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Nov 03, 2024

The 3 Best Mini Desktop PCs of 2024 | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Dave Gershgorn Dave Gershgorn is a writer covering monitors, laptops, and tablets. He is a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation. Apple just announced a new M4 Mac

By Dave Gershgorn

Dave Gershgorn is a writer covering monitors, laptops, and tablets. He is a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation.

Apple just announced a new M4 Mac mini, which goes on sale November 8. We’ve included more details in the What to look forward to section.

If you’re looking for a simple, small desktop computer that doesn’t take up much space in your home or office, consider a mini PC. These computers are best for everyday tasks like working on documents and spreadsheets, browsing the web, taking video calls, or watching TV. However, our top picks are also powerful enough to do some light media editing, and our upgrade pick is fast enough even for professional photo and video editors.

This simple Windows PC is small, quiet, and powerful enough for daily work.

The Mac mini offers excellent performance, and the system’s fan is whisper-quiet even when you’re editing photos or videos or compiling code.

The Mac mini with an M2 Pro and 32 GB of RAM can speed up most media-editing workflows, and it can connect up to three monitors.

For those who prefer Windows, the HP Pro Mini 400 G9 is the best choice, and macOS users should buy the Mac mini with Apple’s M2 processor. Both are capable little computers that you can stick under or behind a monitor, saving space on your desk. A more powerful upgrade is the Apple Mac mini with the M2 Pro processor, which competes with high-end desktops in photo and video editing capabilities.

This simple Windows PC is small, quiet, and powerful enough for daily work.

The HP Pro Mini 400 G9 is a basic PC that’s perfect for home or office use. It runs on Intel’s latest generation of processors, which are energy-efficient and more than powerful enough for daily tasks. It has all the ports you need to hook up multiple monitors, and it offers the latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless connectivity. We love that the Pro Mini 400 is especially repairable; you can swap out and upgrade the storage drive, the RAM, and even the processor. And HP’s competitive pricing on this model means you can get more RAM and storage for $300 less than you’d pay for a similarly upgraded Apple Mac mini.

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The Mac mini offers excellent performance, and the system’s fan is whisper-quiet even when you’re editing photos or videos or compiling code.

If you prefer macOS, get the Apple Mac mini with Apple’s M2 processor. This speedy little Mac desktop can integrate seamlessly with an iPhone or an iPad, as well as Apple services like FaceTime and iMessage. For everyday browsing and general use, an M2 Mac mini with 8 GB of memory is good enough, though if you plan to use yours for professional photo and video editing or app development, you should step up to 16 GB of memory. Keep in mind that you can’t upgrade the Mac mini’s memory or storage after you buy it, so you need to make that decision up front. Apple’s internal-storage upgrades are pricey enough that you should look at an external hard drive or a portable SSD if you need more space.

The Mac mini with an M2 Pro and 32 GB of RAM can speed up most media-editing workflows, and it can connect up to three monitors.

By upgrading the processor in Apple’s Mac mini to the M2 Pro, you get the same blistering processing speeds found in the new MacBook Pro for nearly half the cost. Compared with our previous upgrade pick, the Mac Studio with an M1 Max chip, the Apple Mac mini with an M2 Pro processor loses some convenient features, such as front USB-C ports and an SDXC card reader, but you pay substantially less—$700 less, to be exact—for a faster machine. It’s also whisper-quiet, even under a heavy processing load, so you can keep it on your desk and forget it’s even there.

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Dave Gershgorn has reviewed and covered technology since 2015 at publications such as Popular Science, Quartz, Medium, and now Wirecutter. As a senior staff writer, he covers all computer displays for Wirecutter and is a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation. He has also built, repaired, and largely avoided frying his own computers since 2006.

Mini PCs are small computers that cram all the components of a desktop tower into a box the size of a paperback. There’s no attached display, mouse, or keyboard, so you have to buy your own. (Check out our guides to the best monitors for our recommendations on which one is best for you.) Despite these desktops’ small size, they’re more than powerful enough for browsing the web, handling basic photo and video editing, and working in documents or large spreadsheets.

