"This Is The ONLY Home Server You Should Buy"

this is the only Home Server you should buy at least that's what a lot of people down in the comment section keep telling me and they're not talking about this specific PC but the n100 CPU inside the Intel n100 is a really impressive processor on paper with performance that Rivals that of desktop CPUs from only a few years ago while only having a TDP of 6 Watts for many people looking to do some simple self-hosting is something like this the perfect solution well in today's video I'm going to talk about what you can expect from this specific Mini PC as well as many others like it and see if the n100 inside is all it's cracked up to be oh and also talk about why this CPU might not be as green as you think let's get started now I love self-hosting but if you want to quickly get a website up and running the easy way there isn't really a better option than using Squarespace the sponsor of today's video I've talked before about about how easy and approachable Squarespace is and I love that I can use it to quickly make tweaks to my website without having to dive into any coding but Squarespace has a ton of other features you might not even be aware of like email campaigns whether you're looking to build your brand Drive sales or just let your audience know about some new content email campaigns are a great way to keep everyone in the loop with Squarespace you can easily design stunning emails manage your subscriber lists and even build automations so if you're looking to start a website or build some email campaigns head over to squarespace.com Hardware Haven and use my code at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain in my videos where I cover home servers and such using old Hardware I get a lot of comments asking why I don't use N1 100s and yeah that makes sense in a lot of ways there are a ton of affordable mini PCS with the n100 and they're probably going to be more efficient than most of the hardware I cover on this channel and it's not like I haven't wanted to cover an n100 I've just been busy and haven't really gotten around to it but today is the today if you hop on a website like Amazon you can find as many models of n100 mini PCS as there are rebrands to the usb3 spec but while I was looking to buy one cam ruy reached out and offered to send over their ak2 plus mini now just like with any other brand that sends over Hardware cam ruy had no input as to what I say the topics I cover or my opinions about this PC and they don't get to see it until you do hopefully if you've been watching my channel for a while you know that I strive to be honest and transparent but if you don't trust me that totally makes sense and I get it you probably shouldn't but hopefully I can still provide some helpful information obviously the ak-2 plus mini features the n100 with four Alder Lake efficiency cores capable of boosting to 3.4 GHz four threads and 3.4 GHz probably doesn't sound like a lot but the point of the n100 is to be efficient the alter Lake ecores aren't quite as powerful as their pee counter Parts but they're still very competent especially when compared to older processors the ak2 plus Mini also comes with 16 GB of ddr4 sod in memory as well as a 512 m.2 SATA drive there's only one slot for memory but that's because the M100 only supports single Channel memory so having a second socket doesn't really provide that much value and this features a SATA m.2 drive instead of nvme because well these have to be affordable somehow the ak2 plus mini currently costs just $170 and has been available for even cheaper and the only way this is really possible is for the manufacturer to cut costs where they can and this becomes really evident when you just pick this thing up the entire system weighed only 383 G that's less than twice the weight of an HP Elite desk G3 mini and still lighter than even the cotus mind that I recently covered which is substantially smaller pretty much the entire case is made from plastic and it feels rather cheap I mean just listen now obviously a plastic case doesn't really mean anything in terms of performance or even usability and I know most of you watch watching this video probably won't care but I wanted to make you aware anyway the ak2 has rather minimal IO with just two USB 3.0 ports two USB 2 ports gigabit Ethernet a combo audio jack and Barrel Jack for DC power now this does have dual HDMI ports which would be great for office use but for more Home Server stuff I would have personally loved to see dual Nix which you can actually find on systems that are similarly priced and speced I also would have loved to have seen at least one type c port at least on the outside now one thing I did love about this is easy access to the internals you just slide a small locking tab to open the top and you can easily access the 2 and 1/2 in Drive Bay after removing just three screws you can get to the single ddr4 sodm socket and also this weird USBC Port which as far as I can tell doesn't do anything having easy access to both the RAM and 2 and 1/2 in Drive Bay is great but things got a bit more messy when trying to replace the boot drive you have to disassemble the entire case and pull them other motherboard out which is a bit of a pain off camera I