It is a minisforum UN100L. I disabled WiFi and other devices I don’t use in the bios. And then run Linux with the power saving mode. I also applied all the suggestions from powertop. Some suggest to also disable boost. Although it does save a bit of power by preventing spikes of power, it also makes the whole machine that much slower. So I’m content with the device using 4W idle, 8W-12W for busy, and a max of 24W when maxing out the CPU and GPU.
Not parent, I'm mostly looking at small thinkcentres for that price. The last one I looked at was about $60 for a unit that needs a power supply (about $20) and a couple drives. I haven't figured out a specific model I want yet.
They are excellent. I have a few of these with Intel Core i5-7500t and Core i7-7700t (both 35W TDP), with either 65W or 90W powerbricks, each with 32GB and varying SSDs.
Excellent because of the quality of their BIOS/Firmware. You can throw anything at them, and it just runs without errors.
Even most exotic stuff like https://genode.org , not to speak of any *BSD, Solaris-derivative, or some Linux.
Suspend to RAM, and successfully waking up from that works every single time, without special setup, no matter where and what.
Hibernation/Suspend to disk is up to you and the setup, but no problems there, either.
Rock solid experience even with the 'most riced' kernels and userland by https://cachyos.org running Plasma/KDE on 'oh noez! BTRFS!1!1!!'
If the number of ports and their speed is enough, they are good for homelabbing and even
casual desktop-use. Expansion not so much, except via USB3. (5Gb/s only)
I know nothing about later models, but these are more than enough for my uses.
