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.
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.
Throw zenamor and suricata at the OPNsense VM
IDS, L4 firewall and video streaming from the same machine? It can be done.
Should you do it? That’s a lesson I’m gonna leave to you to learn yourself. For personal growth.
With 2 pinned CPU cores, pci passthru of an Intel dual port NIC, RAM disk for logs, it should be fine. I see no issue.
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.
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.
That doesnt really change what I’m saying here…
Do you think you can’t have an AMD GPU with an Intel board and iGPU?
Because you absolutely can. This is a non-issue.
Sr-iov is electrically expensive to implement. You can have it, you’ll just pay more.