Fanless x86 mini PCs are getting absurdly fast and cheap
Pretty much what the title says - I’ve been looking for something small and not too expensive to run a few VMs on recently, and I’m just genuinely amazed at where the tiny SBC space is at right now.
The Celeron N5105 seems to be the go to choice at the moment. You can get an entire machine running that CPU that’s slightly smaller than an old double CD jewel case, for $150. Less than $200 if you want 16GB RAM and a fast NVMe SSD in there too. Four decent quality 2.5GbE NICs thrown in as a bonus. And it’s not that much slower than my expensive full size desktop from late 2020.
Part of me thinks I’m just getting old - phones have been plenty of people’s primary computer for years now, after all - but there’s something about having a real standalone x86 PC that size for literally 1/5th the price of a flagship phone that just blows my mind.
I skimmed, but that review is of a box that's "for use as firewalls and virtualization nodes." I'm guessing no graphics?
Up to three displays at 4K60, although I think the one I linked only has two physical outputs. There are a few different designs I’ve seen around the same chipset though - Dell has one marketed as a thin client with two DisplayPort and one USB-C for example, but it costs twice as much and at $400 you can do a lot better for your money.
I wouldn’t want to try gaming on it, but it’s got all the relevant video encoding/decoding hardware for media centre stuff and it does technically support DirectX 12 if you need that for anything.
[Edit] That’s one of the reasons I was so impressed, actually: they’re still full PCs, just also small and cheap enough to be marketed as a firewall or thin client or NAS or whatever depending which case the manufacturer puts them in.
I’d be totally comfortable throwing Windows on one and giving it to a family member as their main web and office machine, for example. With a decently fast SSD and 16GB RAM I’d honestly expect the subjective experience to be better than a lot of people’s lower-mid-range laptops with eMMC storage and Windows desperately trying to swap out Chrome tabs from 8GB of memory.
That’s just because Serve the Home is a site dedicated to that kind of thing.
Coincidentally I have been wanting to build a NAS for a while and right now I am considering taking apart my gaming computer and putting it into a smaller case for such a purpose, buying something like this and printing a custom case, or going with a prebuilt unit from Synology or QNAP. It seems like a lot of the prebuilts are using these Celeron chips in any case.
It's a bit of a moot point because I don't have money for it anyways. I'm finally going to be getting some money coming in but I've got plenty of bills waiting to be paid too including some new medical bills that I don't even have numbers on yet.
That sounds like a cool project! I’d bet on DIY if bang for the buck matters most and you’ve got the time - seems like a 10th gen board with 6x SATA and dual 2.5GbE is about $200, whereas the latest Synology boxes are more like $500 with a 9th gen chip, dual 1GbE, and 4x SATA. Synology’s software and ecosystem is rock solid, can’t fault them on that, but you sure do pay for it.
Best of luck to you on the bills, I very much hope it all balances out in your favour once everything’s sorted. I’m just getting a few things in my own life under control recently, that’s actually why I’m getting the chance to look at some fun bits and pieces like this again properly now, so I absolutely empathise there.
It's really the software side that makes me want to buy dedicated NAS hardware. I know how to manage a network and Linux servers, but that doesn't mean that I want to spend time actually doing it. Getting Samba to work with Windows clients always brings me to tears. I also like that they are usually pretty quiet and efficient in terms of both energy and space, especially with mechanically spinning discs involved.
I followed some random person's recommendation to look into QNAP and it seems like they have nice offerings that are fairly cheap but most of their 'home' models are relatively underwhelming ARM systems (I'm sure they're actually pretty decent, but I'd want something I could run virtual machines on in any case) and I'm somewhat turned off by their very "Chinese style" marketing. At the same time I'm surprised that their high-end models have HDMI on them so you can either use them as a Media Player or turn them into a usable PC.