I have a laptop nearing the end of its life with (what I thought was) a good cpu/ram and an integrated graphics card. It was fine at running a DAW but it couldn’t run 10 year old games at a non fucky framerate. I would include its details but I didn’t memorize them and don’t have access to it right now.

I’m looking at replacing it with a minipc because laptops are getting more user hostile but I like the idea of having something I can move around occasionally. So I look on the reddit spreadsheet, and I’m struggling because there often seems to be a gap between the listed specs on the spreadsheet and the actual thing itself (ie “this thing has this gpu” vs “this thing has a slot for you to install a gpu”).

I absolutely need something that will run Reaper or an equivalent well with a billion tracks and add ons at the same time. I would very much like to run ten year old games reliably at a good framerate. And if possible I’d like to badly run a local ai which I understand basically requires a decent standalone gpu, but it isn’t that important because they’re a dumb toy that has no actual use. Is there a minipc that I can buy prebuilt that does that, and if not how close can I get? I don’t know enough about hardware to answer my own question with the spreadsheet sorry.

  • @[email protected]English
    3•10 hours ago

    SteamDeck + Dock might work for most of that? Pre-built, can play games (obviously), it’s portable, 16GB RAM + 4 core/8 thread CPU. Use the Dock (or at least a USB-C dock) to hook up a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Can probably run Reaper in desktop mode – though I’ve never tried that personally. Doubt you’d get much in the way of AI on it (AMD, so no CUDA), but I haven’t really kept up with what crazy things people have hacked together in that space lately.

    • @aaa999OPEnglish
      2•7 hours ago

      This is an interesting suggestion but I’m moderately worried about having linux as my only os. Low cost though

      • @[email protected]English
        1•6 hours ago

        I’ve heard of people installing Windows on it instead, but I haven’t seen one set up like that personally so not sure what the experience is like. There are also copycats/competitors from other vendors that ship Windows pre-installed if you like the idea of the handheld form factor, but for me the fact that the Deck officially supported Linux was a selling point so I haven’t investigated them much.