2023 Mini PC / Perfect Homelab Server

I always look to build lightweight low power efficient 24x7 running Compact and fanless PC which can do office work like running Windows 11 or can be used as a home lab hypervisor running VMware prox mocks can pass through all the hardware it would be great if it can be used to run like 40 terabyte of Nas storage especially running through NASA scale potential to use up to 10 GB of network speed and how about top it off with like zero noise fanless model using all the latest 2022 or 2023 Hardware so that it's good for at least four or five years of support and all that costs less than 300 are you in the market for something similar then let's take a look at this many PC I am looking at it's fanless 10 watt of TDP has USBC quad 2.5 g neck ports dual and vme connections are both are X1 or one nvme connection with X2 speed dual cider connection you know that's where that 40 terabyte came from 64 GB of RAM obviously upgradable I like many PC which you can modify and change the component CPU is the only one which is soldered but you can change the disk nvme drives as well as the memory and this PC can run three 60hz display so at high level 2023 version of many PC cost 195 dollar you can add about 500 GB of SSD dollar 40 and I would prefer from Samsung this is reliable as well as it works with VMware so VMware is very picky about the hardware so the neck works on that and that's a beautiful part 16 GB of RAM which is going to cost 30 dollar in this particular test setup I'm using 32GB of ram total is about 255 I looked around and compare every option available in the market let's look at some of the other competitor which with the similar specs I was very interested in kovan r86s which has two SFTP plus ports though these ports are older generation no more supported in VMware 8 so that's not exactly going towards future proofing it has three 2.5 g Nick which is great another problem it's not fanless so it's going to make a noise typically NVM it drives has very good latency and speed so so even One X is sufficient to get most out of it one of the other thing to consider is this model has better CPU capabilities higher turbo frequency Plus at the same time TDP is 15 watt compared to 10 watt of the PC and here is the high level of specs I I believe this is very good model if you are okay with the price and if you're really looking to get a code I5 or I3 in that respect now this model just came in it's probably a few days back when we start available on AliExpress and as you can see this one is also fun less so that's beautiful the one challenge here is that it doesn't have USBC connectivity if you're buying a Mini PC in 2023 and it doesn't have USBC which means you are losing of those you know KVM and docking capabilities uh via USBC plus obvious speeds and then you can drive 4K 60p display from it so this model is missing that and that's one one of the reason for me to skipping it price wise this is pretty okay it does have PCI 3.0 X4 and HDMI DP very fantastic so two displays that's pretty much covered most of the typical home users and it comes with ddr5 memory so that is very very good thing if you're looking to be on the latest and Cutting Edge technology when I ordered this model this piece was not available in the fanless model it was available in the normal model if you buy go for a non-federalist model in this case you can get it for about 150 dollar for n00 now the next competitor is this guy until node 13 Pro Arena Canyon tall pre-built this just got released this month only and this is amazing it has everything way better than what you can do with the machine the only and only challenge I'm seeing is that it is it's not fanless so basically you can buy some of the extra kids once it's available for this model and then you can basically install on that and then you get the fan list but by the time you buy this and get to that model you are looking at almost 900 it has two Thunderbolt 4 ports so you are completely feature proof in that sense only issue is one 2.5 gig neck which doesn't make sense at this point but you can use the huntable for power to connect to you know 10 gig Nike I went for a fanless model Plus cost is very high but one amazing benefit of this product is that this is super powerful machine so if you look at these chart you can see that this particular Arena Canyon model idle power consumption is just 5 watt under 5 watt compared to 13 watt which our current model is doing so yes idle power is much less so this is Intel product so obviously it's highly tuned money is not a concern and fairness is not your priority you can you can be okay with you know some mini fan noise and all that in that case yes this is amazing productivity it can take up to 9 10 watts of power so you can see it's it's super important in that sense now if you're totally to you know top of the line gaming model this Intel Nook 13x team kit is kind of one of the best option available we are looking at office PC Plus a home lab option now if you look at the operating Sim installed here you can see that Windows 11 installed fine so network card drivers will manually installs links are in the description if you're looking to download it proxmox no shoot it just works tested not just Ubuntu installation install Docker container just so then fine it's it's a pretty small demon which does all that trueness scale no issues it's all just fine recognize all the drives and everything network card is working well and finally the VMware if VMware works then you know the device is really really good for under 200 I was not aware there is another 2022 model of you know VMware device available so this one will install VMware 8 version just fine now issue for trueness scale Nas implementation I would suggest that put it as a virtual machine under prox marks and pass through the hard disk that would be the best option now here are the three operating system where it failed due to no network card rival first of all Windows Server 2022 it did not recognize the driver second open media vault in general I have seen that open media world is very finicky about network card driver though it uses like very less resources compared to trueness scale so it's usually a good option and if you're looking automated way to create the network drives and all that in that case it's a better option to use omv PF sense same at this point there are no network card drivers now let's do quick unboxing then we'll install memory and disk this is how the box came with and this is the SATA connector the PC look like these are the fins this is HDMI this is dp2 USB 2 port for ethernet ports having four and Network Port allows you to do a lot of stuff you can configure it as a soft router and then we have DC input for 12 volts you can see USBC USB 3 this is the SD card slot finally the power button plus you have the Wi-Fi knockout hole which you're talking about so two setup ports are there you can practically take two wires out of this and connect it to a normal hard disk outside two disk enclosure or something bare one enclosure and you can basically create a true Nest setup for your regular next needs so this is the aluminum so it's gonna dissipate Heat opening is pretty straightforward putting NuMe disk you can see there is some wobble there I'm putting the 32 GB Ram just single slot opening and closing is pretty let's connect power and you can see the power consumption is about 13 watt idle when nothing is installed PassMark score is not that great pretty good for running a simple you know home PC or small home lab running few containers shouldn't be a problem for last 20 minutes I've been running this Blackmagic proxy generator which is creating a pretty good load on the system you can see the power usage is very constant when CPU is 100 power is always 23 watts of power it's taking so if I take the temperature of the word you can see it's almost 69 the temperature on the bottom side the temperature is almost 108. there is no thermal throttling temperatures are pretty good so if I play this 4K 60fps video how many frames are getting dropped almost this is almost like seven to eight percent frames for about 260 dollar this is not a bad combination where you can run up office PC or even you know a small lab to test out different scenarios approx marks VMware trueness all is supported so that makes it a very very good nice options very efficient power consumption as well as no noise this is not an affiliate product review I paid from my own pocket if this content was useful to you please like it help spread the words subscribe it and share with your friends thank you and appreciate you watching

Channel: Smart Home Tech

Views: 10,564

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Id: RYNPuC8vdvo

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023