Is there a cheaper Intel Xeon PC workstation? We don’t think so

While there are plenty of PCs with Intel Celeron and Core CPUs on sale with Chinese retailers, a workstation with a Xeon processor is, well, unheard of.

For that reason, we were surprised to discover industrial PC vendor Hystou is flogging a tiny mini PC workstation based on an Intel Xeon E-2176M CPU, with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage, for just under $722 (AU$1205, £591) with free delivery.

Note, there are coupons available at the time of writing that will drop the price even further and AliExpress, which houses Hystou’s store, operates a guaranteed delivery service (or full refund). 

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As Intel’s rival to AMD’s EPYC, the Xeon comes with enterprise-ready features such as support for multi-socket configurations and registered ECC memory.

The E-2176M is a fairly recent Coffee Lake-based mobile Xeon processor, with a maximum speed of 4.4GHz, six cores (12 threads), a base frequency of 2.7GHz, 12MB cache and a very capable Intel UHD Graphics P630 video subsystem.

The diminutive PC also features a mini Displayport, an HDMI 2.0, external antennas, a Gigabit Ethernet port, four USB 3.0 ports, a separate USB Type-C connector and an audio input.

Thanks to a VESA mount, you can tuck the mini PC away behind a monitor, and the internal components are cooled with what looks like a massive low speed heat sink fan.

Hystou provides an OEM version of Windows 10 Pro and DDR4 memory, but it's also possible to buy a barebones version with the same configuration, without memory or storage.

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