I have a slightly older model but yeah agree 100%, DeskMinis are great and the Noctua is inaudible except under high load.
There are a couple of little issues: mine won’t boot without a display so I had to get an “HDMI dummy plug” and the drive bays are too shallow to fit >2TB HDDs, SSDs are fine though.
I am looking for a replacement of the raspberry pi 1st gen model b, which is consuming less than 2W, but serves me well (no, I don’t run any VM on it, just a bare kernel with some home automation software: https://log.pfad.fr/2022/go-ing-krazy-raspberry-pi-model-b/)
I’m always on the lookout for cheap, fanless, low-power compute and basically the landscape looks like this:
Raspberry Pi: Low-power, great Linux/software support. Not as cost-effective as they used to be, the newer models are all significantly more power-hungry, even at idle.
Random Chinese ARM boards: Low-power, about the same price as the Pis, marginal to poor Linux/software support.
Random Intel N100 mini-PCs: Low-ish power, great Linux/software support. All made in China so varying build quality.
Some people on the Internet will also recommend used mini PCs and thin clients from enterprise vendors like Dell and HP. I have a few of these, but they tend not to be fanless, nor especially low-power. They are quite cheap, though.
When I decided to upgrade my firewall, I went with #3. A little over $100 for a fanless mini PC with 4x genuine Intel NICs. It’s been a bit more than 6 months, but so far I’m fairly happy with it. It idles at around 4.2 W. Runs Proxmox like a champ. It has only randomly rebooted out of the blue one time.
I too gambled on one of those random N100 boards, after reading through https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cwwk-topton-nxxx-quad-nic-router.39685/ a few times. It’s paid off, been a great little router box that runs opnSense under Proxmox and some other services that are a little more critical for the household than others I run on my homelab workstation.
Did you ever run into any of the heating issues that others have mentioned from your N100? I stress tested mine and it kept under 70, 75C at peaks, but it consistently keeps at 45-50C, so I never bothered replacing the thermal paste, let alone some of the other things people have recommended in that thread.
This is a great usecase for tailscale serve. I’ve been trying to figure out how to nicely handle the proxmox frontend (I was gonna put some sort of reverse proxy in front of it for TLS and to move it to port 443), but using ts serve solves all these issues nicely.
Hm looks nice! I wonder how it compares with Intel NUCs?
I’m not exactly unhappy with the Intel NUCs, everything seems to work fine [1], and it’s a small, powerful machine. Though when it boots up I feel signs of all the “hidden OSes” beneath my OS which I don’t like …
I’m not very up-to-date on this area, so I wonder if AMD is better in this respect?
[1] except for some reason I am scared to full screen video in VLC. Because it has locked up my machine on both Debian and Ubuntu on Intel NUCs … so I just don’t do that, which is slightly annoying
I’m not up-to-date in this area either (so don’t trust what I say), but I believe there is the AMD Platform Security Processor, which is essentially AMD’s version of Intel ME.
I have some NUC based on Intel N100 with 32GB of RAM, I didn’t compare performance(it will be much slower I suppose) but one advantage that it has is that it is 100% passive(there are no fans at all). Its especially important when your server room is in your bedroom :). Another advantage for me is that it has 6x2.5GBe ports. It is also able to spawn virtual machines for fun/testing. Overall I’m quite happy with. Power consumption is quite nice, unfortunately I don’t remember exact values.
Intel stopped making NUCs in mid-2023. ASUS took over and is making them. This hardware described here is roughly comparable but the case is much larger.
Most people would see Intel Management Engine as a useful feature in a server, not a backdoor. Remote management comes in handy! You can disable it if you don’t like it. AMD has a similar feature called AMD Secure Technology. I doubt this particular system supports it but I’m not sure.
If you don’t trust Intel or AMD to implement these systems right, at least to the level you can disable them, then perhaps you’d prefer an open source CPU with a trusted manufacturing chain.
