We are only five days from Black Friday, and with it comes a plethora of deals on Amazon, which is trying to beat out all the brick-and-mortar stores competing for sales this year. Today, we have a handful of mini PCs that could make for a great home theater addition or home office box that will fit just about anywhere.
Leading off the Read more...
HTPC enthusiasts and anyone else who might be interested in a low profile GeForce RTX 40 series graphics card would have needed to switch gears to a 'Plan B' for their compact builds, because such a card did not exist before now. Even so, Gigabyte isn't making a huge deal out of it and instead has chosen to quietly...Read more...
DFI PCSF51 Industrial Pi: $580 (As Tested) + $28 Passive Heatsink The DFI PCSF51 is an 'Industrial Pi', powered by and AMD Ryzen Embedded R2000 processor for intensive and demanding edge applications. Compact SBC with x86 Ryzen CPU and Radeon Vega GPU Runs silently with the larger passive cooling option Highly...Read more...
Gamers or HTPC fans who are looking for a feature-packed mITX mainboard supporting Socket 1151 Coffee Lake CPUs might want to check out the new EVGA H370 Stinger. As the name of the board implies, it uses the Intel H370 chipset and is an economical offering that supports Core i3, i5, and i7 Socket 1151 Coffee Lake-S...Read more...
MINIX offers a wide assortment of ultra small form factor systems (SFF) targeting an array of use cases, from home theater PCs and digital signage to other industrial applications. Despite their diminutive size, the machines are typically full-featured and come with memory, storage, and an operating system...Read more...
The sound of silence -- there’s nothing like it, especially when it comes to a media PC. The last thing anyone wants while binging on the new season of Game of Thrones is the distracting drone of a fan or whir of a hard drive. Silence is precisely what the Streacom DB-4 chassis we'll be featuring here has to offer...Read more...
We dig burly, decked-out gaming PCs stuffed with powerful hardware as much as the next guy around here. Sleek, ultra small form factor systems like the MINIX Neo Z83-4 we’ll be showing you here today, however, also have a certain appeal. Powerful gaming PCs are awesome for their intended purpose, but try sticking one...Read more...
A couple of weeks ago, we reported on a rumor of forthcoming GT 1030 graphics cards from NVIDIA, and this week, their existence has been confirmed. Its launch creates a new battle: Radeon RX 550 vs. GeForce GT 1030, although based on the specs alone, it looks like the RX 500 is going to come ahead (but its price will...Read more...
The Gigabyte BRIX Gaming UHD is an exciting small form factor PC prospect. It packs a surprising amount of muscle into a tiny frame. This little flyweight may not sound too beastly with its GeForce GTX 950; Gigabyte, however, reckons it is more than capable of streaming 4K UHD media and taking a few swings at 1080p...Read more...
In the run up to the highly anticipated releases of Steam Machines in 2014, Valve announced a beta program called In-Home Streaming that will allow users to stream Steam games (say that five times fast) from one computer to another within the same house. Any system with Steam installed on it can run games from the cloud, but this in-home streaming...Read more...
If you're a proponent of the desktop, don't worry, the sky isn't falling on your form factor. Yes, we've read the same reports you have, the ones pointing out how traditional PC sales are shrinking in the wake of a mobile revolution that has consumers turning to tablets and smartphones for surfing the web and logging into Facebook. There's...Read more...
Zotac has been making ultra-small form factor systems for quite a while now. You can check out a number of our reviews of various ZBox systems and you’ll notice that most of the systems have been built around low-power platforms like AMD’s E-Series APUs or Intel’s Atom processors. With its latest generations of mini-PC’s,...Read more...
Zotac has been making ultra-small form factor systems for quite a while now. You can check out a number of our reviews of various ZBox systems right here. If you read those previous reviews, you’ll notice that most of the systems have been built around low-power platforms like AMD’s E-Series APUs or Intel’s Atom processors....Read more...
CyberPowerPC announced a new line of Zeus HTPCs that are designed to be stylish enough to be prominently displayed in your home theater configuration but are dead silent, never interrupting your movie-watching or game-playing. CyberPowerPC bills the Zeus HTPCs as “your DVR, enthusiast home theatre PC, gaming console and DVD/Blu-Ray Player”...Read more...
Here's a question: does the world need a giant Windows 8 PC? Something tells us the answer must be "yes," and that something is the InFocus BigTouch. It's a giant 55" all-in-one Windows PC, built for huge conference rooms, educational spaces, and working event spaces. Or, the home office of someone who firmly believes that bigger is truly...Read more...
Most HTPCs have more modest components than your average gaming rig, and they’re typically designed to be quiet and to blend in with a home theater. Enthusiasts who go the HTPC route will often keep a dedicated PC in the media room and keep another set up for serious gaming. Velocity Micro is apparently not a...Read more...
Just as we always suspected, Valve's push from the PC to the living room isn't going to end with Big Picture mode. The next logical step, and one that Valve hinted at before, is to jump over on the hardware side of the equation and launch a PC-based console of its own, a "Steam Box," if you will. Confirmation of...Read more...
For our latest End-of-Summer giveaway, we partnered up with our good friends at ZOTAC and planned to give away a full-featured, ultra small form factor HTPC / mini-PC! This time around, you could have won a ZOTAC ZBOX nano AD12 Plus, complete with a dual-core APU and AMD Radeon HD 7340 series graphics, all wrapped up in a tiny enclosure that's Read more...
The summer may be coming to an end, but it’s just the beginning of our latest giveaway here at HotHardware! For our latest End-of-Summer giveaway, we’ve partnered up with our good friends at ZOTAC and are giving away a full-featured, ultra small form factor HTPC / mini-PC! This time around, you could win a ZOTAC ZBOX nano AD12 Plus, complete Read more...
Those who like to tinker with and build computers have a new toy to play with in the cubieboard, a $49 self-described “open arm box” that offers intriguing possibilities as an HTPC build. The cubieboard supports Ubuntu (and other Linux distros), so it can operate as a regular desktop, but it can also run...Read more...
When we first took a look at the ASRock Vision 3D 137B with NVIDIA 3DTV Play last year, we were quite impressed with the machine. It offered excellent all-around performance for a system in its class and had an extensive feature set that included Blu-Ray and 3D video playback capabilities, all wrapped up in what we considered to be an attractive...Read more...
When we first took a look at the ASRock Vision 3D 137B with NVIDIA 3DTV Play last year, we were quite impressed with the machine. It offered excellent all-around performance for a system in its class and had an extensive feature set that included Blu-Ray and 3D video playback capabilities, all wrapped up in what we considered to be an...Read more...