I’ve been planning out a proxmox server for when I eventually have money. (Shut up. It can happen. Shut up!) but I saw something today that got me thinking. Minisforums makes some pretty nice shit at a reasonable price. The entire minis market has actually become pretty great while I wasn’t looking.
I need proxmox hosting opnsense, frigate, jellyfin, homeassistant, BitTorrent, immich, sunshine, steam, and i2pd.
So there are obvious advantages to building my own shit with a trip to microcenter. But maybe these micro machines could actually handle this shit anymore. Opinions?
Almost my entire (excessive) setup is a bunch of used, off lease tiny/mini/micros.
Most ive bought for about $100, then tossed some minor upgrades to like an m2 ssd, maxing out ram, etc, so under $200 altogether historically. Clustered with proxmox, so I even have high availability.
Yes, minis are great. Just do storage elsewhere, which can be a NAS or a generic box you load up with drives.
But I can’t throw a GPU into a mini for sunshine.
Lots of ppl deploy sunshine on n100 mini PCs with quicksync, you dont really need a gpu that way.
An N100 is not going to do what I want to punish this thing with. I have an N100 build going now. It’s good but it is what it is and it’s not going to handle steam games.
If you’re talking about streaming steam games at 4k, then maybe. But at that point build a dedicated machine.
Sunshine works fine with n100 quicksync for 1080p streaming, plus frigate. I’m running both of these on an 11th gen i5 with a coral tpu for frigate.
Not sure what your “punishment” is for hardware, but your current list really isn’t that demanding.