actually broke off one of the Wi-Fi antenna connectors just trying to maneuver the motherboard out of the case now realistically it's not that hard to do especially when compared to working on a laptop or something for example and realistically I should have been a little bit more cautious but it still would have been nice to have easier access to the m.2 slot the motherboard was pretty much a straightforward little single board computer with not much in terms of extra expandability the Wi-Fi module is soldered in so don't get your h up about adding in any m.2 e key devices the board is actively cooled and I have to give Cam ruy some credit here because while testing I don't think I heard this thing once granted it's probably not that hard to cool a 6 wat TDP chip and that's pretty much all there is to say about this Mini PC so let's talk about how it and the n100 performed I started off in Windows 11 which was pre-installed and as to be expected with any modern CPU basic usage was Snappy and pleasant now I've seen a lot of places online where people compare the performance of the n100 to something like the i56500 I didn't have that specific CPU on hand but I do have my HP Elite desk mini G3 which has an i5 6500t and I thought this would make a pretty suitable comparison starting with cabin R15 the n100 was actually 11% slower than the I5 6500t I switched to the much newer cinebench R23 to see if things could get better there but not really the n100 was 16% slower than the older I5 it at least when running the multi-threaded test when switching to the single-threaded test the n100 was 12% faster I also ran PC Mark 10 or the systems performed pretty similarly the n100 system performed a bit better in the essentials category which is probably due to its better IPC and newer integrated Graphics the older I5 took the lead in the content category probably thanks to its better multi-threaded performance okay so the n100 wasn't faster than an 8-year-old low power desktop chip so what it was way more efficient right right well yes and no when just sitting idle in Windows the ak-2 plus mini Drew 6 Watts from the wall while the HP Elite desk Drew 7.4 Watts when under load though running cinebench R15 the n100 system Drew 56% less power than the G3 mini while only being 11% slower so while the idle power draw of both these systems was pretty much the same the n100 system was much more efficient when running a heavy workload but this is running Windows and you guys don't care about Windows you want to know how this runs Linux and how it works as a Home Server so to keep things simple I installed Debian with Kasa OS so I could quickly spin up some containers I ran home assistant jelly fin adguard home and crafty and also set up an SMB share and I did all of that without any issues I ran into one really cool thing when setting up jelly Fen and that's that this integrated GPU does a really great job of trans coating it's not based on the newer Iris XE Graphics but still handles transcoding tasks really well I was able to transcode to 10 bit hvvc 4K stream at over 100 frames per second and when enabling VPP tone mapping the M100 still turned out over 80 frames per second so the n100 is really impressive for transcoding so if you're looking at streaming with jelly fin or Plex or MB and you want to have really large files and transcod them down the n100 is going to be a great option for that now the CPU did show a bit of a weakness when running a vanilla Minecraft server whenever I would run really fast to generate new terrain you would see the CPU Spike up well over 70% now I didn't really notice any issues in game but I was also by myself regardless if you do run a Minecraft server with this there are ways to optimize things and you could probably get it working fairly well but you might run into issues if you're looking to run some large or busy servers while running all of these Services minus the Minecraft server the ak2 plus mini only Drew four Watts from the wall which is really impressive until I installed the exact same setup on the HP Elite desk G3 mini and saw that it only Drew 5 Wat from the wallet idle now clearly the older I5 is going to draw more power when actually doing stuff so the n100 PC is still more efficient and by buying a more efficient PC you're going to be saving money and saving the environment so that's about it for this one thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one okay well it's it's not that simple sure something newer is going to be more efficient and therefore save you money on your power bill but how much and if you already own something or can find something used for half the price let's say what which one's going to be the more affordable option well that starts to get really tricky especially if you're not just trying to figure out what's going to save you the most money but what's also going to be best for the environment let's hop over to my computer and take a look at some stuff really quick okay so I'm over here at my computer and I have this little calculator pulled up because I find this kind of stuff fun you might not and I apologize but yeah let's dive into it so right here I have my two PCS the I5 here with the 6500t and the one with the n100 and what we can do is we can