Upen

Streaming on this topic gets confusing fast, so we start by splitting two things people mix up. Watching a 4K film is media playback and almost any modern box handles it. Live streaming is running OBS Studio, compositing scenes, and pushing video to Twitch or YouTube while that happens, which is a very different workload. […]

I have spent the last two months running the best mini PCs for game streaming through the same OBS workflow I use on my main rig: a game on one screen, a 1080p60 preview on a second, a hardware encoder doing the work, and a capture card in the loop more than once. Eleven boxes

Picking the best mini PCs for Twitch streaming is not about finding the fastest small box, which is the mistake I made first. I built a test bench of eight mini PCs, ran OBS on each, and watched what actually decided whether a stream held frame rate: which hardware encoder the chip carries, how much

Most mini PC roundups on the internet benchmark games. We built this one around compilers instead. Over six weeks we put eight machines through the workload that actually matters when you write mobile apps: an IDE with a full project index open, a device emulator running beside it, and a Gradle or Swift build firing

Full stack development is a memory and storage workload long before it is a CPU workload. A dev box lives or dies on how fast npm install completes, how smoothly Hot Module Replacement refreshes in Vite, and how many Docker containers plus browser tabs you can keep resident without the machine falling back to swap.

The best mini PC for cybersecurity is whichever one gives you 32GB of upgradeable memory, CPU virtualization support, and at least two NVMe slots. Our pick of the best mini PCs for cybersecurity is the Beelink SER8, which pairs an 8-core Ryzen 7 chip with a 256GB memory ceiling and dual NVMe slots, while the

Choosing the best mini PC for ethical hacking comes down to one number above all others: memory. Everything else — the size, the chassis, the badge on the front — matters far less than whether you can fit a Kali attacker VM, two deliberately vulnerable targets and a Windows endpoint without the host swapping to

Three specs decide whether a mini PC can run virtual machines: hardware virtualization support, a memory ceiling you can grow into, and a NIC chipset that behaves under a Linux hypervisor. Get those right and a box the size of a paperback runs a Proxmox node for years. Get them wrong and you replace the

The best mini PC for self hosting right now is the Beelink EQ14 — an Intel N150 box with two Gigabit LAN ports, two M.2 slots and 25W power draw that runs a dozen Docker containers, Pi-hole, Vaultwarden and Jellyfin without breaking a sweat. If you plan on Proxmox, Frigate or a private AI model,

Most people shopping for the best mini PCs for cloud gaming are solving the wrong problem. They assume they need graphics horsepower, a discrete GPU, a big cooling solution, and a tower that hums under the TV cabinet. None of that is what the job requires. When you launch a GeForce NOW or Xbox Cloud