Most expensive laptops

rainer_d said:
That's what the X9 Aura (which is what I assume is pictured above) has, above reduced weight.
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It's an X1 carbon Gen 13, yeah similar to the aura. I think the little x1 nano might be nice too if you need something really small, that one is quite interesting, but the price is very strong. Of course if you get it from work then job done.

What I used to do was boot the box off a freebsd live usb, and take the drive out. Even back then there was so much ram (4GB) that you could get the whole thing running in ram with squashfs. Sadly the freebsd live image I used to use (frenzy) seems to have gone out of business, but I think there are other freebsd live images around. You need a live distro with a TORAM boot option, I think the toram idea originally came from knoppix. In a modern machine with 16GB ram you could get an entire system with kde plasma loaded and still have lots of memory left to run it in. Once you've loaded into ram with TORAM you can pull the usb stick out and everything runs nice and fast from memory. Just don't pull the battery out.

Frenzy is here http://frenzy.org.ua but I think they stopped making new versions years ago so it's way out of date now. Looks like their ftp server is down too. There is nanobsd but I haven't tried using that, I'm not sure that is the same type of thing as frenzy. A modern version of frenzy based on 14.3R would be a nice thing to have (are you out there, technix? :) )
 
Very useful for making a desktop, when your work (compilation etc) is done on a big build machine remotely. The N100 can drive up to 3-off 4K screens which is plenty of glass, I'm running a 27" LG 4K screen on mine now, really that's enough, I could add a second one but I think it would be too much. It's a very convenient and cheap way to make a desktop terminal. I was dubious about stability when I first got one but it seems pretty solid, especially after I re-did the heatsink compound with something better. Even the cheapo generic SSD they put in it hasn't crapped-out yet. The N100 is a nice little chip, low electric bills too. My kill-a-watt says it only uses about 10W, and on idle it's about 6W, which is pretty crazy, it's like a car sidelight bulb. I'm a convert anyway, I was sceptical for a long time, but once I got one, I realised they can be very useful. Of course you're not going to be playing games on it; well, maybe 'moo' or 'asteroids'. It's fine for web browsing, editing code, watching youtube, 'productivity', etc. It just about keeps up with playing a 4K video at 30Hz, without too many dropped frames; at least, it's watchable.
 
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blackbird9 said:
Very useful for making a desktop, when you work (compilation etc) is done on a big build machine remotely. The N100 can drive up to 3 4K screens which is plenty of glass. It's a very convenient and cheap way to make a desktop terminal. I was dubious about stability when I first got one but it seems pretty sold, especially after I re-did the heatsink compound with something better. The N100 is a nice little chip, low electric bills too. My kill-a-watt says it only uses about 10W, and on idle it's about 6W, which is pretty crazy, it's like a car indicator bulb. I'm a convert anyway, I was sceptical for a long time, but once I got one, I realised they can be very useful.
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Well, for starters I am always uncomfortable with external storage (USB and Thunniebolt). Cables and plugs are always trying to come apart.

Even if my local PC is only a terminal I would like to hold physically local backups on it.
 
Mine has got a 2TB nvme drive and a 512GB sata SSD internally.... of course I could upgrade that sata ssd to another 2TB at some point. I haven't got any important data on it anyway, it's a throw-away front-end, like a laptop, Yes I don't like using external storage like usb drives, I've got proper reliable machines to back up to over the network. I agree, I wouldn't trust this little box with important data, it's just a front-end. If it breaks, I can just grab another one off the shelf.
 
I would have actually preferred a MacBookPro for work, but it's not an option our team-lead was willing to go through with.

We will see how well the P14 holds up.

I need to show up in the office three times a week and when the weather is not too bad, I ride by bike. It's a 21km ride with about 350m of altitude gain. I carry all my clothes, my lunch, snacks and I very much do not want to carry a 2 kg+ laptop on to of that. Beyond the weight, it's also simply a question of my backpack simply not holding that much stuff.
 
rainer_d said:
I would have actually preferred a MacBookPro for work, but it's not an option our team-lead was willing to go through with.
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You can have mine. Company forbid Linux clients some time ago, and we had to choose between Mac and Windows.
In short, switching from a Unix desktop such as KDE, Gnome, XFCE (after > 25 years of use) to a a functionally inferior GUI such as Mac OS is an unpleasant and frustrating experience.
 
blackbird9 said:
N150
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After my 'experiences' with N95/N100/N150 systems ... I omit them in any way - they are FAR from 6W TDP like Intel 3150N were ...

After my adventures with various Mini NAS systems:
- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/08/04/perfect-nas-solution/
- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/05/28/failed-backup-server-build/

I really like how these two behaved under FreeBSD (all AMD Ryzen based):

- GenMachine model Ren5000 with AMD Ryzen 3 5300U
- Minisforum model UM350 with AMD Ryzen 5 3550H

But IMHO any even no-name or no-known-name AMD Ryzen based mini PC should do well.
 
Oh well, that's what my kill-a-watt was showing, anyway. It's probably not very accurate at such low power values, I mean, it's a cheap consumer grade meter for checking what your kettle and washing machine uses 😁 . Actually my mini-pc looks very similar to your genmachine ren500, just about the same size and ports. You said the genmachine used under 6W, with it's amd cpu. Mine showed about 10W in normal use and dropping to around 6W doing nothing, the fan hardly spinning, couldn't feel airflow. Still, I'm sure the error bars on that measurement are pretty wide. I haven't got a fluke power analyzer sitting around to measure it accurately. I think that measurement was taken before I added the 2TB nvme drive too, so it might be a bit higher now, I noticed that stick gets quite warm.

I replaced the heatsink compound on mine because it crashed hard a couple of times in the hot weather last year, when I took it apart I found they'd put a huge thick dollop of paste on in the factory, I wiped it all off and put some mx-4 on, that dropped the CPU temperatures around 10 degC iirc, big improvement. It now idles around 42 C and gets up to around 75-80C max under high load (all cores working at 100%).

Anyway, next time I get another mini pc I might have a look at the 5300U, they're about the same price as the N100 boxes, maybe slightly more. Aside from power consumption... the N100 box I've got works fine, I've been very pleased with it, though I'm only using it as a little desktop. Haven't had any problems. Don't think I'd trust it as a nas though, it's a very cheap build; at least, not to store anything important.
 
I thought about this a bit more, those power values I measured do seem extremely low. As a sanity check, I read the labels on the box, they state the power supply rating is 3A at 12V DC, which means a 36W PSU. Assuming they have left some headroom, that might suggest a real power draw of around 20-25 W for this mini-pc box, so that might be a truer estimate of the real power consumption; that sounds more realistic. Suppose we asssume it's 25W, that is still a pretty good number. That means I can run four of these mini-PC's for the same amount of electricity as a single 100W incandescent light bulb, so they are pretty economical in terms of power consumption.

Anyway its only an estimate, unless someone has measured what these things really use with a properly calibrated meter, its all I have to go on. I tend to agree with vermaden, the number on the kill-a-watt seems too low, I suspect that it's under-reading the true power value.
 
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