Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because I’ve started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope it’s simple). For the past couple years I’ve been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. I’ve also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in RAID0 RAID1, which is about half full atm. I’m not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so I’ve pivoted to an attempt at combining the 3 Pis above into one NUC/SFF/etc device with a roughly similar power draw. Also looking at re-jumping back into 3D printing using OctoPrint.
I’ve looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerling’s article/video on Pi vs. NUC. I’ve continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only because… it’s all I know. I’d like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as I’m a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as I’ve primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. I’d like to try staying with AMD as I’ve slowly moved over from the “dark side” (don’t hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.
Last nugget is that I’ve never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. I’ve new-ish to VMs too, so anything “Baby’s First VM” would be nice.
I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if there’s no magical unicorn, I’m cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and I’m really keen on seeing what options I have.
I’ve found that you don’t need to go that far above the $200 cost of an Intel N100/150 system to get a mini PC with a significantly more powerful AMD processor. It won’t be the latest generation but it will be capable of a lot more than those low-power Intels, and from my measurements many AMD processors of the last three generations or so are good at saving power when they’re idle, so it won’t use a ton more electricity. Sometimes you find used ones on eBay at a decent price because someone upgraded.
But is it necessary? I’d rather focus more on the tdp.
I know I could just boost the tdp of the n150 if I did want more power, but I see people here running stuff on 10 year old laptops and older Intel n series stuff seemingly without a problem.
Wouldn’t that laptop use so much more power that it costs you more in electricity though? At least that is usually the problem I hear with it, not sure what a good low spec option is currently once electricity prices are included. IIRC N150 is pretty good, not sure if there are other good/better options though.
Would the 5000 series of AMD’s Ryzen 5/7 be a good bet to baseline with? Couple gens old now, so I’m thinking kinda cheap. Something like this from Beelink perhaps?
The Ryzen 5000 series should be a good choice for such an application, they’re still quite powerful CPUs. You should just make sure that you get the notebook/APU variant of the CPUs (e.g. 5600G or 5600U) and not the desktop variant (e.g. 5600 or 5600X). The desktop variant has significantly higher idle power consumption (see e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/1l707yc/nas_idle_power_usage/, they report 50+W in idle, while my 8500G system idles at 17W). The one you linked should be fine.
Yes, I think that’s reasonable. The midrange CPU in the Beelink you linked is already significantly more capable than the Intel N150 etc., though it has a TDP of 15W compared to the N150’s 6W. I haven’t dug into which specialized features they support (hardware codec support etc.) but for a general-purpose computer I’d definitely prefer the one you linked to those N100/N150 minis, even if it uses a little more power. Others might have a different opinion but that would be my choice.
I generally agree, but keep in mind that CPU TDP is not a good metric to predict the total power consumption of a home server. Most of the time, the CPU is in a very low power state and the power consumption is dominated by things like the mainboard, drives, PSU, … Wolfgang has a good video on the topic: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=239
That said, the conclusion that the 5600U system draws more power than a N150 one is probably still correct in most cases.
Yeah, in all reality, I’m not too hung up about AMD/Intel, I was goofing in an earlier reply, and that was geared more towards the Nvidia/AMD perpetual battle. And that doesn’t matter much here as I’m not doing anything GPU intensive outside some possible transcoding, but even that may be unnecessary with my needs.
Thx for the video as well!