes "kin-sot-in" via transliteration into Mandarin Chinese and subsequently back into the Roman alphabet? I would have thought dropping the "ng" sound, and "ston" becoming "so-tin" were a dead giveaway.

              The article itself stated that the name "kinsotin" was unknown to Google, which indicates that it's clearly not a well known manufacturer. A current google image search for "Kinsotin RAM" brings up exactly 20 results, one of which is a picture of a dinosaur's face, and one a pair of '90s era desktop PC speakers. After you tell google that you're NOT looking for "Kingston RAM", that is. That doesn't indicate "major player" to me, but you are free to draw your own conclusions from the available information.

  7. PhilipN Silver badge

    VM; support

    At those prices you load one OS per machine. When it fails - throw it away.

  8. Tron Silver badge

    OK this is El Reg but...

    ...whenever this kit is reviewed, test it once for standard civilian use. Basically a browser, a bit of streaming, and a word processor. 80% of users don't use more than that. If it works for that, there is no reason why people should get shafted by their local chain store, paying over a grand for 10x more power than they will ever need.

    1. Dr. Ellen

      Re: OK this is El Reg but...

      I have an Ace Magician, which came with Windows 11 installed. I added 2 TB of spinning rust for data - the machine has a dedicated space. Wouldn't be surprised if there were one factory turning out these computers under many brand names. I use it a bit more intensely than the standard civilian, but not terribly so, and it behave itself well and does the work. And it hangs from the back of my monitor, so I don't have to look at the wires going every which way.

      1. allyngibson

        Re: OK this is El Reg but...

        I bought an Ace Magician recently myself (the AK1 Plus), and it's perfectly fine, more than adequate for what I wanted from it. I pulled the M2 with Windows 11, dropped in a new M2, and installed Linux Mint. It connects to my office, runs a remote desktop, and does office stuff. I wanted something small I could set up in my living room, and it's good for that.

  9. Blackjack Silver badge

    400$ for a mini PC with just 16 GB of RAM? Wow that's expensive.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The mini PCs with N100 processors are popular as Plex servers or media clients.

    The number of Alderlake video units means they can handle and transcode most videos without breaking sweat.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Once upon a time ...

    Stuff like this couldn't legitimately be imported into the EU unless the relevant support documentation was available. E.g. EMC assessment requirements, CE marking and Certificates of Confirmity..

    Where does stuff like this box (and the *importers* of stuff like this) fit in that picture?

    https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-requirements/labels-markings/ce-marking/index_en.htm

    Just askin

    Did similar requirements also apply in FCC territories?

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