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.
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.
You bought it from Aliexpress too?
Yes, the seller was Topton Computer Store. No complaints from me on the purchase/process!
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 only have myself and a family member. It’s mostly local use, but I do tend to use on multiple platforms - tv, phone, tablet. So my current setup does get around to transcoding a lot. Thanks for telling me about your gen4 i5 running a bunch of docker containers :)
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.
this is the usecase i want a personal unit for. I have a Pi4 which I use mostly for Ci/CD and maint but sometimes there is just no way to easily get something to run on ARM and I’m firing up a 800watt PC or a 160watt laptop again.
IMO either of the Intel options we are discussing here will work well for you.
Thanks! I think I’m gonna go for the N5105. I was looking at the spec diff between that and the N100 and though the N100 has more processing power, it seems the N5105 has better GPU for less price. Strange.
It’s always those details. I want the gpu so I can do transcoding of new files. Is you don’t need a gpu go for the 100
definitely considering transcoding as an option. Even if I use it for the github runner work, some of the data pipelines use puppeteer and Chrome, which needs a GPU for nicely rendering CSS. So I think the 5105 is the better bet… :)
wish these companies making soft routers would give a couple options with a nas case instead. 4 bay n5105 or n100 for cheap would be a nice low power side grade to my old e3,
I bought one, it was called the CWWK AIO-T6. Six bay, n5105 based in a nas form factor. Absolutely excellent, runs unraid well. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like CWWK sells it anymore… I got it for £329 with I think 16gb of ram and a 1tb nvme ssd on AliExpress.
soft(ware) routers?
Yeah. There are a lot of them, all pretty good. servethehome has done reviews for many- N100 version
If they removed all but one 2.5gbe port, it might not even be any more expensive to give 4 sata and a case.
Thank you for the link!! I’m gonna swallow that site if I can. 😆
I just picked up a similar one that i’ll use as a router. They work just like any normal hardware, you can do pretty much anything you’d want on them. Also they definitely are not paying for windows licenses, so they probably wouldn’t be any cheaper without.
I run Plex on essentially one of these (different case, but n5105/8gb ram, bought from AliExpress) and they’re great little machines for it. Most of my library is 1080p, but I have run 2 simultaneous 4k transcodes before and it just keeps chugging along happily. I’m actually running proxmox on it, with Plex being just one container out of several, so it also has the grunt to do several simultainious streams and keep my mastodon server, torrent box, pihole, and a few other things running at the same time. In my experience, you’ll run out of ram before ever chocking the CPU on a standard setup, so it might be worth upping to the n100 to get 16gs instead.
It wouldn’t be any cheaper for them to ship without windows, because the windows os youre getting from aliexpress sellers selling budget pcs is almost always counterfeit :p but installing Linux on them is a breeze, they’ve got a full standard uefi BIOS, so just plug a USB stick with Ubuntu on it in, and install as usual.
damn! Thanks for the LD. Did not expect you to say the Win will be fake :D But good to know about the RAM situation. I mentioned this elsewhere that the 5105 seems to do better GPU than the N100. So if some other seller has a 5105 with 16 GB RAM, I’ll go for that instead. Man I wanna play with proxmox. Just never had an idle machine to do that. Maybe this will be it.
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)
That’s brilliant clustering!! And yeah, I suspect not setup will work for a few years before needing whatever is the latest mini pc 😊
I bought a N5100 from AliExpress and I use it to run my -arr apps and Plex, and so far it has behaved really good. It’s fanless in an all-metal case and it gets a bit hot, but nothing you wouldn’t put your hand over. Weirdly, before I installed Debian in it, the BIOS and UEFI console made the CPU so hot I was worried it would not work without a fan, but after the OS took over, it’s working without any issue. I installed 16gb of ram in it and two SSDs, and the power consumption is so low I’m really amazed.
Edit: I might add, I bought it barebones, so I missed the W11 license, but I was never planning to use it anyway.
Wait, how did Debian fix the bios??
It probably didn’t. What’s probably happening is that when Debian starts, it loads power management, while being in the BIOS/UEFI still has everything at max.
I believe that the OS puts the CPU in a different state, that’s all. while the BIOS and the UEFI shell had it boosting all the time or something like that
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.
huh… I’ve not yet come across LibreWolf. Thanks for pointing me in that direction!
Thanks. What are your ideas on using this as a server?
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.
How many clients are you serving? That box is too OP for just a plex server.
I think I could run at least a dozen k3s containers on that, with enough RAM and storage
No clients. Just me and another family member. I’d love to hear how you’d serve up a dozen containers on that. How much RAM? 16 gigs?
Admittedly, I don’t know if Plex is CPU heavy.
I could run a bunch of applications like a reverse-proxy, a load-balancer, a DNS resolver, a VPN server, an rysnc/Syncthing server, scripts to archive data, downloaders, an internal CA (although that might not be the best idea since you need to carefully back it up), an MQTT server, and maybe other things. These are random examples that came to mind, I’m sure there’s plenty more that can be done.
Yes, I would go about 2TB of SSD storage and maybe 16-32GB RAM, although the latter might be overkill for this CPU.
Cheers
out of all those, I’m most curious about that MQTT server. What’s your usecase for that? These CPUs don’t support anything more than 16GB RAM, so there’s that :)
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.
