Gigabyte Brix J1900 mini-PC barebones, with free 120GB SSD, $103.xx @ Newegg

[VirtualLarry]

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164024

Generally, the cheapest that these units have been is $100, and occasionally, they come with free 4GB DDR3 SO-DIMM, or in this particular case, an HP S600 2.5" SATA6G SSD. (Note that the Brix unit, being a Bay Trail Atom SoC setup, only supports SATAII 3Gb/sec.)

Still, that SSD is worth $30 or so, so that makes the unit around $75, a decent price.

I used to own four of these units, I had them with 300GB Intel Series 320 SSDs. I think that they are fine units, generally reliable in Windows, but not stable in Linux unless you disable C-States in BIOS, in which case, the CPU never ramps up clock speeds in Linux.

I think that I ran mine with Windows 7 64-bit, which was alright, but it was a bit sluggish web browsing with Firefox back then. Since then, though Firefox has evolved quite a bit, and is now multi-threaded. I use Firefox Nightly on my Bay Trail Atom quad-core Lenovo CloudBook 100S, and it performs fine for browsing.

I wouldn't really try gaming on this unit, it's way too slow, and the iGPU is fairly poor.

But anyways, with Windows 10, updated BIOS, and Firefox Nightly, and the included SSD (just add 8GB of DDR3 SO-DIMM, it only has one slot), it should perform just fine for a low-power, quiet, small, browser box.

 

[gibster]

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164024

I used to own four of these units, I had them with 300GB Intel Series 320 SSDs. I think that they are fine units, generally reliable in Windows, but not stable in Linux unless you disable C-States in BIOS, in which case, the CPU never ramps up clock speeds in Linux.

That's interesting. I have an N3700 unit from 2015, ran ubuntu on it, it would freeze up while running kodi mostly, then one day it corrupted itself somehow and would not boot. Haven't done anything with it in a year or so, now I may have a glimmer of hope that it can be made more stable. I don't mind it being slower, I just want it to be stable... I compared the specs of N3700 and J1900, they seem pretty close, I was surprised to see N3700 be better in some cases.

Evening edit: So after playing with the NUC some, turns out I flashed to a BIOS version that made the NUC not boot right last year, and I thought it was ubuntu curruption lol... recovery is very painful on these things...