give it some idle power draw numbers here like let's go with our Linux numbers so five and four and so this will generate how many kilowatt hours per day but we have to give it a cost so where I live it's about 12 cents a kilowatt hour but let's go with something like 35 which might be more representative of something in oh not $35 jeez 35 which might be more representative of somewhere in Europe for example and then we can give it a number of years so let's say over the course of 3 years and we can see with this cost for power in over 3 years we'd be paying $36 or $37 roughly for the n100 PC and 46 for the I5 6500t but we also have to think through the cost that we're purchasing these systems for so for the M100 PC you know if we spent $170 on that Camu ak2 and then let's say I feel like it's probably fair that you could find the HP Elite desk with an SSD for around $100 if not less so if we put that value in we can see over the course of 3 years even paying 35 per kilowatt hour we'd be spending more money on the newer system now to be clear these numbers aren't exact this isn't an exact science this is just sort of getting a rough idea of what some of these costs might actually look like and I find it helpful to put stuff into a spreadsheet like this to get a better idea of what we would actually be spending if we were looking at these two options now to be fair these systems probably aren't going to be sitting completely at idle all of the time so let's let's give some numbers here like maybe six Watts for the n100 and let's go up to like 15 for the I5 6500t say occasionally they are crunching some data and they're going to draw a little bit more power well now we can see that over the course of 3 years with that power cost we're going to spend a little bit less on the n100 in total versus the older I5 system and then let's go crazy here let's say we're running Camin R15 non-stop so we'll put those numbers in and we can see over the course of 3 years we are definitely going to pay more for the older system but now I'm curious because where I live power is pretty cheap so let's change this to 12 cents per kilowatt hour and over the course of 3 years running CCH R15 all constantly those prices are actually really similar if we only ran it for 2 years I'd actually be saving money by going with the older much less efficient system so it's important to keep in mind both the initial cost of the PC you're looking at as well as the long-term cost of power and that's going to change based off how much electricity costs where you're at but I don't just want to talk about how much this is going to cost you I I kind of like to talk about the environmental impact of these PCS and this isn't because I'm getting up on my soap box and talking about climate change and everything but I do get the comment pretty often when I'm talking about older computers that I should just throw those in the trash they belong in a landfill I need to use something newer that's more efficient because that's better for the environment which is interesting because I feel like people don't take into account the manufacturing cost on the environment of those newer systems if you look through pretty much any study that covers the environmental impact on computer manufacturing and usage they pretty much all say the exact same thing which is manufacturing and shipping are far more detrimental to the environment than the long-term usage and typically the recommendations of any article I've seen are that we should try to repair and reuse stuff when possible rather than buying new stuff because that encourages manufacturing of new materials which has a much higher impact on the environment so I made this other little calculator here which I think is fun which is very similar we have our power draw kilowatt hours per year but now we're looking at pounds of CO2 emissions per year and I do have this manufacturer cost here which to be clear there was a manufacturing cost on the older I5 system but if we're buying that secondhand we're not really incentivizing a company to manufacture another product so that's why this value is zero and then this 330 lb value I got here was roughly half of most of the estimates I saw for a laptop which a laptop's going to be a lot worse because you're also having manufacture a screen and so this is sort of just a guess once again these are not exact numbers this isn't an exact science but I tried to get a rough estimate based off what I could find on the internet that the manufacturer of a Mini PC like this might have in terms of CO2 emissions so that's where this 330 number came from now down here we can put the number of years so you know let's say two years whatever but then this pounds of CO2 emissions per kilowatt hour that's very dependent on what type of power generation we're talking about because there's very clean types of electricity generation but there's also really not clean types of electricity generation so for example coal everywhere I found was around the 2.2 lb of CO2 per kilowatt hour so let's do 2.2 let's assume all of our electricity is coming from coal generation and it's it's let's go with our oh we could start with uh the rough numbers here let's do 4118 this is our running cin bench all the time and you can