popular Posted by phoinix | Staff • 5d ago
Jun 9, 2025 10:57 AM
Item 1 of 4
Item 1 of 4
popular Posted by phoinix | Staff • 5d ago
Jun 9, 2025 10:57 AM
$157.98*: GMKtec Mini PC: N150, 16GB DDR4, 512GB PCIe M.2 SSD at Amazon
$158
$210
24% offAmazon
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TBH, at $158 this is a really inexpensive way to start a home lab. I have a similar mini PC running docker. Quite the learning experience.
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The "m.2 ssd" notably lacked the "nvme" or "pcie", and it is in fact a sata drive with read speeds just over 100Mb/s. Or as slow as a lot of EMMC.
Tried two actual nvme drives in it, 1tb and 4tb, western digital blue, not recognized. Specs say gen 3 nvme. Boolsheeit.
Picky as hell about ram as well. Used a 16gb/3200 stick from another pc and I guess it doesn't support xmp or doesn't support it correctly, because it wanted it to run at 2133.
Another chinabox with fake specs and things that'll be a lot of problems to fix. But keep deleting the product listing, and deleting bad reviews and you might buy and return it. I had an experience with kamrui a while ago where they wanted me to delete a one star review or they wouldn't accept the return. Joke was on them, amazon took the return and they had no say over it. They then disabled me from reviewing their products on amazon. "Reviews for these products from this account is prohibited".
That should have scared me off of this, but then again that woman at the UPS store IS kinda cute.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH81C...gToDp
I use a remote mouse app on my iPad for input, having the system sleep and then wake on LAN. You'll still want a wired or BT kb handy for logging in on boot, since the mouse server isn't running at that point. No problems streaming videos or playing back video files. It can run hot, but it's a headless laptop essentially, they aren't known for the best thermals. Also if you're really wanting the best performance from it, go look around for some reviews on YT, you'll see that the system isn't set for the best performance settings out of the box, but at a more middle ground for thermal reasons. But it's fine for my needs, didn't change anything.
SSD speeds were fine-ish. Definitely above SATA speeds. Different boxes have different specs. When I was looking at the smaller G5?, with the N97, I noticed that one was a SATA M.2 in it. I don't recall the speed test numbers offhand on the G3 plus, I think it was lower than the Gen3 in my full sized system but easily faster than SATA. System also passed memtest. Don't forget, these low end systems are only single memory channel systems.
Also note the unit linked to this deal is "lush green" in color, go searching around if you want to see pics of the color. If you want the black colored unit, which I did, search for the G3 plus on Amazon and you'll find it from another seller and for a similar price (at least I did when I bought mine)