Mini PC for local LLMs: top picks under $800

Mini PC running local LLM models

Mini PCs tempt as home AI servers: silent, tiny, sipping power. The direct assessment is that they are strong hosts and modest workers.

A modern mini PC with 32 to 64GB of RAM makes an excellent Ollama server for small models. Quiet box in the corner, API on your network, done. What it cannot do is serious graphics processing unit (GPU) inference. Most models have no discrete GPU slot, and integrated graphics top out at small quantized models.

Networking is the mini PC's quiet strength. A wired Ethernet port and a static address turn it into a proper home server that your laptop and phone can reach. Wi-Fi works, but a cable is worth the ten minutes.

The neural processing unit (NPU) marketing deserves skepticism. Current NPUs target operating-system assistant features, not llama.cpp workloads, and software support is thin. Buy a mini PC for what it is: a low-power server for 7B-class models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) experiments. For bigger models you want a real GPU, which means a real case. Compare with full-size build options.

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