minoche

I made a very similar build almost 2 years ago.

I did not like the Jonsbo N4. The HDD temps were bad. The case amplified HDD noise and was a pain to build in. I used a Silverstone SFX power supply. I had two of those PSUs fail in less than a year.

After the second expensive SFX PSU failed, I decided I did not want to buy another. I changed cases to the Fractal Design Node 804 and bought an inexpensive ATX PSU. I have been much happier with my build after those changes. My HDD temps dropped by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The case is much quieter and I was impressed by the quality.

Minisforum gets a ton a hype. Nothing they make gets slept on.

You said it’s trash because of performance. That’s not the whole story, it’s trash because the CIX chip causes a list of goofy issues that the engineers never solved. This includes power issues but also other things that will pop up and make things much harder than they should be. It’s cheap because they’re getting rid of their year-old stock that predates most of the RAM price increases.

If don’t think you will be able to get it run everything you have in mind. I don’t think it will be near 12W either.

A lot of the SBCs or n150 pcs have limited RAM upgradeability.

You might look at the old HPE Proliant Microservers, like gen8 - gen 10. You can get them with 16GB ram included for $300. They’re low power and they use the cheaper ddr4 ram.

SYS-A22GA-NBRT The $500,000 10U AI server or is there another one?

I still can’t add 3rd party software that isn’t in their App Store

That doesn’t seem right… I think you can use their “Container Station” to make an LXD or Docker container with whatever you want. You may have to enable “advanced mode.” www.qnap.com/…/how-to-use-container-station-3