Mini-PC Picker + Power-Cost TCO
Pick what you actually want to run, get the RAM / threads / iGPU-transcode / storage it really needs, then see which mini-PCs clear that bar ranked by 5-year total cost of ownership including your electricity price.
What will it run?
Required & matching mini-PCs
Methodology & honest caveats
Requirements are the sum of per-workload steady-state estimates plus a host/hypervisor baseline, taken from each project's documented minimums and community-observed headroom — deliberately a little generous so a "fits" verdict has slack. RAM and threads add linearly; transcode demand is tracked separately in Quick Sync 1080p-equivalent streams (a 4K HEVC job ≈ 2).
5-year TCO = purchase price + electricity, where annual energy =
(idle W × (1−duty) + load W × duty) ÷ 1000 × hours/yr × your kWh rate,
multiplied by 5 years. We weight idle vs load by a duty cycle because home servers spend most of
their life near idle — using peak wattage 24/7 (what many "power cost" posts do) overstates the bill 2–4×.
Wall-watt and price figures are bands, not guarantees: actual draw shifts with RAM amount, number of disks, BIOS power settings and silicon lottery; used-gear prices swing weekly. AMD APUs do transcode via VAAPI/VCN but are conservatively scored as 0 Quick Sync streams here, so an AMD box may be fine for transcoding even when this tool flags it — that's a deliberately cautious bias. This is sizing decision-support, not a purchase guarantee; verify wattage with a meter on the actual unit.
Coefficients & catalog: src/data/workloads.json + src/data/minipcs.json
(model v1.0).