I have a ASUS PN53; which largely fits the same niche, I run Ubuntu but you could theoretically run an immutable Proxmox OS on a USB stick… I have mine configured with RAID1 8TiB NVMe SSD, 64GiB of DDR5 SODIMM; it runs my gitlab (git.drk.sc).
It’s a wonderful little machine, I couldn’t have asked for more, I sometimes get tempted to buy a whole bunch of them and cluster them.
I replaced my little home server with a $200 Intel N100 mini-PC and Proxmox. Been doing great, really like this class of hardware. 7W when idle, max power consumption is 19W. And while the I/O is very limited (single channel RAM, one SSD but USB for external disks) it’s just fine for a home workload.
I’m impressed that AMD’s systems have gotten this good too. At $1070 this box is a lot more expensive than mine but should perform much better. DDR5 RAM, 2x SATA 6GB and room 2.5” drives. Plus the two SSDs.
I’d quibble with their choice of RAID 1 for the SSDs. Proxmox is a bit persnickety about hardware RAID. It’s very good at ZFS though and I wonder if there’s a better way to use two fast disks with ZFS.
I’d quibble with their choice of RAID 1 for the SSDs. Proxmox is a bit persnickety about hardware RAID. It’s very good at ZFS though and I wonder if there’s a better way to use two fast disks with ZFS.
The page you link to is about hardware RAID, but I’m not using hardware RAID.
In the proxmox installer I selected ZFS RAID-1. I don’t think that’s an unusual setup?
I have a Ryzen 9 6900HX as my mini PC home server. Aside from XMPP & other hosting, the initial motivator was a remote builder/substitutor for Nix which really helped speed up rebuilds. I like that it doesn’t hog a lot of power, use up too much physical space, or get too terrible loud. It’s really been helpful.
I have a slightly older model but yeah agree 100%, DeskMinis are great and the Noctua is inaudible except under high load.
There are a couple of little issues: mine won’t boot without a display so I had to get an “HDMI dummy plug” and the drive bays are too shallow to fit >2TB HDDs, SSDs are fine though.
This is very very nice, to give this figure!
I am looking for a replacement of the raspberry pi 1st gen model b, which is consuming less than 2W, but serves me well (no, I don’t run any VM on it, just a bare kernel with some home automation software: https://log.pfad.fr/2022/go-ing-krazy-raspberry-pi-model-b/)
I’m always on the lookout for cheap, fanless, low-power compute and basically the landscape looks like this:
Some people on the Internet will also recommend used mini PCs and thin clients from enterprise vendors like Dell and HP. I have a few of these, but they tend not to be fanless, nor especially low-power. They are quite cheap, though.
When I decided to upgrade my firewall, I went with #3. A little over $100 for a fanless mini PC with 4x genuine Intel NICs. It’s been a bit more than 6 months, but so far I’m fairly happy with it. It idles at around 4.2 W. Runs Proxmox like a champ. It has only randomly rebooted out of the blue one time.
4.2 W is quite good (esp. when one does not need much computing power).
Thank you for the feedback and advice
I too gambled on one of those random N100 boards, after reading through https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cwwk-topton-nxxx-quad-nic-router.39685/ a few times. It’s paid off, been a great little router box that runs opnSense under Proxmox and some other services that are a little more critical for the household than others I run on my homelab workstation.
Did you ever run into any of the heating issues that others have mentioned from your N100? I stress tested mine and it kept under 70, 75C at peaks, but it consistently keeps at 45-50C, so I never bothered replacing the thermal paste, let alone some of the other things people have recommended in that thread.
This is a great usecase for tailscale serve. I’ve been trying to figure out how to nicely handle the proxmox frontend (I was gonna put some sort of reverse proxy in front of it for TLS and to move it to port 443), but using ts serve solves all these issues nicely.
Hm looks nice! I wonder how it compares with Intel NUCs?
