I’m Seeing Sparks 🔌

Hey all, welcome to the second edition of Boxed News. Since our launch last week, we’ve put a bit of work in under the hood to add RSS and AT Protocol support to the site. Hope it‘s helpful. (And tell a friend! We’re new!)

Anyway, Nvidia’s DGX Spark has been on the market for more than a year, and it costs nearly $5,000. Despite this, more than 500 of the devices have sold on Amazon alone in the past 30 days.

It’s an extremely niche device, even more so than the company’s developer boards. Yet clearly, someone is buying these things.

That perhaps explains why mainstream PC manufacturers are making desktop machines a key part of their RTX Spark strategies. RTX Spark, essentially Nvidia’s retooling of the DGX Spark for the Windows market, still doesn’t have any attached price tags, but it’s clear these companies are closing in on something.

At this year’s edition of the Berlin-based consumer tech event IFA, companies like Acer and HP shared their visions of what desktop-driven AI-first mini PCs should look like. And it’s a relatively new vision for each of these companies. While Acer already sells something like this—the $5,499 Veriton AI Mini Workstation—HP does not, at least not with an ARM processor.

Why a desktop and not a laptop? Do you want your Qwen run to shut down halfway through because you decided to leave the office and grab lunch? And to be clear, this is probably a bet that at least some of these machines are going to live in a server rack somewhere.

I’m somewhat skeptical that these devices will truly go mainstream or even cause a blip for, say, homelabbers, but it’s nonetheless probably a good thing that traditional PC manufacturers are taking this space seriously. For one thing, it’s likely at least some of this tech will trickle down to smaller machines, too.

(On the other hand, I bet at least some traditional desktop folks are seeing this as the company’s strategy to get out of that market entirely.)

Hot-Plugging

Even low-end manufacturers are trying to make high-end AI boxes a thing

Of course, Nvidia wasn’t the only company trying to show off mini PCs with a little AI horsepower under the hood over in Berlin. Traditional mini PC manufacturers, like GMKtec, Acemagic, and Minisforum, are leaning on AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495, a.k.a. Gorgon Halo, to separate LLM tinkerers from their money.

These machines sport up to 192 gigs of memory, which is probably enough to run Deepseek v4 Flash locally. They’re complete overkill for all but the most dedicated of homelabbers. But they nonetheless represent an expansion of the sector that is even leading companies best-known for riding the low end of the market, like Chuwi, to go upscale.

(Chuwi doesn’t just sell low-end tech, but it did appear at The Verge recently with the headline “Is this $450 laptop from an unknown brand too good to be true?” So it has a rep.)

Which I guess raises the question: How big does the mini PC industry expect this market to be? At the moment, devices like the Framework Desktop are seen as niche or enthusiast plays. But if every company is making one of these, do they expect there to be a lot of people who just buy one of these to have around their house instead of paying OpenAI and Anthropic a monthly bill?

My prediction is that this market actually gets interesting in a few years, when the Ryzen AI Max+ machines become old news and can be found on the used market for $1,000 or less. That puts this otherwise exciting tech in the hands of more people with presumably more normal technology needs. But given that machines with the AI Ryzen AI Max+ 395 are selling for upwards of $3,000 on eBay, we might all be waiting for a while.

Mini-Links

» Weird discovery of the week: For folks attempting to fit a relatively powerful GPU in a tight space, an unusual card just hit Newegg. The SRhonyra RTX 3060 packs a 12GB graphics card into a single-slot PCIe card and doesn’t require external power, which might sound like an ideal play if you have a small machine but don’t want to go the eGPU route. Not everyone’s a fan, as the TechPowerUp comments section suggests.

» BIOS drama: Minisforum is taking a few reputational hits over on Reddit. The reason? The company is refusing to release a critical BIOS patch for the HM80, a 2021-era device with a fourth generation Ryzen chip on the board. Five years is a while, of course, but if AMD is addressing issues with its chips, so should Minisforum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

» A strong case as any to disable your smart TV. Over at GamersNexus, Steve Burke just conducted a massive investigation that shows how LG TV sets are horrifically insecure. The devices acquire data throughout your home, not just from what you watch, all in the name of advertising. (And its monitors are a whole ’nother bag of worms.) It’s a must-watch. The idea of letting a dedicated box handle your TV stuff makes a lot of sense all of a sudden.

» Trying to keep an extremely old mini PC alive? Linux is often the play, but the latest beta of Haiku, the spiritual successor to BeOS, might be an even better one. Not only does it still ship a 32-bit Intel version (no longer a guarantee even for Linux), it even supports full-fat Firefox.

