FANLESS 7W Homelab Fantasy Mini PC

@ServeTheHomeVideo This has great potential to do practical example of hyperconvergence labs for cheap… 3 of those, 1 2.5Gbps managed switch… and you can give a very complete demonstration of vSAN and AzureStack HCI, very very easily. Excited about this posibility.

What was that stress test software?

I wonder if you could split the power output that's used for the sata ports. That way you could run more sata ssd's if you put a pcie card on there.

So all i would need is a monitor, mouse and keyboard then i could start programming? I dont need it to play games, i already have a phone for that

I love your opening with: "THIS …".

Seems like it'd be pretty trivial to design and 3D print a clip-on or screw-on carrier for a bracketless PCIe card to hold it more securely in place.

How this cpu for Plex server hardware decoding?

You know what might be cool to mess with? A mini PC that you strap [onto] a full size graphics card. 🤪 Whoever makes it will have to include APIs for popular card drivers. Something most SBCs lack.

This! This right here is so cool! I’ve been lurking around the ZimaBoard & this thrashes it on many levels. I was thinking that you could probably 3D print a carrier/hot-swap tray to screw onto the top of the chassis for the dual 2.5” drives. Super fun!

The unused fan mount could be used for a bracket that can hold the sata drives and the pcie card.

I love the N100, but this just seems soo not right for everything….sure, building a low power "Jack of all master of none" machine.
And theres soo many options in that price bracket….soo the only time i can see this make perfect sense is if you want an overpriced or underpowered toy…..or want to upgrade your Zimaboard 🙂

All in all, a pretty "Meeeeh!" product, reviewed in an entertaining way.
Keep up the good work!

To sum up I still think it's useless. Why? Let's take a look at the pros and cons. All pros come with a "but": small, compact … but if adding disks or pci-e components it's not compact and small anymore; cheap (rather?) but if consider all the necessary components needed – it becomes almost the same price as more powerful machines: passive cooling and quiet? But the performance is terrible; pci-e slot? But it is not placed good and you have to invent smth to make it work, and it is only 4 lanes; RAM slot? But it is single-channel and supports little amount of ram (8 gigs for Windows? Seriously?.. Open the browser… 16 Gb is the bare minimum for desktop usage and for server to make it usable you always need way more – I am not even talking about zfs filesystem requirements…); …. And other similar things. So basically what it is? An "ok, but" piece of hardware? What is it actually good for? It doesn't even have the gpio pins for the IoT / home experiments usage… Sorry but it feels really unnesessary in this configuration and form.

Thanks again for a next great review – I love your videos 👍
You made a short comparsion to the Zimaboard. Was it ment to the Zima board or blade?
I would be happy if you would make a real comparsion. Meaning this tiny little pc vs blade vs board. As a runnung system with som VMs in Proxmox for example.
What are the systems consuming in idle or with some permanently running tasks like smart home with pulling data like temperature or what ever situation would fit to real live.
That would be great ❤.
I yust want to set up a Proxmox Smart Home system on a high availebility Proxmox cluster. If I am doing smart home, I don't want to stay only on one system.
So it should run for a long time and because of that power is very interesting to me.
(Also I didn't found any video, that yust compares the both Zima board and blade with each other according power, performance and other capabilitys.)
Again, thanks a lot – and I also would appreciate some short words from you according the above topic if you have some more knowledge on that 👌

100v 1.5A? so power supply uses up to 150w to output 36w? why?

This kind of n100 mini PC are great but price should be around 100USD and should have type-c power supply, 2 x 32GB memory slots, 2 x nvme slots high speed, 2 x 2.5 Gbps or upper, fanless with optional external fan, few usb3 ports, DP/HDMI at 60+ Hz, small slots for PCIE extensions 😊

I'd totally buy one at a $50 price point

I've been running a little fanless PC like this for the past 15 years as my webserver. 400mghz and 112K of RAM. Works great, no reason to upgrade. But maybe I would just for the heck of it, if they can get the price down to $50. I didn't pay anything for my unit, it was an HP thinclient I got free and repurposed.

my home server is an old hp pc, 3rd gen i5. its a proper 24/7 server running esxi and 4 vms. it was very cheap, it can handle anything, its expandable. power draw around 35 watts.

Was eyeing this little thing for a month now. Seems like nice little low power box for DIY NAS build or Pmox cluster node if you need PCIe capability. Plan on ordering one, pairing with LSI HBA and prinring a case for it

This thing is just weird. What were they thinking?

Is that the Zimaboard's cousin…?

Seems too expensive for what it is. 4 cores really? Nahhhh

Nice little PC for Mobile Entertainment like RV or Car Stereo applications.

i have a few things that are 12v. i was thinking of having a DIY 12 v PDU 1U. Seems plausible?