Unlike ultrabooks or most all-in-one PCs, Windows mini PCs are easy to upgrade if you want to add more memory or storage, and they have all the ports you need to connect two or three monitors and your favorite keyboard, mouse, and webcam. The size of a mini PC prevents much expansion, but you can upgrade the storage and the memory on most Windows models, and some allow you to swap out the CPU, too. Instead of having a dedicated graphics card, you’re usually stuck with integrated graphics, so don’t expect a mini PC to have enough power to play many modern games; you can add an external graphics dock if your mini PC supports Thunderbolt 3 or higher, but such docks tend to be large and expensive.

Two of Apple’s flagship desktops fit into this mini PC category, and they’re a bit different from Windows mini PCs. They’re not upgradable and repairable—instead they contain desktop versions of the same powerful guts found in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Their chips are power-efficient, and they’re nearly silent, since they don’t require much cooling from fans to keep running smoothly; the Mac mini has one, but it’s almost unnoticeably quiet.

You can find mini PCs for less than $250, but Windows PCs in that price range have unusably slow processors and less memory and storage than most people need. We did not look at cheap, single-board computers, such as those from Raspberry Pi, nor would we include them in our definition of the term “mini PC.” Those ARM-based computers are slow, geared toward hobbyists, and designed to use custom Linux software.

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Here’s what we look for in a good mini PC:

We also consider the following features, but their presence has no effect on our recommendations:

After we settled on the hardware criteria, we searched the websites of major PC manufacturers such as Acer, Apple, Asus, Dell, HP, Intel, and Lenovo—and poked around in the inventory of smaller manufacturers such as Gigabyte, MSI, Shuttle, and Zotac—to find models to test.

We started our tests by booting up each mini PC and then running all available updates to the operating system and hardware. We then ran the benchmarking program Geekbench 5 and ran the 10-minute single-core and multi-core benchmarks in Cinebench R23—this process gave us a good idea of how the computers would perform in general use and when running at full speed for an extended period of time.

We then connected each mini PC to a series of 24-inch, 27-inch, and 4K monitors to test its display outputs and used it for a few days of ordinary work. This process usually consisted of running a web browser with at least 15 tabs open at a time (Google Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Slack, and plenty more), streaming music through the Spotify desktop application, video chatting, and recording audio. The testing allowed us to get a feel for how each mini PC performed on a daily basis, and it also gave us time to discover any quirks related to bloatware or driver issues.

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This simple Windows PC is small, quiet, and powerful enough for daily work.

The HP Pro Mini 400 G9 is a simple and repairable computer that’s fast enough for everyday work and general use. It’s small enough to mount behind a monitor, which you can easily do with the computer case’s included VESA mounting holes, and its fans aren’t too noisy.

Inside the Pro Mini 400 is a fast 13th-generation Intel Core i5-13500T processor, as well as 16 GB of RAM, which was more than enough memory for us to have a wealth of tabs open, to stream video, and to run applications with abandon.

It’s extremely configurable if you need a specific port. We’ve linked to a configuration of the Pro Mini 400 that we think provides the best value and options. But you can configure the PC on HP’s site and select the Flexible Port option to add another USB-C port that can power the PC if you supply it with 100 W of juice; this means that you could mount the Pro Mini 400 on the back of a monitor that outputs 100 W over USB-C, and use that single USB-C cable to both power the PC and send video to the monitor.

Keep in mind too that if you are configuring your own PC, you should be sure to include a wireless card for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, because that option isn’t selected by default.

It has all the ports you could need. One advantage of the Pro Mini 400 over the Mac mini is its front-facing ports. The computer has two USB-A ports, one USB-C port, and a headphone jack on the front, making it easy for you to plug in flash drives and other peripherals you might not want plugged in all the time. The back of the computer has more ports, including three USB-A ports, two DisplayPort 1.4 connections, one HDMI 2.1 port, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. Also available is a single HP FlexPort, which you can change into an extra DisplayPort, HDMI, or USB-C port if you customize your PC.

It’s extremely easy to open and upgrade yourself. You’ll find just one screw on the back of the computer, which you can open with a flathead screwdriver. You can then push the entire top of the computer case forward and lift it off, revealing the internals of the PC. Removing three screws that secure the heat sink allows you to upgrade the processor, an excellent feature that helps to ensure the repairability and long-term lifespan of your computer. (It’s also something you can’t do with any Apple computer.) The SSD inside is also readily accessible if you want to upgrade that yourself, and it requires the removal of only one more screw. The RAM is equally accessible, hidden under the PC’s fan; you lift the fan up from over the RAM using a clever hinge built into the computer’s heatsink, which cools both the processor and the RAM. This kind of design also lets you clean dust from the heatsink and fans, making maintenance a breeze.

