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Is The Ace Magic S1 A Good Homelab Mini PC?
Is The Ace Magic S1 A Good Homelab Mini PC?
#Ace #Magic #Good #Homelab #Mini
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Router, the only Router on that small ones is either OpenWRT or VyOS.
Might be a nice little kodi box
The NICs let this machine down. If you know, you know.
It really is a shame that it's RealTech Network cards.
This crap vendors provide no bios updates. Alone for that i would not buy this chinese boxes.
Would be great if the display was accessible using, for example, python API. Small home server with low consumption, running some filestorage (NextCloud) and Homeassistant… This would be perfect for it.
I assume W11 home? Is there a model with Pro or Enterprise available pre-installed?
First
You should do a video on how to avoid, or choose, these low price "novelty" mini PCs. Some of them I've never heard of and look sketch. .
Heat in a homelab? Sleep in the homelab at night. My apartment when I had multiple Pentium 4s was always warm during the winter!
Honestly, if the Display functionality was more open source, what this seems great would be as a home media box.
Like a TV Plex player, etc, where you can set the small display to show progress, etc.
The dual 1Gbe, specially Realtek, kills it for anything home lap aspect for me.
Nowadays, I start expecting minimum 2.5GbE.
I purchased one back in early November, and immediately the RGB software was tagged as malware by MS Defender. So I reimaged the unit, but then the LCD screen didn't function. I reached out to them and they were pretty receptive. I installed MS365 and Adobe on it, only connected one monitor to it, connected it to the corporate network and it runs just fine for what we do. I requested a quote from AceMagic for 6 units as it is time to start cycling out our old Lenovo SFF units.
This will run my homeassistant server nicely as an upgrade to my full desktop 7th gen intel machine
Use it as a home assistant server
Looks like a nice enough box to run Kodi on
I would really rather go for a used Thinkstation Tiny with at least an i5 for the cores to run VMs on. For a HTPC this might be nice, but the screen software just feels sketchy, and I would rather wipe the included Windows 11 install for a clean one.
Makes me miss the NUC line…
I'm running pfsense on a Beelink EQ12, 8gb ram, N100 CPU, which has 2x Intel 225V NICs, which works like a charm. My Internet feels faster although my previous router was an Asus AX92u, which was no slouch. On Tom's advice in several videos I have avoided Realtek for pfsense, although, if you ran pfsense on Proxmox and let Proxmox deal with the NICs directly I assume that would solve the problem.
1G, at 23 years old, why didn't they install 2.5G and the screen is not needed at all, I wouldn't spend money on it
Since it has 2 NICs, it might be a good choice for a firewall (OPNSense, pfSense, or Sophos XG Home Edition).
So they don't run Linux?
I was looking at one of these to run PiHole and a few other services on and it would great to have the display showing system stats on my Internet shelf but sadly as you found out it Windows Only.
That's a decent little box. I'd be curious how well it performs with 4k content and maybe used as a remote server (maybe a game server :cough:valheim:cough:). If you're bored and wanna do an extra video or article I'd love to hear about it.
Price already went up 5 bucks. Also a little disappointed it only has one so-dimm slot. Cant have everything at that price and size though.
There are plenty of mini PCs with more powerful CPUs such as N100, N200, or i3-N305. They're passively cooled, have several 2.5G NICs, expandable RAM, NVMe, etc. The pricing is about the same. Most of them have CWWK motherboards. Always buy your own RAM and SSD as the bundled stuff is junk.
I have been using an N5105 unit from HUNSN (CWWK clone) for close to a year with Proxmox virtualized pfSense and I really like it.