Mini PCs are Perfect Solutions for Businesses

Mini PCs are the smaller and more portable versions of the large tower PCs we are used to seeing. Their compact form factor allows them to fit into more constrained areas, like a small desktop, a portion of a meeting room, or a collaborative office workspace. This article will discuss a few use cases of mini PCs in a business environment and the benefits of getting a mini PC for offices.

Office Workflows

Executing business workflows efficiently is essential for any organization, so enterprise owners must invest in the right technology. While Microsoft Office suite apps are used in all business operations, large companies often rely on applications like SAP, NetSuite, and SYSPRO for business data processing and analysis. Small and medium-sized operations use cheaper services like Xero and Wix for resource planning and statistics management.

Office and data processing software generally do not require top-of-the-line hardware, so bulky tower PCs with desktop-grade CPUs are unnecessary for most employees. Power-efficient mini PCs can simultaneously offer the performance you need and save space and energy.

For those who have to work from home now and then, carrying a mini PC is even easier than carrying a regular laptop, as long as you have a display, a mouse, and a keyboard in your office and apartment.

Content Creation

Productivity software is also widely used in many businesses. Whether you are developing the built-ins for the company website in Dreamweaver, editing a poster picture in Photoshop, or producing a promotional TikTok video in Premier, chances are that there is a personal computer behind every single click, render, and save that is performed.

Professional artwork designers and content creators will surely be better off with regular desktop PCs with high-performance CPUs and premium discrete graphics cards. But a mini PC with relatively high configurations should be sufficient for those who only deal with lightweight photo and video editing.

For photo editing and web design, you can choose a mini PC with either an Intel Core or an AMD Ryzen SoC, but if your content is mainly about video production, you might want to get an Intel Core-powered model. Because Intel iGPUs support way more video codecs than their AMD counterparts, an Intel-based mini PC will be much more efficient than an AMD-based mini PC in video editing and streaming.

Video Conferencing and Collaboration

Video conferencing is probably the best approach for companies with offices in multiple cities or business owners who need to travel often, as it can efficiently improve communication, simplify collaboration, and simultaneously save money. According to a recent study done by VC Daily, online video conferencing has been growing by more than 18% each year since 2015.

Mini PCs are ideal for video conferencing because they are fully compatible with many operating systems and a wide range of collaboration software such as Asana, Google Workspace, and Microsoft Teams. Suppose the mini PC used for video conferencing supports the Intel vPro platform. In that case, the IT administrator of your company will even be able to emulate a virtual display to manage and troubleshoot it remotely without interrupting the content being played on the device.

It’s also important to have multiple screens in a meeting room to show remote attendees’ faces while displaying shared content. A mini PC often features two or more video output interfaces, making it a perfect device to power an entire conference room. Because of its small form factor, you can easily conceal it behind the back of a monitor or on the top of a projector installed on the ceiling. Some mini PCs even come with CIR, allowing you to control them conveniently with a remote.

Besides the visuals, you may even use sound to enhance the conferencing experience further. Most mini PCs can output 5.1.2 or 7.1.2-channel sound via a HIDMI port. Connecting them to a surround speaker system will give attendees in the meeting room a more immersive experience.

For people who choose to work from home or those restricted from going out during the Covid-19 pandemic, a mini PC can still deliver the full-on video conferencing experience, thanks to its amazing portability and superb connectivity. However, we recommend you get the camera, microphone, and monitor in place before joining a meeting.

Business Server and Data Center

A business server can be a game-changing investment for a small company. By centralizing a wide range of IT functions, a server can help improve the productivity of business workflows, increasing the reliability of the company intranet and protecting important data from cyber threats. For a device that is supposed to be running 24/7, you would want it to be stable, quiet, and power-efficient.

As the technology that drives laptops and small form factor computers continue to mature, more and more small companies are now using mini PCs as their servers. For instance, the GEEKOM Mini IT11, which offers impeccable performance, superb networking capabilities, easy access to storage expansion, and excellent power efficiency, can be a competent business server and data center for most small organizations.

Conclusion

Mini PCs are the smartest and most cost-effective computing options for businesses and home offices. Compared to a regular desktop PC, a mini PC offers all the functionalities in a much smaller footprint, which is ideal for offices where space is at a premium. A mini PC is more affordable, expandable, and offers better connectivity than an average laptop. So, if you are a business owner, maybe it’s time to start thinking about getting mini PCs for your offices.