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.
I’ve got three with quadros in them.
There are definitely options. No youre not shoving a full size GPU in there, but there are options.
I’m looking ant intel and AMD GPUs. What fits in these minis?
Depends on the model.
I can say for jellyfin transcoding, the igpu is plenty. The quadros only get used for transcoding and some misc cad use and other such things.
Given the recommended GPU w/ HDR specs for Sunshine - Intel HD Graphics 730 or higher - thats easily accomplished, even used. I couldn’t say how well it runs though as I don’t use it myself.
I wish SR-IOV support was more common. I suspect I will end up with an Intel GPU most things and an AMD GPU on passthru for the games. So needlessly inefficient.
Sr-iov is electrically expensive to implement. You can have it, you’ll just pay more.
I mean, thats what my quadros are. There is an Intel igpu plus the quadro, I find it more efficient because I can dedicate them to tasks more easily.
I agree sr-iov being better adopted would be great, but I also realize I’m not really a candidate either, I find the split approach best for my needs.
NVIDIA is not an option for me. The hardware is great but the company is evil and I won’t give them my money.
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.
For Frigate you can just add a Coral TPU to offload the heavy lifting but with Jellyfin you’ll likely need a GPU/iGPU (Intel) that can handle transcoding. I don’t know what specific models you’re looking at but you might try to determine their passmark score. I think it’s recommended at least 2000 score for a single 1080p transcode. Alternatively you can stick to specific file formats that won’t need transcoding but this might be some work.
You could get a used Dell Optiplex micro. They have i3/i5 processors and can be found for around $100. This will at least get you going and you can always build something later.
I want to avoid Intel CPUs. I also don’t generally need transcoding for my setup but want the option and aside from Apple, Intel has the best encoders out there right now. AMD has better rendering GPUs but they have historically had absolutely terrible encoders. Nvidia is not getting my business. They can fuck right off.
That might really limit your options as Quicksync is pretty much the gold standard for efficiency and performance. A discrete GPU works too but you might have trouble finding them in a Chinese mini PC.
I used AMD for years (RX580) but it wasn’t always the best quality and having a separate GPU really sapped a lot more power. I don’t believe ARM processors are really optimized for transcoding either. Under the hood, Jellyfin, Emby, and Plex all use ffmpeg to do their transcoding so maybe you can research more about its performance with each platform.
Again, used is always an option. You’re not giving money to any of these companies by buying used parts and it sounds like this would get you more ‘horsepower’ from your budget than buying a bunch of new stuff.
I am thinking a Ryzen with lots of cores I just pin shit to and an Intel GPU for most things. Supposedly there is work going into SR-IOV support on battlemage but it’s not out yet. The 9000X Ryzen chips supposedly have iGPUs on them too so I wonder if I could throw them at frigate. The encoder just can’t be done on the CPU because AMD has by far the worst encoders, though I’ve heard the new AV1 encoders aren’t terrible.
