Thanks! I just ordered the BeeLink EQ14 and it’ll be here sometime next week. Hopefully your guides prove useful to the noob I am :)

EDIT: I’ve chosen the Beelink EQ14. It had the best “last-gen” specs, lowest price, and better hardware (BT 5.2 vs Pulcro’s 4.2, as well as Wifi6 vs Wifi5). I also ruled out the Morefine because all of its reviews were paid, not very reassuring imho.

Alright, not sure how many will circle back, but I’ve narrowed down my choices, as they hit my current thresholds - N150 or equivalent/greater, 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe, and Dual LAN connection.

1st place - Morefine M9S - This caught my eye, as although because to me it’s a no-name brand, it has a beefiest specs still well within my price range ($270-ish)

2nd place - Pulcro.io TurnKey Two - These guys I just found, and they seem the most… professional? Same specs as the two below.

3rd place - BeeLink EQ14 - Weird that link has it as an N100, clearly shows N150 on the page…

Thoughts?

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I know some of those words, but with that said, thank you for those ideas! That’s a lot more complicated than I was planning, but you gave me fodder for buying a beefier NUC! I think I’m close to settling with an n97 unit that has dual LAN for Pihole and such.

Would you know of any guides or such to set something as complex as what you’ve going, or was it more just time and tinkering? I’m still wrestling with which VM setup to use, but at least Mint was on my shortlist for OS choice.

Damn right. As much as I love my Pis, they have minimal headroom for what I’m looking at doing. This upgrade is great esp with the ability to consolidate all my stuff into one unit. As for power use, the lower the better as I’m guessing the setup will be idling majority of the time, and “vampire power” still sits in the back of my brain. In another comment I placed anything below 50w as a good limit.

As for my Pi4, I’m looking at possibly gifting to a friend as their primary devices don’t handle x265 at all, but I have plenty of options to repurpose both it and even the Pi3. I do need to look into Zigbee stuff though. Still an alien term to me lol.

Oh wow. Heavier hitter than my initial needs, but I wonder if more overhead would be worthwhile, or if the other NUCs I’m looking at will be “enough” for my current and future needs. I do have some card points to burn, so I could get something up this alley. Thanks for the rec!

Yeah, this QuickSync option looks like the best all-rounder for my needs. I don’t transcode atm as I’m simple and usually stick with 720/1080p stuff, maybe I’ll get around to 4k eventually (when a codec makes them the size of 1080p vids lol), but for now, all my devices handle video without any extra fancy.

Yeah I did get a little __ Lost __ :P

But for reals, yeah I did. I was taking in the entire picture, but still way more than I’m hoping to utilize. One tiny box for now, but maybe down the line I’ll expand to a rack. Its only me, as my housemates use the Jellyfin setup a bit through our TVs, but the HA stuff, and even the PiHole are more or less all mine.

I do have a few old desktops I could work with, but my goal here is to find the golden ratio or whatever of hosting a bunch of small things all in one unit without going overboard, and ultimately shoving it all into the networking cabinet I posted in another comment. Low power, low footprint, etc. But who knows? Maybe one day I’ll jump to something like your setup. Thanks for the input!

Oh don’t get me wrong, I get burnout myself if I’m hovering on a hobby for too long, but tinkering is in my blood. I’m sure I’ll have moments where I’m just thinking, “Fuck it, Imma play some gaems instead.”, but that itch is bound to come back.

I am curious what VPN you use tho. Been shopping around, and the unfortunate news that the big services are owned by a particular company kinda stalled my research.

As tempting as that is, I’m not expecting to build up something that hefty. Love the wireminding and all, but I’m hoping to keep this as something I can mount nicely in my teeny tiny network cabinet. The horsepower I’m looking for, alongside the low thermal and power loads, are my goal. Maybe I’ll expand beyond eventually, but who knows?

Thank you for the suggestion though! Also love the R&C refs :) Still need to finish Rift Apart.

