Would the 5000 series of AMD’s Ryzen 5/7 be a good bet to baseline with? Couple gens old now, so I’m thinking kinda cheap. Something like this from Beelink perhaps?
Comment on Best "bang for your buck" NUC/Pi setup for Jellyfin/HomeAssistant/PiHole?
floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I’ve found that you don’t need to go that far above the $200 cost of an Intel N100/150 system to get a mini PC with a significantly more powerful AMD processor. It won’t be the latest generation but it will be capable of a lot more than those low-power Intels, and from my measurements many AMD processors of the last three generations or so are good at saving power when they’re idle, so won’t use a ton more electricity. Sometimes you find used ones on eBay at a decent price because someone upgraded.
linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 1 day ago
stuner@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
The Ryzen 5000 series should be a good choice for such an application, they’re still quite powerful CPUs. You should just make sure that you get the notebook/APU variant of the CPUs (e.g. 5600G or 5600U) and not the desktop variant (e.g. 5600 or 5600X). The desktop variant has significantly higher idle power consumption (see e.g. www.reddit.com/r/…/nas_idle_power_usage/, they report 50+W in idle, while my 8500G system idles at 17W). The one you linked should be fine.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Yes, I think that’s reasonable. The midrange CPU in the Beelink you linked is already significantly more capable than the Intel N150 etc., though it has a TDP of 15W compared to the N150’s 6W. I haven’t dug into which specialized features they support (hardware codec support etc.) but for a general-purpose computer I’d definitely prefer the one you linked to those N100/N150 minis, even if it uses a little more power.
stuner@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
I generally agree, but keep in mind that CPU TDP is not a good metric to predict the total power consumption of a home server. Most of the time, the CPU is in a very low power state and the power consumption is dominated by things like the mainboard, drives, PSU, … Wolfgang has a good video on the topic: youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=239
That said, the conclusion that the 5600U system draws more power than a N150 one is probably still correct in most cases.
linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
But is it necessary? I’d rather focus more on the tdp.
I know I could just boost the tdp of the n150 if I did want more power, but I see people here running stuff on 10 year old laptops and older Intel n series stuff seemingly without a problem.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 18 hours ago
Wouldn’t that laptop use so much more power that it costs you more in electricity though? At least that is usually the problem I hear with it, not sure what a good low spec option is currently once electricity prices are included. IIRC N150 is pretty good, not sure if there are other good/better options though.