I’ve been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is… delicious!
I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).
So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).
Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?
Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.
I run Plex on essentially one of these (different case, but n5105/8gb ram, bought from AliExpress) and they’re great little machines for it. Most of my library is 1080p, but I have run 2 simultaneous 4k transcodes before and it just keeps chugging along happily. I’m actually running proxmox on it, with Plex being just one container out of several, so it also has the grunt to do several simultainious streams and keep my mastodon server, torrent box, pihole, and a few other things running at the same time. In my experience, you’ll run out of ram before ever chocking the CPU on a standard setup, so it might be worth upping to the n100 to get 16gs instead.
It wouldn’t be any cheaper for them to ship without windows, because the windows os youre getting from aliexpress sellers selling budget pcs is almost always counterfeit :p but installing Linux on them is a breeze, they’ve got a full standard uefi BIOS, so just plug a USB stick with Ubuntu on it in, and install as usual.
damn! Thanks for the LD. Did not expect you to say the Win will be fake :D But good to know about the RAM situation. I mentioned this elsewhere that the 5105 seems to do better GPU than the N100. So if some other seller has a 5105 with 16 GB RAM, I’ll go for that instead. Man I wanna play with proxmox. Just never had an idle machine to do that. Maybe this will be it.
Getting proxmox to pass the GPU through to containers is a little fiddly, but it got a lot easier since they moved to the 6.x kernel, and there’s plenty of guides around. It could well be worth a look if you want to run multiple servers on one device
As for the GPU, they’re unlikely to make a huge difference either way, but note that the n5105 has no hardware support for the AV1 codec, so any media you have or end up with in that format will need decoding on the CPU. The n100 igpu has hardware decode instead, so if you think you might end up with any av1 content, then that’s the way to go.
How about proxmox running GitHub runners? Maybe it can run a few containers, each running an independent GitHub runner which can pick up different tasks in parallel?
AV1 content… I don’t think I have need for it. But maybe I’m wrong? I have an Apple TV and iOS devices running Plex apps. Do those need AV1 now?
AV1 isn’t needed yet, because its only really being used for live streaming like youtube gaming at the moment (Plex itself only started supporting AV1 in December). That might change in the next few years, depending on if the scene picks it up as a technology, its just a case of whether you want to future proof yourself. Of course, given how cheap these mini pcs are, you might be as well sticking with the N5105 now, and then picking up an N100 (or even whatever it’s successor is) in a few years time. If you do end up running proxmox, you can always cluster them together, so you can keep using the old one alongside the new one. (Because they’re so cheap, I actually have three of them in a little cluster, so I can patch and reboot each proxmox server without downtime to my plex server)
That’s brilliant clustering!! And yeah, I suspect not setup will work for a few years before needing whatever is the latest mini pc 😊