Could you help me find a powerful yet affordable mini PC as an alternative to a traditional gaming PC? I'm not a fan of laptops, but I'm open to mini PCs. I was recently interested in the Beelink SER6, but the prices on Amazon.ae have become quite high. I would greatly appreciate it if you could suggest a suitable option for my needs!
So...please take this with a huge grain of salt. If you are buying a mini-pc it's not ever going to be upgradeable, with the exception of RAM and storage space. The best I've used these for is light gaming, web browsing, and as a media link to home servers that do most of the lifting when it comes to compute.
I have had some luck with something like these:
1195G7 based - Decent setup, with something left in the budget for RAM, an SSD, or the monitor.
12700H based - Very top of your budget. Not a lot of room for extras.
6900HX based - near your budget range
If it were my money, and I had to get something, then I'd probably do the 6900HX based system. It's got pretty much everything you'll ever need. That said, it's still 680m graphics, which doesn't beat a 1660 ti, but the power draw of the entire system is almost a third of the GPU's draw alone. If you play less GPU intensive games, and at reasonably low settings, you could probably get 45-60 FPS in older titles. Newer one would be closer to 20-40 FPS.
I do have to ask a second time, why does it have to be a PC? If you want portability, there's the Switch. If you want library, there's the PS5. If you want dirt cheap and a library, there's the PS4. If you want an extremely specific set of games there's the Xbox. All of these things, barring the newest PS5, would probably be cheaper than a mini-pc. That'd free up a lot of money to buy games, or save so that in the future you could purchase a much more capable PC...or maybe learn to build your own. Right now the premium on GPUs is just silly.
