The price may seem steep, but there are TCO advantages of switching from a gas-guzzling desktop PC. With over-powered innards and multiple fans, it isn’t unusual for a PC to consume 80W at idle; the PrimeMini sips 13W in general use and even at its peak draws only 30W. Over the course of five years, that’s a saving of roughly £150 based on typical usage and electricity rates. If you need a computer to stay on all the time – and this is a PC designed with 24/7 usage in mind – then that saving triples to £450. It’s fair to say that this is a relatively specialized piece of equipment.
The high price may put you off using it for office-based deployments, but look at it over a multi-year period and the lowered energy costs start to become a little more attractive. Where this machine is really likely to find a home, however, is as a micro-server, quietly sitting in a cupboard and running a handful of constant applications with minimal fuss while cutting down electricity and CO2 consumption. If you divide the cost by a likely life of five years, that may not be too high a price to pay."
Source: ITPro
