I want to have a small & cheap PC that I can bring along with me easily. No, I don't need a laptop. I have monitors, kb and mouse at my desired locations. Just a simple PC for net surfing, 1080p YouTube and file transfer via USB sticks.

I plan to buy a Raspberry Pi5 (run PiOS with desktop environment). Reddit discussion says a Pi5 is overpriced because a mini PC with intel N100 beat it easily. I checked shopee and AliExpress. N100 PC price is a lot higher than a 4/8GB Pi5 with power brick and 32GB card. Some may argue the extra power of N100 but I don't need that at all. N95 price is more friendly but still a lot higher than a Pi5 setup.

what do you think?

regarding 1080p yt, redditor said:
"The Pi 5 is a very bad choice to watch 1080p (or higher) YT. You can try to use the h264ify plugin (h264 uses less CPU), as the Pi 5 has no hardware acceleration for VP9, nor AV1."


This post has been edited by Skylinestar: Oct 7 2025, 02:27 PM

ROG Xbox Ally X, yay.

thats not cheap

4.2K， ok lar.

Utube vids every so often upgrades their codec making it heavier for baseline machines to run with each updates. Unfortunately those at the borderline today like RasPi might be okay today but can struggle in few years. You will want N100 to have some perf buffer for the coming years.

Use laptop

There's monitors, kb and mouse at your desired locations but no PC? What the monitors, kb and mouse doing there?
Or you have a PC are there too but for privacy you don't want to use that PC? If so get an external SSD drive with USB 3.0 speed connection and use Rufus to create portable Windows on the external SSD. With this external drive, you can use any PC or laptop to boot into your portable Windows. All your settings and files will stay in the external drive without touching the internal drive on the PC/laptop.

N95 actually have better CPU performance than N100.

I have a Raspberry Pi, and let's just say that it's very underpowered even for rudimentary tasks

Samsung phone with DEX ?

only high end Samsung has Dex. I'm using budget A series.

lesser known android secret, a phone with USB3 may support DisplayPort alternate mode,
you dont need DEX to use your phone like PC, just connect your phone to usb dock that has HDMI output, you can control the phone with mouse and have audio/video output to LCD
downside is for android it's mirroring, my op7t 8t already can mirror screen content to large display, up to 4K 60FPS with compatible usb hub

Native Android desktop mode never made it out of beta stage yet, until now it's still hidden inside developer mode encumbered with broken sheets

already knew this for a long time. used it on my RM999 Honor V20 (with full desktop experience). unfortunately industry decided that nobody used cable anymore for data transfer and therefore almost all phones have stupidly slow USB2.

yes, many mid-end phone have USB 2.0, they probably want to shave off the cost but dang it's already 2025 lmao, we already have USB 4, Oculink...
i mean for casual user, they probably don't care as long as it support fast charge and have USB-C

If you don't want to deal with hassle buying a tiny PC with N100 or pi, for me, i will just bring my old phone that support USB3 and i solved all the problem you're facing lol.
if you have spare cash but none of your phone support USB 3 just buy tiny Pc with n100, straightforward can use

Setting up Raspi can be daunting if you never installed linux before.

get mini pc

voted best answer in this tered

Youtube now went all-in AV1, welp google does not want to pay MPEG-LA licensing cost for using h265 and even the upcoming h266
h264 will be last MPEG codec they use for the rest of the older devices.




you can play with raspi hardware but need to make sure the model you buy support AV1 hardware decoding, or force youtube plays in h264 via h264ify but it's an extension and only works with chrome based browser.

otherwise you may not be able to play smoothly at 1080p, only 720 or even 360p only.

If your iGP support AV1, you can even play youtube AV1 up to 8K video with little to no hiccup due to the decoding process offloaded to GPU.

This post has been edited by 1024kbps: Oct 12 2025, 01:00 AM

N100 / N150 / N200 all good... Pi5 not really useful these days even for a micro server...

I have 2 x Pi4, 2 x Pi5, and 1 x N100, and I prefer N100 anytime to Pi5.

This post has been edited by thankyou: Oct 12 2025, 12:59 AM

Beelink devices good ?

Im not sure you got the info right.

N97>N100>N95

Im just wondering. How much is the price for pi5 completed? I mean I got a N100 (no brand) 16gb+512gb and N97 (gmktec g5) 12gb+512gb for RM700 each.

N100 have better iGPU but CPU performance N95 is better, thanks to it's higher TDP
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel...-processor-n100

literally 10 second google
https://minixpc.com/blogs/news/beelink-ser4...teardown-review

for review info gathered by google, it's mixed,
if scared of getting lemon, get one from local shop, big shop i mean, not shady one looks like will close within a month, with 2 years warranty....