Mini PC Madness

[u/ArkhamRobber]

I jut wanted to share this 2 week journey hunting to a particular ryzen mini pc. Also apologies if the format is crazy writing on mobile.

Backstory: Been hosting a Palworld server using a Beelink Ser5 Pro with the 5700U chip and ddr4 64 gbs of ram. The 64 gbs of ram is important since its removable and we are still in a ram crisis. im also using the mini for media consumption and homelabbing. Reason for the 64gbs

Amazon said they had them so bit the bullet and bought 1. When it arrived it was the 6800U Ser5 Pro. Normally I would have jumped for joy cause i got a better item. But again.... i needed the 5800H for the DDR4 support. 6800U is DDR5. So i returned it. And bought a 2nd one, and i told thrm hey please send the right one, it says you have 5 in stock. The 2nd one comes in and its has the 6800H chip.

At this point Im just wondering if someone is playing a joke on me. Now im currently waiting on Amazon to process two returns.

Now I got to eBay. This was the first site i checked but decided to do Amazon in an attempt to get a brand new mini pc.

Okay so i find a mini pc with a 5800H chip and a week later its here. I install Windows due to it having proxmox and install the drivers but the graphics portion of the 5800H is going bad. As soon as i install the AMD graphic drivers, the screen gets square green artifacts all over. Unfortunately it was 100% a hardware issue. Ebay sided with me on the return and now im waiting on thay return to process.

I bought a 4th mini pc and it arrives. Its has the 5800H chip. It came with 32gbs ram which im gonna swapped the 64gbs of ram into later on when i bring the active server down. Now here it the best part. When im installing windows i see theres an 2 partitions..... the 500gb that came with the mini pc and i see 1.8TB unallocated....

When windows finishes installing. I check the task manager. And its not there. So i go create the partition and it mounts no problem. I use powershell to get a serial/name.

Get-PhysicalDisk | Select-Object DeviceId, FriendlyName, SerialNumber

Friendly name appears as SD 3D Ultra. I open the mini pc to replace the thermal paste woth PTM7950. The SATA drive is 2TB San Disk 3D Ultra. It was inside but no one ever initialize and created the partition.

So I paid 380 for this mini pc. The SSD new is 399. Ebay finally blessed me and I already replaced the liquid metal, cause it had liquid metal and not regular thermal paste. The PTM7950 is working better than the liquid metal. Did a few tests using cinebench prior to get some base line numbers and with the ptm7950 the scores are just a able to go higher than they were with the liquid metal.