I’m not exactly unhappy with the Intel NUCs, everything seems to work fine [1], and it’s a small, powerful machine. Though when it boots up I feel signs of all the “hidden OSes” beneath my OS which I don’t like …
i.e. Intel Management Engine backdoor
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000008927/software/chipset-software.html
I’m not very up-to-date on this area, so I wonder if AMD is better in this respect?
[1] except for some reason I am scared to full screen video in VLC. Because it has locked up my machine on both Debian and Ubuntu on Intel NUCs … so I just don’t do that, which is slightly annoying
I’m not up-to-date in this area either (so don’t trust what I say), but I believe there is the AMD Platform Security Processor, which is essentially AMD’s version of Intel ME.
I have some NUC based on Intel N100 with 32GB of RAM, I didn’t compare performance(it will be much slower I suppose) but one advantage that it has is that it is 100% passive(there are no fans at all). Its especially important when your server room is in your bedroom :). Another advantage for me is that it has 6x2.5GBe ports. It is also able to spawn virtual machines for fun/testing. Overall I’m quite happy with. Power consumption is quite nice, unfortunately I don’t remember exact values.
Intel stopped making NUCs in mid-2023. ASUS took over and is making them. This hardware described here is roughly comparable but the case is much larger.
Most people would see Intel Management Engine as a useful feature in a server, not a backdoor. Remote management comes in handy! You can disable it if you don’t like it. AMD has a similar feature called AMD Secure Technology. I doubt this particular system supports it but I’m not sure.
If you don’t trust Intel or AMD to implement these systems right, at least to the level you can disable them, then perhaps you’d prefer an open source CPU with a trusted manufacturing chain.
I have a ASUS PN53; which largely fits the same niche, I run Ubuntu but you could theoretically run an immutable Proxmox OS on a USB stick… I have mine configured with RAID1 8TiB NVMe SSD, 64GiB of DDR5 SODIMM; it runs my gitlab (git.drk.sc).
It’s a wonderful little machine, I couldn’t have asked for more, I sometimes get tempted to buy a whole bunch of them and cluster them.
It barely takes any space, sips energy for the power it outputs, I almost never hear the fan: https://imgur.com/a/89YFT6L
Out of curiosity, have you measured the energy consumption?
I just got out my kill-a-watt to measure some of my homelab stuff, and I suspect those measurements might inspire shopping for a replacement soon.
Interested as well!
According to https://www.anandtech.com/show/18964/geekom-as-6-asus-pn53-review-ryzen-9-6900hx-packs-punches-in-a-petite-package/9 (but it likely depends on the attached devices as well)
This is a great overview, I’ve been looking around for a replacement to my almost 10 year old NUC. Seems like a great option here.
I replaced my little home server with a $200 Intel N100 mini-PC and Proxmox. Been doing great, really like this class of hardware. 7W when idle, max power consumption is 19W. And while the I/O is very limited (single channel RAM, one SSD but USB for external disks) it’s just fine for a home workload.
I’m impressed that AMD’s systems have gotten this good too. At $1070 this box is a lot more expensive than mine but should perform much better. DDR5 RAM, 2x SATA 6GB and room 2.5” drives. Plus the two SSDs.
I’d quibble with their choice of RAID 1 for the SSDs. Proxmox is a bit persnickety about hardware RAID. It’s very good at ZFS though and I wonder if there’s a better way to use two fast disks with ZFS.The page you link to is about hardware RAID, but I’m not using hardware RAID.
In the proxmox installer I selected ZFS RAID-1. I don’t think that’s an unusual setup?
oh my apologies, that’s definitely the usual setup. I misunderstood and thought you were using hardware RAID.
I have a Ryzen 9 6900HX as my mini PC home server. Aside from XMPP & other hosting, the initial motivator was a remote builder/substitutor for Nix which really helped speed up rebuilds. I like that it doesn’t hog a lot of power, use up too much physical space, or get too terrible loud. It’s really been helpful.
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