Yeah, in all reality, I’m 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 doesn’t matter much here as I’m not doing anything GPU intensive outside some possible transcoding, but even that may be unnecessary with my needs.

Thx for the video as well!

Looks like that’s a bit under-powered compared to the N100, but if it more than suits your needs, great! Again, I’m just happy with all the outpouring of info and ideas. Knowing that most NUCs are quite a bit more powerful than Pis is the best new in itself.

Yeah, definitely beyond my needs. I actually have a hand-me-down server a friend gifted me, and that is well beyond what I need, plus power costs in the $50+/mo realm. Certainly not a bad price for that type of performance. Sure, it would be cool to have a centralized system that can do everything, but outside of my initial thoughts of using this setup for 4-5 low-power things, the cost is too great to consider. Thanks for your input nonetheless!

Wow, yeah this looks great. 16GB/512GB for under $200 makes this a frontrunner for now. Outside of Jellyfin, what else do you run, and how do you have it containerized? I’m inching closer to Proxmox vs Docker due to issues brought up in other comments.

Yeah, most units I’m looking at now are of the 16GB/512GB flavor, as while that should be plenty of overhead for the time being, I’m wondering if 32GB is the better way to go to give even more buffer and cache space traded off with a smidge more upfront cost. I hope to eventually repurpose the Pis with something else, or donate them to my school’s tech program (yay DoE crumbling :( ), as I currently have one of my RPi4s running Steam Link for my housemate. Freeing up the other Pi4 and the Pi3B+ for other things would be great.

I think this is kinda where I’m heading with how the comments are helping guide me. I started this journey nearly 10 years ago with my first house and it was a measly HP SFF junker I had pulled from… somewhere (I honestly don’t recall how it materialized :P ), and had TrueNAS on it with a dinky 2x1TB non-RAID setup. I’d still like to keep my current 2x8TB Synology RAID1 as a separate entity until I deem the need for more local storage, so if I can fit all the brains into one unit for everything I’m hoping to use, so the Beelink/Minisforum/GMKTek route is my current path. Might I ask which model NUC you have?

The Docker Desktop comment was from literally one post stating it was junk vs the standard Docker Engine (GUI vs not), so I thought it was deeper than that. The only thing keeping me away from Docker now though is the inability to use deeper customization on HA. A comment above noted HACS can’t be used in the Docker container, which I use currently to control my Govee lighting.

Aww tho, having nothing to tinker with does fill the soul with sadness. As a fellow tinkerer I feel this, however I just fill my time then with extensive modding of games, or y’know, actually playing them :P

Holy moly. Yeah that’s an exhaustive list :P

I don’t see myself going that far, but again you didn’t either. The Jellyfin/PiHole/HA/OctoPrint is kinda my current scope, but who knows what other options I’ll look into. Having the overhead would always be nice. Although Immich is tempting now as ditching as much Google stuff is also on the horizon (I can’t even think of getting rid of Gmail just yet, but it is inevitable).

Curious, what’s your typical idle/load power draw? I think I’m comfy with up to 40-50w on load (my Ryzen 7700 is 65w TDP), although the less impact on ever increasing bills would be nice.

Right on the money. I know that this’ll be a hobby I can grow for a while, just gotta find that balance of "is this good enough, or just one more device/peripheral/etc? Right now, I just wanna be able to shove it into my tiny network cabinet (the ones that are included with many new houses). This is what I’m working with currently:

Certainly far from winning any pageants lol. That said, The n100 units, or comparable, are the perfect size to shove into this (sans the two Pis already in there). And yeah, warranty/support-wise, I’m cool with this being an “I’m on my own”, as I don’t even know how far I’ll take this. The e-waste bit, well… I don’t really throw anything out. Not a hoarder outside of the digital sense, and repurposing tech is something I’m able to do working for a school district with young tinkerer minds, so to eventually hand this stuff down to them even if just for a stockpile of tech to mess with, is my end goal.