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.
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.