I’ve been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is… delicious!
I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).
So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).
Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?
Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.
Getting proxmox to pass the GPU through to containers is a little fiddly, but it got a lot easier since they moved to the 6.x kernel, and there’s plenty of guides around. It could well be worth a look if you want to run multiple servers on one device
As for the GPU, they’re unlikely to make a huge difference either way, but note that the n5105 has no hardware support for the AV1 codec, so any media you have or end up with in that format will need decoding on the CPU. The n100 igpu has hardware decode instead, so if you think you might end up with any av1 content, then that’s the way to go.
How about proxmox running GitHub runners? Maybe it can run a few containers, each running an independent GitHub runner which can pick up different tasks in parallel?
AV1 content… I don’t think I have need for it. But maybe I’m wrong? I have an Apple TV and iOS devices running Plex apps. Do those need AV1 now?
AV1 isn’t needed yet, because its only really being used for live streaming like youtube gaming at the moment (Plex itself only started supporting AV1 in December). That might change in the next few years, depending on if the scene picks it up as a technology, its just a case of whether you want to future proof yourself. Of course, given how cheap these mini pcs are, you might be as well sticking with the N5105 now, and then picking up an N100 (or even whatever it’s successor is) in a few years time. If you do end up running proxmox, you can always cluster them together, so you can keep using the old one alongside the new one. (Because they’re so cheap, I actually have three of them in a little cluster, so I can patch and reboot each proxmox server without downtime to my plex server)