The HP site is confusing if you’re configuring your own PC. The Pro Mini 400 is almost too configurable, in a way that makes it confusing to buy. For instance, if you want to change HP’s Flexible Port to the USB-C option that allows you to power the whole device from a compatible monitor, you have to go through HP’s customization menu. This menu is not intuitive, and you can’t configure the machine to be the same price as one of HP’s preconfigured options. This is more of an issue with HP’s website and price structure than anything else, but it’s still an annoying aspect of the purchasing process.

The Mac mini offers excellent performance, and the system’s fan is whisper-quiet even when you’re editing photos or videos or compiling code.

If you prefer macOS to Windows, the Apple Mac mini with Apple’s M2 processor is the mini PC you should get. Apple’s M2 processor is about as fast as the speediest Intel processors available for our Windows pick, and thanks to its power efficiency, the Mac mini remains whisper-quiet even when the computer is working hard.

It has a fast processor that’s great for everyday tasks. The 2023 Mac mini’s M2 processor makes it about as fast as an M2 MacBook Air, so it’s great for web browsing, document and spreadsheet work, and casual photo editing yet still usable in a pinch for professional tasks like app development and video editing. If you mainly plan to use it as a day-to-day computer, the basic $600 version with 8 GB of memory works just fine. If you want to run professional apps, getting 16 GB of memory is worth paying an extra $200, since you can’t upgrade the Mac mini yourself after buying it. Apple’s storage upgrades are similarly expensive, so we recommend buying an external hard drive or a portable SSD rather than paying Apple’s prices.

It has more ports than a MacBook. You get one Gigabit Ethernet port, a pair of USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4, an HDMI 2.0 port, two Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and a headphone jack. You can use the Thunderbolt and HDMI ports in any combination to connect up to two external monitors. But despite its relatively larger size, the Mac mini actually comes with fewer ports than most of the Windows mini PCs we tested (and fewer than the old Intel-based Mac mini had).

Apple’s storage upgrades are expensive, so we recommend buying an external hard drive or a portable SSD rather than paying Apple’s prices.

It’s one of the larger mini PCs we’ve tested. The Mac mini also lacks VESA-mounting options, so it needs room on a desk (unless you want to try a third-party mount). But unlike the Windows PCs we’ve tested, the Mac mini doesn’t have an external power brick, so you don’t need to find room for one behind or under your desk.

It runs silently. The Apple M2 version of the Mac mini is barely audible even when you’re playing a game or encoding video files. Apple’s chips, originally designed to fit into small, fanless iPhones and iPads, are more efficient than Intel’s, so they generate less heat and use less power. In laptops like the MacBook Air, that manifests as a few extra hours of battery life. In a desktop computer like the Mac mini, it means that the system doesn’t need a loud fan, and your power bills will be a little lower.

It comes with Apple’s standard one-year warranty. Extending that coverage to three years with AppleCare+ costs $99; doing so also adds accidental-damage protection and three years of “priority access to tech support.”

The Mac mini cannot be repaired or upgraded at home. In this regard it stands in stark contrast to our Windows pick, which is one of the most repairable PCs that we recommend. Apple’s choice to make its devices non-upgradable means that if you run out of storage on your Mac mini, you won’t be able to swap out its storage drive to gain more space. Your only options are to buy an external hard drive (though some synced iCloud services like iMessage cannot be stored on external devices), to buy Apple’s cloud storage for a monthly cost, or to buy a new Mac mini.

Apple offers paltry storage sizes for entry-level devices. Part of what makes Apple products compelling is the suite of great applications that sync across all its devices, such as iMessage and Photos. Unfortunately, the size of Apple’s default storage drives hasn’t grown as quickly as the number of people who take photos and send them to their friends. And larger drives are extremely costly, adding hundreds of dollars over the typical market price to the cost of the Mac mini. Long-term Apple fans who have years’ worth of saved photos, videos, and messages and who don’t want to pay for iCloud must now pay a premium to store all that data on their own drives.

