Published May 1, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.  Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals. When shopping for a mini PC, there's a lot to look for. CPU is a large part of the equation, and it's one of the things I look at first, but it's not the most important one. A powerful CPU is great , but the latest and greatest from both Intel and AMD don't always have the most PCIe lanes, even if they have the best performance.…