EDIT: Holy shit, was not expecting so much support for my inquiry. Thank you all for the bevy of ideas and solutions. I think Iām still gonna go for the Intel 12th Gen+ NUC style, although some of your setups seriously made me quite jelly. Maybe Iāll get there one of these days. I update this when I finally lock down my purchase :)
Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because Iāve started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope itās simple). For the past couple years Iāve been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. Iāve also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in RAID0 RAID1, which is about half full atm. Iām not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so Iāve 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.
Iāve looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerlingās article/video on Pi vs. NUC. Iāve continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only becauseā¦ itās all I know. Iād like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as Iām a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as Iāve primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. Iād like to try staying with AMD as Iāve slowly moved over from the ādark sideā (donāt hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.
Last nugget is that Iāve never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. Iāve new-ish to VMs too, so anything āBabyās First VMā would be nice.
I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if thereās no magical unicorn, Iām cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and Iām really keen on seeing what options I have.
While I get leaning towards AMD products, Iāve been doing so as well, when I built my first server with a Ryzen 5 2400GE I have found that there just isnāt as much resources/support for enabling transcoding with the vega 11 in Jellyfin or Immich. Most Intel iGPUās have a hardware chip specifically tuned for transcoding called quicksync that you should strongly consider.
Especially in the $100-200 price range tiny mini microās from HP/Lenovo/Dell are widely available and offer lots of capability in a power-efficient (~10-15w idle, 40-50w full load) and easily maintainable form factor. The Lenovoās in particular are interesting due to a few models having full pci-e slots if you decide later you want a GPU.
Lenovo pci-e
Finally for software I would suggest looking into Cosmos Cloud, I use it and have found it made it so much easier to setup and manage all my docker containers and domain name/reverse proxy settings.
Yeah, I think Iām willing to go Intel if thereās that much a performance gap. Iāll look into the Lenovo option, although Iām not sure Iām the best use case for it. Still, thank you for the suggestions! Any particular models, or is it really down to newer = better? Besides the basic moar RAM, moar CPU, but actually Iām quite ootl with the naming conventions with non-desktops procs.
For me Quicksync converts videos anywhere from 4x to 10x faster than using the GPU.
In terms of the tinyminimicroās I think i5-6500T 7500T or 8500T (T signifies 35w TDP) could all fit your price point depending on RAM/SSD specs. I havenāt done much research on the n100 processors but I think they are broadly comparable to the above i5ās