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For anybody who does processor-intensive work, the Apple Mac mini with an M2 Pro processor is a tiny powerhouse that can fit under a monitor. Its processor is wickedly fast for converting file types, rendering video, or working in 3D. Because the unified 16 GB of RAM works with either the central processing unit or the graphics processor, you can also more quickly handle enormous video files. The Mac mini with the M2 Pro also has two more USB-C ports than the standard model, so you can have peripherals aplenty.

Its M2 Pro chip is a worthy upgrade over the basic M2 processor. The Mac mini’s M2 Pro chip proved to be just as fast as the M2 Pro processor in the MacBook Pro that we previously recommended in our guide to the best editing laptops. The M2 Pro Mac mini exported our two-minute 4K test video in Adobe Premiere in just 2 minutes 8 seconds, and it resized and exported 330 high-resolution images in 5 minutes. These tests aren’t indicative of the performance you’re likely to get from every video- and photo-editing process, but they do offer a good benchmark for how quickly you can expect the desktop to process similar media.

It has more memory than the basic Mac mini. The M2 Pro Mac mini’s 16 GB of RAM is “unified,” which means that it’s accessible to both the CPU and GPU cores on the M2 Pro chip. Traditionally, on Windows PCs, only the CPU accesses the RAM; this is why media editors and gamers typically buy dedicated graphics cards, or GPUs, which have their own processor for video as well as additional RAM. In the M2 Pro Mac mini, all of the RAM resides in one pool that the system can access for handling spreadsheets, managing Chrome tabs, and exporting video at the same time.

This processor and RAM configuration does have the downside of being completely soldered to one mainboard, which means that the system is essentially unrepairable.

It has more ports than the basic Mac mini. The M2 Pro version of the Mac mini has two more USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports than the standard version, for a total of four, and the computer can support three monitors instead of two. It also has two USB-A ports, an SD Card reader, an HDMI port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a headphone jack. Thanks to this collection of ports, you should be able to connect just about any accessory, peripheral, storage drive, or monitor with little issue.

This “pro” version is the same size as the regular Mac mini. Measuring 7.7 inches wide, 7.7 inches long, and 1.4 inches tall, the Mac mini system is extremely quiet even under heavy load, and the noise is almost unnoticeable even when the computer is on a desk.

Gaming mini PCs promise full gaming capabilities in a package smaller than most game consoles, but they don’t make sense for most people. Gaming mini PCs are considerably pricier than the models in this guide, and buying one is usually much more expensive than building a larger PC yourself. They run hot, which can lead to a shorter lifetime for the components. The components are slower than what you get in a midrange gaming PC, and you’re usually limited in the kinds of CPU and GPU upgrades you can perform when you need more speed. In most instances, you should still stick to a gaming PC in a Mini-ITX case if you’re looking for something small, because such a PC will have better cooling, cost less to build, and be easier to upgrade later on. If you’re more concerned about portability, a gaming laptop is a better option.

You can also find a slew of mini PCs sold with more limited Intel Celeron and Pentium processors, which might be fine for emulating games from older consoles but don’t meet the processing-power threshold that we set for daily use. If you’re looking for a mini PC to emulate retro games, the reviews posted by the YouTube channel ETA Prime are thorough and widely sample the category.

A handful of other powerful barebones gaming mini PCs exist, but most of them come from smaller companies like ASRock and Zotac and have shorter warranties and worse support. They’re also harder to find and to buy, and their makers haven’t always updated them to use the newest processors and GPUs.

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If you’re looking for a mini PC we haven’t mentioned for daily use or to replace a desktop tower, consider the recommendations we outline in the How we picked section as you shop for one. The configuration should include a 13th-generation Intel processor, at least 8 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of SSD storage.

Mini PCs have other uses, however, like acting as small servers to host websites or the Plex media-management app. For these specialized situations, you could relax our stated requirements for the latest processors and go down to 4 GB of RAM, and wind up saving quite a bit of money on an older mini PC. We don’t recommend going older than the 10th generation of Intel processors, however, since at that point your system would really start to run slow on modern applications. We also don’t recommend Celeron or Pentium processors, which are unlikely to be powerful enough to handle anything but the simplest computing tasks.

