For many years when buying a PC we’ve had to choose performance over price, and size over performance. Now we can have it all, small formfactor, performance at a reasonable price.

Born out of the need for small workstations to run office applications comes the mini-desktop computer. Very small case with very big performance.

Talk about power. Many of these computers have CPUs with up to 12 cores, pretty good graphics, and as 64GB of RAM.

All of the manufactures are making them Intel (NUC), Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, and even Apple, has gotten into the act.

By far the leader has been Beelink, a company out of Schenzhen China that started with producing dongles, remote controls, gaming consoles, and home cloud products. Now they are the biggest thing in high-performance mini-PCs.

The Beelink SEi12 i5-1235U is the computer that I’m looking at to replace the computer that I distroyed. It has a 10 core i5 CPU, 16 or 32 Gigs of Crucial DDR 4 RAM, a Kingston 500GB SSD, and 2 HDMI ports (supports dual monitors). All for $459 (16GB), $519 (32GB), via the Beelink website. You can get a better deal on Amazon especially with Prime.