Hi I am currently struggling with deciding between Pis (all variants e.g. Orange Pi) and Nucs as I can’t find any for a reasonable price. Do you guys have any recommandation for me? German/European Stores maybe? I am looking for the best efficency to performance ratio for a low price. Basically just small computing units that I can cluster ideally in a 1U Rackmount.
I decided to go with Tiny/Mini/Micros personally. It consumes more than a Pi but it’s also more powerful. I can find second-hand TMMs locally with 8th gen Intel i5 for almost the same price as a Pi kit (Some Single Board Computers looks affordable, but you often need to add storage, a power brick, an enclosure, which can add up quickly!)
I use TMMs with a mix of 6th-gen and 8th-gen Intel i5. The 6th gen are decent for my needs, but the >7th-gen’s iGPU supports more codecs, which is useful if you want to stream HEVC. i5-8500T also have 2 more cores than i5-6500T!
Edit: those TMMs are used in a lot of businesses and often replaced every 3-4 years. They may be slightly more power hundry than newer hardware, but I like to think I am saving them from being e-waste!
What do you mean Tiny/Miny/Micros?
They are Ultra Small Form Factors PCs from the big brands. Lenovo ThinkCenter Tiny, HP EliteDesk/ProDesk Mini and Dell Optiplex Micro. They are small, quiet, they don’t pull a lot of power and they are not too expensive when you get second-hand ones that are decomissioned from business environments.
The only thing is that they don’t have a lot of room for expansion/storahe. Some some have 1x M.2 port for NVMe + 1x 2.5" slot, some have 2x M.2 ports. Most don’t have PCie ports (apart a few Tinys) but if you want affordable nodes, they can be great!
Edit: you can read more here https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
Hm okay thank you. I’ll read it
Another vote for TMM. Pi type devices will use less power at idle but probably by only around 5w. I have a Pi 4 that idles at 4-5w and HP Elitedesk g5 with i5 8500t that sits at around 9w. The performance difference between the two is night and day. Used Intel 8th gen really is getting to be the sweet spot with regard to price, performance, and efficiency.
Many of the business TMMs often use hardware that is easily supported across a variety of OSes common in homelabs as well, plus some have features like vPro that can provide OOB access similar (though not as full-featured) to IPMI
I’m adding yet another vote for the little 1 litre x86 thin clients. I run the HP 800 Minis but lots of people also enjoy the tiny ThinkCentres. My use case is very similar to yours - JellyFin for home media plus a few other services. I run them in VM’s under Proxmox. For transcoding, you can pass the Intel Quicksync into the VM (works without it, but is quicker to start up with it and doesn’t peg the CPU).
These little ex-business PC’s are really nicely made - upgrading anything the HP’s is a delight. There’s great technical manuals and they look good enough (and are quite enough) to have in your lounge or bedroom. Businesses tend to replace them at the three or four year mark so there’s always plenty around. I also find them more convenient than a Pi - proper hard drive bay, SODIMM memory etc.