Apple just announced a redesigned version of the Mac mini that’s smaller and has two USB-C ports on its front. The new Mac mini offers two processor options: the M4 chip for basic work, school, or creative tasks, and the M4 Pro for more intensive workloads, such as 4K video editing or app development. Both models start with 16 GB of memory, a welcome upgrade from the previous base of 8 GB.

The M4 Mac mini has two USB-C 3 ports and a headphone jack on its front, and on its back there are three Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, an HDMI port, a gigabit ethernet port, and a power jack. The M4 Pro version has Thunderbolt 5 ports instead of Thunderbolt 4 on the back of the device. Both versions support sending video to up to three displays, with some limitations once you get to 5K and 6K resolutions, but we don’t think that will be an issue for most people. Apple also says the 3.5mm headphone jack supports high-impedance headphones, which is welcome for professional users who want to use headphones that would typically require an amplifier. We plan to test this feature.

Initially, the M4 Mac mini looks very competitive, especially when compared to the M4 iMac announced yesterday. The base level M4 Mac mini costs $600 and comes with the 10-core M4 processor, while the base level iMac has an 8-core M4 processor and starts at $1,300. More cores typically means better performance when you have lots of windows and tabs open. The iMac has a 4.5K display while the Mac mini does not, but you can easily find a great 4K monitor for less than $700 (the price difference between the iMac and Mac mini).

The M4 Pro Mac mini starts at $1,300, but offers 24 GB of RAM, an upgrade from the 16 GB in the base M4 model. The Mac mini doesn’t have great storage options, so we recommend an external storage drive rather than paying for Apple’s expensive internal storage.

The M4 and M4 Pro Mac mini go on sale November 8. We plan to test them and update this guide with our recommendations soon.

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The HP Z2 Mini G9 had some drawbacks that prevented us from making it a pick. In our tests, our upgrade pick, the Apple Mac mini with an M2 Pro processor, proved to be more than 30% faster at certain tasks, especially multi-core tasks such as media editing. The Mac mini was also whisper-quiet, even under heavy load, whereas the Intel processor in the Z2 Mini required a fan, which audibly kicked on while it was handling that same workload.

We tested the Dell OptiPlex 3000 Micro and found it very similar to the HP Pro Mini 400 G9. The two computers are available with similar processors, RAM, and storage configurations, but the HP model is less expensive and more flexible in terms of configuration. Most important, the Pro Mini 400 also has a USB-C port. If the HP model is out of stock or wildly more expensive than $800, or if you don’t care about USB-C, this Dell model is a comparable purchase.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q Tiny, M80q Tiny, and M90q Tiny are virtually indistinguishable, as they provide most of the same ports and processor options. Compared with the HP Pro Mini 400 G9, however, they cost more for less RAM, storage, and processing power, and Lenovo systems have had fluctuating pricing and availability this year, likely due to supply-chain issues.

As a general rule for any mini PC, you can skip models that use older 9th- or 10th-generation Intel processors, as those processors are aging and will receive support for a shorter amount of time.

We used to recommend Chromeboxes as a low-cost alternative to mini PCs for people who need only to surf the web and check email, and who mainly rely on Google services. However, new Chromeboxes with modern processors aren’t released as often as Chromebooks, and generally Chromebooks offer a better value for those people who don’t need a full PC.

For more details, read our guide to the best Chromebooks.

Apple’s new Mac Studio with M2 Max and M2 Ultra processors is geared toward media professionals rather than the average person. While the Mac Studio was previously an upgrade pick here, we now think the M2 Pro Mac mini offers most of the performance for nearly half the price.

If you want to learn more about the Mac Studio and how it compares to the Mac mini, check out our full guide to Mac desktops.

The latest version of this article was edited by Arthur Gies and Caitlin McGarry.

Chris Hoffman, How to Install Windows 10 on Your PC, How-To Geek, November 1, 2017

Dave Gershgorn

I am based in Seattle and responsible for Wirecutter’s computer monitor coverage, as well as all our guides to Apple laptops and desktops. I also review higher-powered laptops, such as business laptops and laptops for photo and video editing. Plus, I write our reviews for all-in-one computers, ergonomic keyboards, and home 3D printers. If it has a screen, sits on a desk, and isn’t a basic Windows ultrabook, I’m usually the person to try it out.

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