Hey @Shockwave, you seem to know a lot about these mini-PC’s. What’s a good updated model in 2021 (almost '22!) to look for? Preferably something with on-board Nvidia/Amd graphics, but small form factor.
More than happy to hear from anyone, obviously…
My 2c…
Not the best time to buy anything new right now IMHO, if you want something cheap buy a RPi4 as it’s still good for cores up to ~Dreamcast level, and has top tier support and the ability to run close to mainline kernel etc.
I wouldn’t recommend anything Nvidia at the moment (at least for the Linux driver aspect), though the AMD Mesa drivers are in good shape, as are most Intel NUC’s (something like a Tiger Lake i7-1165G7 would be overkill for most emulation).
Lakka does better with older (think 8th/9th gen Intel, 2nd-gen Ryzen CPUs and older) PC hardware. For GPUs, think Pascal/Maxwell Nvidia stuff (GTX 10 series and older) and Polaris AMD (RX 500 series including the RX 590) cards and older, because of the way Lakka is compiled/coded/programmed.
So it would definitely be in your best interest to aim for something along those lines if you want something a bit more modern, but not too modern. Although I have got it to run with Turing-based Nvidia cards, the results have been spotty at times (the GTX 1650 had some weird artifacting at times, and sometimes it goes away). Right now, I’m about to put Lakka on an i5-8400/GTX 1050 Ti combo of spare parts I have lying around here and use that for Lakka. Just to give you an idea.
If you want an example of something I think would run Lakka great, here’s an example of something I think would do well (I haven’t tested it myself, but it’s a pretty good bet it will run): https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001556127384.html?aff_fcid=9ba28afa845b496d9693755c98288088-1623654789685-01786-_AeeIfn&aff_fsk=_AeeIfn&aff_platform=shareComponent-detail&sk=_AeeIfn&aff_trace_key=9ba28afa845b496d9693755c98288088-1623654789685-01786-_AeeIfn&terminal_id=73be68a6ba24458292afd29bda95e886&tmLog=new_Detail
That’s funny… I ended up getting an Rpi and an Intel NUC (of the 1165G7 variety). The NUC is cool, but apropos of what you were talking about… the RPI is just incredible value for something like this. My wife has been loving DK Country 1,2&3 on the RPI/Lakka with an old DS4 controller. Can’t beat the fun->$$$$ ratio on that! Except maybe a handheld…
This is super helpful info. Before reading it I sprang for an old 980ti on eBay (painful though it was). I don’t know if this is happening at scale, but in my situation the insane price of graphics cards (and my unwillingness to pay said prices) have gotten me looking elsewhere to get some gamin kicks. I got a NUC and have decided to go ahead and go the eGPU route. I probably would have been well served to just build an ITX box or something. It’s good to have this info here for other people. Thanks for posting it.
I love SBC projects but really, if the goal is emulation, the most cost-effective solution is to grab an old PC. In my arcade cabinet I have an old Dell (i3 3220) which I paired with a low profile Nvidia GTX 1050 (which I got used too). The computer came out of a congressional candidate’s campaign office, pretty sure it was dirt cheap.
I was aiming for the lowest specs I needed to run arcade roms at full speed with the best shaders at 4K. The only miscalculation is that I hadn’t discovered the HSM reflective shaders yet. If I’d known, I would have beefed up the GPU so I could run them – as it stands I can’t really use them without significant slowdown.
But aside from that, this modest hardware does exactly what I wanted it to do.
I haven’t tried N64 on mine but I’d be shocked if it had trouble with those games.
I also have both a RG350 (running OpenDingux Beta and RetroArch) and a RG351V (running Lakka 3.6) and I find both of them great, but the screen on the RG351V is really, really nice and makes <16bit systems pop. 
On Generic platform you will have better result with AMD or Intel GPU as we rely on open source driver.
There are better support for AMD and Intel than Nvidia with the open source driver.