I do wish NVIDIA would release a new Shield already, as that would probably solve my problems, but the last one they released is like five years old at this point.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/cheap-functional-upg...
If you're not loading it heavily that might not be a problem.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/18794/asrock-industrial-4x4-b...
AMD's APUs are great for this form factor, but I think the Plex transcoding support is a YMMV situation.
It has been great and I have no complaints, except the wifi seems I bit slower on some torrent downloads than my laptop which is just 7 feet away from it. (I haven't delved into that to see if it is actually happening and if I can fix it.)
At the same time, I bought another for my elderly parents and they have used it for web and email with obviously no problem. They should be good with using it for that for another 5 years or more, assuming no hardware malfunction.
Overall, I would buy another BeeLink.
The N100 made me think "Intel is back!". The article's description is spot on - sips power (6W) yet snappy enough for day to day tasks. GPU isn't anything to write home about, but it supports hardware video codecs so it's fast enough for general web browsing. I'd guesstimate 10x improvement in MIPS/Watt over the GX-420CA based box it replaced.
The Beelink EQ12 case made me wish I had more time to find what I was really after: the same hardware in a fanless box. Fans have to be cleaned, and if you every have to take the thing apart to blow the dust out be prepared for to spend an inordinately long time getting the all screws back in. It's entirely possible you will give up.
But overall, it's a pretty awesome machine for the price. The N100 is undoubtedly the current sweet spot.
I’m curious if others have done something similar?
I got mine for €100 many years ago, including a power supply and an Intel pro SSD of 512GB. For that price I can't get a recent raspberry pi with decent SD card and power supply. I guess I do pay some more in terms of electricity, but it's reasonably efficient and the extra performance makes up for it.
Intel if you want to be sure to be able to run Linux, otherwise, they just run MacOS.
I built a smallish Proxmox cluster out of Lenovo M910q uSFF boxes - works pretty good and sips power (the i5-6500 series has a pretty good performance to power ratio imho).
RPi used to be $25 or $35 , and then use equipment lying around.
Now it's $80, plus high performance power, case, active cooling, storage, etc.
RPi is no longer in it's own original category. And when you compare via cost, it's a loser these days.
The only way the RPI isn't a complete loser is inertia, pure and simple.
If you are interested in a Pi that is in their original category, there are options available.
The advantage of the Raspberry Pi is the software. Raspbian just works and will continue to work. Other SBC might not work with their software and who knows if it will ever be updated. My understanding is that there are stable OSes for other boards, but then have to find boards that work.
I recently got Pi5 to use as computer, and microPC is probably better for that. But the Pi can be repurposed for other uses. I'm pretty sure I can pull the microSD card from Pi4 and put in Pi5 and it will just work. The Pi4, which is an awful computer, will do some thing that microPC can't possibly do.
I mean the title is withholding information and wants us to click on it.
Maybe the "Pi 5 is still an odd fit for day-to-day desktop use; cheap mini PCs come closer" subtitle would have been better.
The undisclosed hero feature is QuickSync. Jellyfin was practically unusable on the Pi4.
The only thing I'm missing is somewhere to slot in an Arc GPU. I'm pretty certain that some light local LLM inference would be possible.
I gave my parents my old Skylake and it's reasonably usable but that's an i5 quad core and for me that's where I draw the line.
I'm sure others will disagree and say how they're still running core 2 duos and they're perfectly fine, but that's just my opinion, and you can have yours.
I haven’t even booted it yet but I’m starting to think that a I should get them a Lenovo tiny and just keep my nuc as is. I hadn’t thought about the bios malware and now I’m concerned.
The main reason I went with the n100 was the power usage for me (my power is 50c/kWh, theirs is like 1/10 that). The nuc is around 20-30w average, I guess I can put up with that.
It would make the coolest paper weight that I own, though.
On a harder level: there is no way to know if the drive firmware has un-destroyable malware, or the boot firmware is compromised. (update the firmware yourself for sure at minimum, not sure thats even possible with most hard drives)
