Question Dedicated Mini-PC and NAS Appliance building thread? N100, N95, J4125, etc...

[evident]

I've found building a modern gaming rig has become more or less mundane, just throw a ton of money on the best gfx card, fastest cpu (either intel or amd) and boom you pretty much have your gaming pc.

I've become more or less obsessed with finding the best low power 24/7 home appliance solution. I currently have a 4th gen Intel Haswell system as my main Unraid NAS / home server but it's getting long in the tooth. I want to see if i can replace it with a much lower powered N100 system and still maintain the same functionality at a much smaller power footprint. There's an ASRock N100 mATX and mITX motherboard that would be great for DIY'ing a NAS. I also have a little N100 mini pc that's serving as a 16 bit emulator system that i could repurpose for appliance work as well.

I currently have a refurbed acer mini desktop with a J4125 CPU as my opnsense router. it's been solid since i set it up 2 years ago and draws about 8 watts at the wall.

anyone else using these lower powered chips and want to share their builds?

 

[lantis3]

Have a $150 N100 16GB RAM and $325 5700U 32GB RAM mini pc as desktops.

Not yet convert one of them into a server. Both running 24hrs though.

No more big boxes or even mid towers.

Both running VMs occasionally.

 

[In2Photos]

Mu unRAID server has always been a repurposed PC. The only money I have spent on it was for the drives and a new PSU when the fan on the original one started failing. Its first iteration was an AMD Athlon 3000 1.9GHz with 2GB of RAM. Had it that way for many years before "upgrading" a couple of years ago to an i5-2300 with 8GB of RAM from a Dell XPS machine my daughter was using for gaming. It runs 24/7, doesn't consume much power but not exactly sure how much. It's quiet, and so far, reliable. Does what it needs to do.