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I know this has been talked about ad nauseum but the new Intel Alderlake CPU are really good and low power consumption. Recently got one with a N100 with removable 16GB of RAM 500 SSD and and it’s been an absolute workhorse. You can get a N5105 for about a Rpi 4 8GB price as well.

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I just ordered a N100 unit too after I saw this[1] Reddit post about doing 7x 1080p transcode streams without sweating.

There are some variants around, some with multiple NICs like this[1] ridiculously tiny thing sporting a N5095, some with a 2.5GbE port etc. I picked up this[3], but haven't received it yet so can't vouch.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/11u30jx/inteln100_6w_...

[2]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005461064337.html

[3]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005142509880.html

I think you’re gonna love it, mine has a dual 2.5G Intel NIC. If I had to do it again, I might prefer the fanless CWWK ones with 4 NICs so I can do a LAGG or increase my bandwidth to my switch. A bit more expensive but more rugged and suitable for my application.

Wait how do you get a N5105 at $75? The lowest I've seen still go for over $100 and they're barebones units.

x86 pricing is getting down to ARM SBC levels for sure, especially considering the recent rounds of decomissioning older non-Win 11 prebuilt mini boxes, but AFAIK it's not there yet.

It’s annoying but for whatever reason these vendors have special coupons randomly on their direct site or clip and save on Amazon (but there’s 50 listings for the same product so you have to get lucky). I got a N5105 with 16/256 for $130 shipped. Cheaper brands like ace magician has them at them at the cusp of $100.

I haven't been able to find them for cheaper than say ~$120 USD. I purchased two "GMKtec Mini PC Windows 11 Pro Intel 11th Gen N5105" on amazon for $115 each after a coupon. These are the 8GB Memory and 128GB SSD version. I'm okay with that price for an x86 CPU (even though it doesn't support AVX). There are a few other brands you can find out there with either a N5095 or N5105 (Alibaba even had 16GB memory versions).

Right, but an 8G RPi is $75 MSRP, so this is over a 30% - 50% higher cost!

For most projects that really _need_ a Pi (for the GPIO, CSI etc.), most don't require the 8G version, and you can get by with a 2 or 4G which is closer to $50 or less.

If the goal is compute/$ (or for that matter, compute/W) though, Pis are nowhere near being the most efficient for that and haven't been for years.

What's the real power consumption under full load and idle?

I use mine with OPNSense so it’s hard to say since it never really idles. But a N100 has a 6W TDP to begin with. I draw about 12W peak (the fan is what kills) and 7W nominal.

CPU TDP does not have much to do with power consumption of the complete product. Anyway, those numbers seem to be comparable to high performance ARM boards. Compared to boards in Raspberry Pi's ~$50 range, that idle power consumption is still about 5x higher than those 7W on Intel N100.

N100 is also a bit pricier than N5105.

My real world usage for a Rpi 4 is pretty close to 5W nominal, 8W peak (but I do run a zigbee/zwave and NVMe ssd). My Zero W is pretty close to 2.5W but it’s overclocked. I’m pretty sure you can underclock the CPU and RAM, and under voltage the RAM, and you’ll get very close numbers to a Rpi. Has to be a N100 though, didn’t look into but a N95 is significantly more inefficient

Then Rpi4 is very inefficient even compare to other ARM boards.

RK3399 based boards idle at 1.7W or ~1.2W with a binary blob TF-A firmware and suspend to 200mW. My Allwinner H3 based boards idle at similar power levels and I haven't measured suspend to RAM. On A64, suspend is ~60mW and is fast so it can be used regularly and you can wakeup the board in response to work being needed.

The 4x 2.5 GbE model I have draws 7-8W idle, 12-18W under load, add 1W per active network port.

The Pi draws considerably less at idle, so could be worth it if you just have light or small bursts workloads and don't need the performance.

Can you tell me the model and make you have? Been eyeing the Topton and CWWK ones and debating on an upgrade down the road. I’m currently running mine to a cheap flex mini since it only has a dual NIC. Hoping to upgrade down the road once I get everything working.

Thanks for some real numbers. :)

It really bothers me that ZERO of these mini PCs offer 10/25gbe or at least a single small PCIe slot to add it. They would be a dream for clustered storage...

They have limited PCIe lanes. The N100 I ordered has a 2.5GbE and from what I can see only a x2 M.2 M-key slot. However that should be sufficient for a 10G adapter, so while perhaps janky you could try to fit one of these[1] in there.

Will have to resort to the 2242 M.2 SATA slot for storage though, or the USB ports.

[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005065403928.html

LattePanda has PCIe slots, if you prefer: https://www.lattepanda.com/blog-308782.html

2.5gBE devices are also becoming more mainstream (Like Orange Pi 5 Plus, Radxa Rock 5).

The main problem is not the interface in most cases, but the internal bandwidth on these boards.

I'll be spinning up an Orange Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM as a home server shortly. Let's see how it goes.

I'm not really talking about the little "Pi-class" ARM SOC boards, but more the "edge compute" type hardware market that might be served by a small stack of NUCs. The internal bus on the Pi's SoC maxes out at 3.6gbps; it's clearly a non-starter for a high-IO project, but there are plenty that would be highly serviceable.

It’ll be tough because you would need a dedicated PCIe x4 bus and above. I’m not sure many of these low power CPU would support that on top of supporting a SATA bus. Zimaboard has a PCIe expansion slot but it’s limited to 6.0 Gbps (guessing they use the rest of the bandwidth for something else like storage).

You can increase your bandwidth if you have a multiple NIC computer though. You can tie in 2X 2.5Gbps to get about 4 Gbps to your switch.

Edit: assuming you mean 25G and not 2.5G?

There's plenty of bandwidth despite the limited number of lanes; I'd think with a PCIe switch everything would be just fine...

100gbe is already pretty affordable, like Mikrotik's switch. Not an overkill considering a single consumer NVMe drive cam do ~50 Gbit/s.

One 100G QSFP28 module costs about $100. 100g Mikrotik CRS504-4XQ-IN switch costs about 600-700 bucks.

Consumer PC mainboard side the problem is often insufficient PCIe lanes. Except in server products...

I just want 2 decent nics, 2 nvme, 8-16gb ram, and a cpu, that's all. Damn thing can be headless for all I caree.

Instead all these boards all have six video outputs and usb connectors protruding from every single edge. No shit you don't have any PCIe lanes left after you spent it putting three 10gbps usb ports on the front. Is it just because they can?!?

I'd like 100 gigabit ethernet, 128 GB ECC, 4x NVMe and still enough PCIe lanes for some GPU for ML.

Seems to be impossible without going to server mainboards.

You seem to be aiming a bit above what I am after. Almost any AM5 board would get you there with a couple of PICe cards though. Dont think I've ever seen a board with "onboard" 100GBe; the high end has mostly moved to OCP3.0. There is one single board computer that has an OCP3 slot which is actually a pretty nice idea for SBCs; perhaps we will get something similar to the R86S but with a more powerful cpu and some additional storage io soon.

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