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.
Would the 5000 series of AMDās Ryzen 5/7 be a good bet to baseline with? Couple gens old now, so Iām thinking kinda cheap. Something like this from Beelink perhaps?
The Ryzen 5000 series should be a good choice for such an application, theyāre 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 thatās 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 N150ās 6W. I havenāt dug into which specialized features they support (hardware codec support etc.) but for a general-purpose computer Iād 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, ā¦ 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, Iām 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 doesnāt matter much here as Iām not doing anything GPU intensive outside some possible transcoding, but even that may be unnecessary with my needs.
Thx for the video as well!