see over the course of 2 years even without having any manufacturer cost here our I5 system is causing 1580 lb of CO2 emissions versus the 10,24 so in this case the older system is a lot worse for the environment than the newer system but what if we change our numbers to something like the idle power draw running Linux so let's say four watts and 5 watts and we'll even bump this up I I'll say like 7.4 I don't know we once again these aren't exact numbers I'm just kind of giving an idea you know I'll go back to I think we did 15 and five these are pretty generous for the n100 here if we're taking into account primarily idle power draw but also occasionally running a workload and we can see that over the course of two years once again it's closer but the I5 system is worse for the environment than the n100 but that's assuming that our electricity is entirely generated from coal where I live for example the majority of our energy comes from natural gas followed by a very close second of wind energy which everywhere I've read natural gas only emits about one pound of CO2 per kilowatt hour generation and uh now this number starts to look a lot different and realistically based off where I live wind generation is a close second and that is closer to zero so this number might be lower than one but we'll stick with one and over the course of two years we can see that the emissions cost just in terms of CO2 emissions is substantially worse coming from the n100 let's bump it up to like 5 years okay now so over 5 years we're looking at something different four years we can kind of play around with this a little bit but once again if we just go with the straightup idol running our server not running any sort of workload very often over the course of 20 years it's going to take a long time before yeah okay 50 years 40 years let's see all right it's going to take 38 years before the older I5 has a worse impact on the environment than the n100 and this also isn't taking into account the other issues of manufacturing computer components like Wastewater and Mining of rare Earth elements and labor issues there's a lot more that goes into it than just CO2 emissions but I did find it interesting to pull up this actual data and see what the impact could potentially be like and if you're just looking at CO2 emissions by far the manufacturing stage is the worst contributor for emissions so by reusing older equipment when possible and disincentivizing companies from manufacturing more components you're actually making a better impact on the environment in terms of CO2 emissions by using older less efficient Hardware now once again I am not up on my soap box here I am not telling you not to buy new computers I buy new computers all the time but if your rationale is okay I'm going to buy this new computer because it's going to be more efficient and therefore less expensive for me to run and better for the environment it's probably a good idea to put some thought into both of those aspects to make sure you're actually achieving what you want to achieve so hopefully this was helpful let's hop back over to where I'm in front of the camera over there if you are looking for a new PC to run a home server on anything with an n100 is probably going to be a pretty good choice because let's be honest most of us when we're building home servers overspend on CPU resources for me at least I've noticed that most of the stuff I run can get by without a whole ton of horsepower from the CPU and something like this is probably going to get the job done just fine plus it's really efficient and you get some cool perks like the integrated GPU that handles transcoding really well however if you are running some stuff that's really demanding on the CPU you might find that this doesn't quite have the horsepower and you should also keep in mind some of the other limitations of the CPU like memory channels and pcie lanes because it only supports one channel of memory a lot of the devices you buy it in are only going to have one slot making upgradeability a little bit more difficult and because the CPU only supports nine Lanes of PCI gen 3 even if you go buy a cool ITX motherboard like this one you're going to be limited in what you can do in terms of expandability also because of the race to zero to have the cheapest n 100 PC you can buy there's a really good chance you might end up with something that's a little bit Yeah I do want to thank camur for sending this over for me to take a look at and if you're in the market for one of these and you don't need dual Nicks and you can find these for a good price it's a fairly decent option now if you're interested in some other Home Server type stuff maybe check out this video right here as always thank you guys so much for watching especially my RAID members stay curious and can't wait to see you in the next [Music] one

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 528,016

Keywords: n100, n100 mini pc, n100 power draw, n100 home server, ak2 plus mini, best low power home server, super low power home server, effecient home server, low power mini pc, alder lake, kamrui, n100 jellyfin, n100 plex, n100 mine craft server, n100 minecraft server

Id: PisIPpbMkTc

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023