Jargon Clarifier

WTF is an M-Key?

They’re ubiquitous for SSDs these days, but not all modern M.2 devices are built the same way. See, the M.2 connector standard, first introduced in 2013 by the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group, relies on a number of different “keys”—i.e. connector types—that are mostly physically incompatible with one another. For example, an E-key M.2 card, typically used for Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity, has a divider in the middle of its connector. The M-key, most common on modern-day NVMe-based SSD devices, has its divider on the right. But one potential bugaboo comes in the form of B-key devices, which have a divider on the left and are mostly used for SATA drives. Some of these SATA drives have what’s called a B+M key, making them work on either a B-key or M-key M.2 slot. Those may work in your modern-day mini PC, but in most cases you’re probably going to want an M-key drive, as NVMe drives are significantly faster than older SATA drives. But if you’re dumpster-diving, you should definitely be aware of the different types.

Deal Watch

» Mac Minis may not be cheap, but a deal can still be had on a decent Mac Mini dock. Amazon has half-off coupons on a number of enclosures, many of which sport a built-in NVMe slot.

» As far as old office gear goes, the TinyMiniMicro subgenre gets a lot of attention, with fairly small Dell, Lenovo, and HP devices in particular popular with the homelabber crowd. Less heralded among this lineup are the HP Z2 Mini workstations, which are fairly upgradeable and (if you care about such things) look pretty good for old office-drone gear. They were well-reviewed in their day, with the biggest knock against them being the power brick. Over an eBay, you can get seventh-gen and eighth-gen Intel boxes for less than $200. Plus, they use desktop chips, so even if you opt for an i3, you can still upgrade the CPU later.

» Bosgame has a number of coupons on many of its current machines over on Amazon, with the P6 Neo Mini probably hitting the price/performance sweet spot. That machine, with a Ryzen 7 6800H, 24GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, is currently going for $489.99 with coupon. If you want to go more basic, the E2 Mini PC, sporting a Ryzen5 3501U, 8 gigs of DDR4, and a 256GB SSD, is around [$179 with coupon](https://amzn.to/46KlWXF). Either could be a decent starter for a home server.

» Looking for a remote access option a little better than a NanoKVM? Amazon has the GL.iNet GL-RM10 Comet Pro, which is capable of displaying a remote image with a 4K passthrough, for $152. (That’s a 15% discount from its normal price, BTW.)

Mini PCs in History

Hey! You got AMD graphics in my Intel NUC

Since we’re talking about mini PCs that combine the GPU and CPU power in a single chip, let’s bring up one of the more cursed entries in mini PC history. In 2018, Intel and AMD decided to actually collaborate on a couple of processors together, the i7-8809G and the i7-8705G, both sitting under the Kaby Lake code name. These processors included the usual Intel integrated graphics but also added a dedicated Radeon RX Vega M graphics chip into the mix.

While these chips appeared in some laptops, the main way this cursed collaboration reached the public was via the “Hades Canyon” NUC, a hefty gaming-targeted Intel mini PC with a glowing skull on the side. (It needed the skull, because if it didn’t have it, it would make the gamer-targeted box look like a router.)

It wasn’t the first Intel NUC in this form factor, but the two-companies-one-chip selling point gave the device a real air of novelty. Jeff from Craft Computing once reviewed this thing more than four years after it came out, and still found the device worthy of his time. In the pre-Intel ARC era, this was about as good as you could get as far as a GPU on package with an Intel laptop chip.

Plus, the combination meant that it was an excellent machine for folks who wanted to build a Hackintosh with a little bit more heft than a 2018 Mac Mini. The chipset was comparable to what you could get from a high-end 2018 MacBook Pro, with the RX Vega M more or less equal to the Radeon Pro 5500M that came with the high-end version of that machine. The CPU is showing its age in 2026, but graphics performance still holds its own comparable to more modern AMD iGPUs like the Radeon 890M.

It’s a machine I and lots of other people have looked longingly at over the years, and honestly, it still kind of feels like a decent buy today, nearly nine years after it was first announced. Packed with IO and performance, it likely chews through way more power than a modern-day mini PC, but it also doesn’t embarrass itself either. These things sell for between $300 and $500 on eBay if you’re curious.

Got a weird mini PC in your archives? Send a pic to us, and we might feature it here.

Alright, two issues down. Let’s see if we make it to issue #3! Bug us at ernie@tedium.co if you have any thoughts, feedback, or how-am-I-driving advice. Cheers!