Mini PC advice?
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My main PC is a bit of a beast, built specifically for running demanding flight simulators and the like. It's an i7-13700K with 64GB RAM and an RTX4090. It's what you might call hungry for power. I haven't put it on a meter yet, but I know it's drawing its fair share of electricity. (It's not a bad alternative to a panel-heater in the winter, so that's a plus!)
I'm considering getting myself as little Beelink (or similar) N100 mini PC to run a Plex server on. I used to be able to run Plex on my NAS drive, but Seagate decided last year that my perfectly functional NAS was vintage and "end-of-life" and pulled all the services for it, meaning the Plex software on it is out of date and also seemingly impossible to update. So the idea is to use an N100 as the server and simply plug the old NAS drive into that to use as storage. From what I've read an N100 usually only draws about 5-10W of power, so a fraction of what my main rig is using meaning I can happily leave it on 24/7 and not worry about turning the main rig on and off again every time I want to watch something in the living room.
What I'm wondering now is would it make sense to run my torrent client on it too? Again, fraction of the cost of the main PC and on 24/7. I can't see why not, but I'm wondering if anyone has any words of wisdom/caution when it comes to this. I'm undecided on just getting one for Plex due to the initial cost, but if its practical to run torrents on it too.....
Any thoughts? For reference, this is the unit I was considering getting, but if anyone has a sensible alternative without going wildly more expensive...
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I have two mini PCs, one has an old Atom processor, and the other is i5-4570T. Not sure of the power consumption. Both run Linux with no GUI. When I run torrents on the Atom when downloading at a high speed I can't access the torrent web interface, the system can't handle the workload, so I just wait. My i5 has been handling everything4 fine. I run HandBrake on it for movies. It's slow, so I start it up before going to bed. Again I don't know what the N100 can do.
If you want to run Plex you'll need to see how N110 performs at transcoding. Personally I have my media server NFS mount my media. Then just play it as a local drive.
You can get a cheaper unit than the Beelink with a i5-6500T.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ureon327LrE&t=984s
With the Dell you can have a 2.5 HDD which would be cheaper. Again it may use a little bit more power, but the system would do more.Hope this helps.
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@baddawg Thanks. I opted for a Trigkey G4 N100 mini-PC in the end, and started porting everything over to it a couple of days ago. It's a bit of a slow process transferring lots of files over, but I'm getting there. Currently have it set up with 4 USB HDDs connected through a hub, plus of course the old NAS drive available too.
The Plex library isn't very large yet, as I've normally deleted stuff after I've watched it, but I'm sure it will grow with time. I've also got all my porn running through it, and though I know PLEX could probably handle the job it would mean spending a lot of time reorganizing everything, so for the time being I'm going to continue running StashDB on it which is fine for local access. I'm not sure If it will allow remote access yet, so I'll need to investigate.
The N100 is struggling a little bit right now, but I'm asking a lot from it. Once I've got everything moved around and all my scans finished I think it should be OK. Torrents are taking forever to allocate for large downloads, but that's probably due to all the other stuff I'm doing with the disks at the moment. I'm hoping it settles down eventually.
As for power, I tried running my gaming rig through a power-monitoring smart plug for a couple of days, and at idle it drew around 0.12 kW per hour, costing roughly £0.85-£0.90 per day if I left it on. The N100 is sitting at around £0.10 per day, so the £150 to buy it should be covered in around 6 months. Not bad at all IMO.