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I’m convinced that modular PCs are … at least a flavor of the future.
MiniPC with higher spec laptop or mobile cpu, soldered on to a mobo that has sodimm slots.
Oculink port, external gpu dock with psu.
CPU gets too old? Keep your ssd and sys ram, get a new mini pc, put the ssd and ram into it.
GPU gets too old? Get a new one, new PSU if you need it.
Yeah, you get a slight ding to extreme performance scenarios, but at least at the moment, this seems to be the more cost effective route to get something like a ‘ultra graphics at 1440p’ capable system.
Also, once you get the GPU dock, you probably don’t really need to get a new one… unless like an entirely new PCIe standard comes out, or something like that.
But, you can currently get a bare bones one thats around the cost of all the fans and cpu heatsinks and what not that you’d need for a traditional ‘battlestation’.
Also also, when not gaming or doing something graphically or LLM or whatever kind of demanding, you can just boot up the MiniPC alone and have a lower power bill.
If you want more long term storage, set up a NAS, or maybe just some usb external spinny spinny HDDs.
This kind of thing is already a fairly rapidly growing niche in China, if you hop on AliExpress and just look at how many different kinds of things are offered and roughly fit into this kind of setup scenario.
PCs are already modular and have been for decades. My CPU has a heat sink larger than a MiniPC.
That said I have been tempted by a MiniPC for a low power device, and with how good graphics can be on some CPUs you could do some fairly decent gaming on them too. But that is probably more than I would want to spend on one yet.
Currently game on an RTX2070, no plan on upgrading for more performance any time soon as it is plenty. I wonder how many generations we are from CPU graphics being comparable?
Not sure how they manage for the higher end CPUs that are going to put out quite a bit more heat.
I’m convinced that modular PCs are … at least a flavor of the future.
MiniPC with higher spec laptop or mobile cpu, soldered on to a mobo that has sodimm slots.
Oculink port, external gpu dock with psu.
CPU gets too old? Keep your ssd and sys ram, get a new mini pc, put the ssd and ram into it.
GPU gets too old? Get a new one, new PSU if you need it.
Yeah, you get a slight ding to extreme performance scenarios, but at least at the moment, this seems to be the more cost effective route to get something like a ‘ultra graphics at 1440p’ capable system.
Also, once you get the GPU dock, you probably don’t really need to get a new one… unless like an entirely new PCIe standard comes out, or something like that.
But, you can currently get a bare bones one thats around the cost of all the fans and cpu heatsinks and what not that you’d need for a traditional ‘battlestation’.
Also also, when not gaming or doing something graphically or LLM or whatever kind of demanding, you can just boot up the MiniPC alone and have a lower power bill.
If you want more long term storage, set up a NAS, or maybe just some usb external spinny spinny HDDs.
This kind of thing is already a fairly rapidly growing niche in China, if you hop on AliExpress and just look at how many different kinds of things are offered and roughly fit into this kind of setup scenario.
AOOSTAR, Minisforum, others, etc.
PCs are already modular and have been for decades. My CPU has a heat sink larger than a MiniPC.
That said I have been tempted by a MiniPC for a low power device, and with how good graphics can be on some CPUs you could do some fairly decent gaming on them too. But that is probably more than I would want to spend on one yet.
Currently game on an RTX2070, no plan on upgrading for more performance any time soon as it is plenty. I wonder how many generations we are from CPU graphics being comparable?
Not sure how they manage for the higher end CPUs that are going to put out quite a bit more heat.