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.
The link points to the J4125 priced at USD99. I’m thinking of the second one - 8GB/256GB N5105. Or maybe even the N100, since it has more RAM on it.
Have a J4125 driving an entertainment center fairly competently, was eyeing a N5105 as a personal device.
What all do you run on it? Does it support 4K streaming? Remote Plex users or just local for you?
Just local, streams 4k fairly OK but will studder sometimes, not enough to be a problem in general but if you want a perfect image full time you might be disappointed.
Its primarily a media player and runs 8 and 16 bit emulators. Haven’t tried anything more ambitious yet. It streams content from my NAS just fine. I don’t think multiple users would work on it for video streaming however others uses maybe.
Thanks for the rundown. My other usecase is running a GitHub Runner and running some CI/CD or automations kind of work. Some data pipeline work, some npm builds. Right now that all runs on my main Windows PC that’s also the media center and gaming PC. Overloaded that fella, so thinking of expanding the homelab to purpose-based machines.
I can’t open the link due to how I’ve configured my browser: is this an integrated board? Could you pull the specifications?
It’s a mini PC (literally just a box). 8/16GB DDR4 RAM, 128/256/512GB 2.5 HDD, processor model options are Intel N5105/N100/N5095/J4125/N95. WIFI5 and Bluetooth 4. 2 USB 2s, 2 USB 3. No USB-C. Windows 11 Pro preloaded (ugh).
But more importantly, how have you configured your browser? It’s a direct link to Aliexpress with no tracking middleware. Have you just blocked shopping sites to stay away from them?
I don’t exactly remember what I have set up (will have to revisit my config, using Librewolf), but websites like Aliexpress are serious offenders of partial/incomplete redirection requests. Librewolf doesn’t like such behaviour, and neither do I.
I’m considering using it either as a plex server with transcoding, or for CI/CD work using github actions to do some data pipelines and npm builds.
I use an N5105 for my Opnsense firewall and run Adguard Home on it as well. Installing software on it was incredibly easy. Mine was barebones, had no OS, and it has an American Megatrends BIOS so it was as easy as selecting boot from USB.
I have no doubt it could run a small homelab. I have my Unraid running on a worse quad core gen 4 i5 processor (20+ docker images, 1 VM).
The only downside I would point out is that some of these things are passively cooled and put out some HEAT. It looks like yours has a fan so that’s nice. Maybe another would be Plex transcoding… depending on how many people you have on your Plex you maybe could run into some transcoding issues.
I use a similar one of these (different io panel and case) for OPNSense and it’s been a delight. Not sure how well it would handle Plex but if you don’t need to transcode the files it should be fine. I bought one without ram, os, and storage for $150 last year. That listing isn’t available anymore.
