Experience with N100 / N200 CPUs?
Experience with N100 / N200 CPUs?
Hello selfhosters.
I'm considering to buy a SFF PC to act as a docker host. The main services / applications I'm going to run is going to be Immich. Filebrowser, Samba-share and eventually Paperless-ngx. I've been eyeing PCs with a N100 / N200 specifically to run quiet, and to conserve on energy consumption. I am most likely going for an Asus PN42 and will have an SSD in it to keep the moving parts to a minimum.
To those who are running machines with this CPU and similiar workloads, how has your experience been?
i bought a beelink n100 and love it. samba/paperless-ngx work fine. Immich is a heavy load doing all the ml stuff so if you have a large photo library itll take a while
I can tell you that my Celeron J4105 (the N100's predecessor) can run paperless and most other NAS/home server tasks just fine. I haven't dabbled with Immich and its ML though. The 10W are pretty accurate. With hard drives, HBAs and PSU inefficiency, my home server comes out to about 20W from the wall under full load IIRC.
Also look out for RAM extensibility; you probably want 32GB in the not too distant future.
According to ark.intel.com, the N100 only supports 16GB. It probably still works with 32GB, but if it doesn't you're on your own.
I would highly suggest a slight upgrade to the n305 which is an actual i series chip with double the cores of the n100 but still less than 10w power usage.
One of my mini PC's is an N95, which is similar to the n100 but with a higher peak power. It's faster than the old legend 2600k and has a decent little igpu for video processing or general desktop use.
I run a jellyfin test server from it, transcodes high bitrate 4k HDR H265 to 1080p SDR tonemapped H264 at over 200fps, while running my security camera Dashboard with multiple video feeds.
Their only limitation is they usually only have a single memory slot so keep that in mind.