mini PC info

I have been planning on building a PC from parts soon for general computer tasks and 1080P gaming. Mostly flight sim. I currently use an M1 Mac with built in graphics and 16g ram. It works but I want better and I think PC is better for me.I was looking at the ITX builds everyone is doing on YouTube and they are thousands.
All about 1000$. But I have seen some of the mini 160$ PCs with Windows 11 ready to go and they have my interest up.... I was wondering about pairing one of these with an external Graphics card sitting next to it like a 3060 or something cheap but competent for 1080P good resolution.Has anyone had experience with these things
and what do you think of them??? One company is Elite I think and there are several with offerings. These sit only a little bigger than a Raspberry card pc but have full IO....what do you know about this??? I will keep my Mac too...

For general computing almost anything will do.
1080p gaming - depends on what kind of games you want to play

I would think FS2020. I bought a high end laptop in 2020 just to play that. Ended up selling it 11 mos later out of frustration. I couldnt just boot it up and play the fucking game. EVERY time I started it it needed to do a loooong update. Talking twice a week. Updates would take up to an hour even with high speed and werent optional. I didnt have a permanent internet connection and just wasnt that dedicsted.
The laptop was awesome it was an MSI Raider that I added another SSD to and expanded memory to 64gb, it played all the newish games I threw at it at full bleed. Paid $2200 for it sold it for $1200 with a month left on the warranty.
FS2020 would be perfect if you had bombs and missiles to destroy things.
I used to have a lot of fun installing free add ons to the old FSX. Stuff like the starship enterprise and space shuttle that you could get up to mach 25. IIRC they also had the seaview flying sub with all its flight characteristics.
Once in a while an unrefined add on would corrupt your install and that was a problem because MS didnt allow unlimited activations.
OP should try an old computer with legacy combat flight sims like Janes F-15 or Falcon 4.0. The former being a blast just for its mission builder. Falcon 4.0 was years ahead of its time and the developers generously gave the program away to the public who expanded it to allied forces with a euro theatre.

Fs2020 is fairly CPU and GPU intensive, I doubt a cheap mini pc is going to handle it. I tend to use matx these days in sff cases they work out cheaper than it's and allow me to use a decent sound card as well as a GPU, I would imagine with all the recent changes in chipset and CPU sockets you could pick up AMD 5000 series CPUs reasonably cheap even second hand and a appropriate MB also for far less than the equivalent mini pc.
No recent photo but I'm using the same zzaw case It's not tiny but it's not far off the size of a shoebox.

I think I will just build a new itx(small case) size AMD later in the fall. Prices should be lower...

e67 said:

I think I will just build a new itx(small case) size AMD later in the fall. Prices should be lower...

Click to expand...

Prices of DRAM are started rising.
I suggest buying around August as soon as Ryzen 9000 series are released. Seems Ryzen 7000 are becoming deeply discounted and are fantastic bargain given their power.
If money is an issue, getting DDR4/X570 based system (AM4) maybe best especially with newest releases on AM4 socket which are incredibly powerful even today.
Even GPU prices have more or less stabilized, as long as you are not going for hi end.