Buy a 7th gen Intel based tiny/mini/micro PC instead of a Pi or NUC. You get much more bang for your buck. 35W max draw. They are far more capable than people give them credit for. I run 3 of them (4 if you count the Mac mini).
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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Maybe you enjoy the "getting it to work" part more than me. I went from RPi to a cheap used miniPC from eBay. Installed Debian and bought a wireless keyboard with touchpad. Cheap and so much simpler. Plays all my flac music through Strawberry, plays all my movies at home and away. Easiest VPN setup, I don't use smart functions of my TV, just the miniPC for everything.
tldr: A used x86 desktop is better than a pi
I've never understood why so many people self-host on pis. If it's at home and not on a sailboat or drone, don't worry about the power consumption. Worry about having enough power for a smooth operation.
Like imagine your jellyfin skips during videos. Now you have to chase down the bottleneck and when you do, probably can't upgrade the hardware anyway.
Plus if the project doesnt have an ARM binary or container, you have to create a compilation workflow.
Hospitals and schools upgrade their hardware every five years or so (when windows starts to slow down). The x86 workstations go up for auction for cheap. I buy them direct at govdeals.com (usa) where they usually sell in lots. If you just need one, look on ebay where the units are typically resold. Either way you can find something decent for $50-$100.
So buy an x86. It will live forever and you can use your pi in a weather station or drone or similar project where size and power consumption matter.
In my own setup, I have jellyfin on one $50 workstation and homeassistant/frigate on another. I would not have space (resources) for both on one machine because frigate is doing object detection on six cameras (even with a hardware detector). So the homeassistant computer has that NPU and zigbee dongle and a big hard drive for the recordings. In the Jellyfin machine, I put a 12tb hdd for the media and graphics card that is really good at transcoding (I travel a lot and stream videos from home).
I'm in a similar situation currently hosting Pihole on my Pi's and Jellyfin on a SFF refurbished PC that's running some other project. I've decided to go with a NUC, most likely beelink, and intend to install Proxmox to then run container VMs for each of the various projects to more easily manage them.
I think this is kinda where I'm heading with how the comments are helping guide me. I started this journey nearly 10 years ago with my first house and it was a measly HP SFF junker I had pulled from... somewhere (I honestly don't recall how it materialized :P ), and had TrueNAS on it with a dinky 2x1TB non-RAID setup. I'd still like to keep my current 2x8TB Synology RAID1 as a separate entity until I deem the need for more local storage, so if I can fit all the brains into one unit for everything I'm hoping to use, so the Beelink/Minisforum/GMKTek route is my current path. Might I ask which model NUC you have?
I'm using a 2019 Dell SFF OptiPlex.
With the current 8TB data drive, it idles at 18w, but being Intel can convert or transcode very quickly.
With the previous 2TB drive it idled at 12w, little more than a Pi but far more capable.
I run my PiHole on it plus Jellyfin, HandBrake, etc. It also has 4 VMs using VMware for some other stuff as needed (testing mostly).
Hard to beat the bang for buck, or per watt.
How do you have it setup though? I got a hp elitedesk 800 micro and wondering what way to set it up
Can you be more specific?
I first ran Proxmox on it (which ran fine, just overkill for my use-case).
Now it's Windows server and anything I do on it is done in a VM via VMware Workstation (since it's free). So the host os doesn't see much change and any changes that break things can be rolled back via a VM snapshot. Proxmox ZFS would be better for this, but I don't need it, yet.
You could run any Linux distro on it then use KVM for virtual machines and also docker for things like PiHole and Jellyfin.
There's a million ways to skin a cat, though I like using VM's so if I need to move a service I just copy the VM to a new box. Even my docker stuff is in a VM for just this reason.
I was mostly just wondering which OS and how you have your pihole and jellyfin set up.
Oh that sounds epic actually. Just like Wizard said tho, I too am curious on your setup. What VM solution? I've been looking lightly into ProxMox, but I know nothing much more than the name so far lol.
I've run Proxmox on it, but it was overly complex and overkill for my use case.
Right now the host OS is Windows Server running VMware Workstation. Pihole runs in a VM (DietPi), which auto starts on reboot. Fast setup, runs as my DC, VM's as needed with enough performance (though not as much as I'd like for my virtualization goals).
Next box will be my own build since this one is limited on space.
Best bang for your buck in general, IMO, is going to be an off-lease mini or SFF from eBay.
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I use RPi 4 2Gb for Pi-Hole.
Just retired a broken 8th gen intel i3 laptop used for Jellyfin. Its replacement is a GMKTec G3 N100. 4 core 4 thread, single channel SDRAM, but 12th gen Intel which is capable of a wider range of encoding & transcoding. Came with 8Gb ram and 256GB Nvme. Cost Less than £100 on ebay. Jellyfin installed ontop of Debian & very pleased with it.
Currently running Truenas scale with smb shares to service local network.
Additionally VPN on router provides access to home network.
I have a few redundant Rpi's sitting about now as I've consolidated and will be using more NUC/ MiniPC hardware in future. They're just better value at the moment for me.
Not looked at HA seriously yet, but its part of the plan
I use RPi 4 2Gb for Pi-Hole.
Pi-hole will run on far less than that. I run Pi-hole and PiVPN on a Zero W. Uptime is over a year now.
Yeah, most units I'm looking at now are of the 16GB/512GB flavor, as while that should be plenty of overhead for the time being, I'm wondering if 32GB is the better way to go to give even more buffer and cache space traded off with a smidge more upfront cost. I hope to eventually repurpose the Pis with something else, or donate them to my school's tech program (yay DoE crumbling :( ), as I currently have one of my RPi4s running Steam Link for my housemate. Freeing up the other Pi4 and the Pi3B+ for other things would be great.
This is going well for me - Jellyfin etc
Wow, yeah this looks great. 16GB/512GB for under $200 makes this a frontrunner for now. Outside of Jellyfin, what else do you run, and how do you have it containerized? I'm inching closer to Proxmox vs Docker due to issues brought up in other comments.
Dell refurbished 1L PC?
I am more of a Lenovo guy, but they are more or less the same anyway.
Here is a great list of these tiny PCs: https://github.com/a-little-wifi/TinySecrets
I have a NUC with an intel N6005 in it for around that price, very happy with it.
Looks like that's a bit under-powered compared to the N100, but if it more than suits your needs, great! Again, I'm just happy with all the outpouring of info and ideas. Knowing that most NUCs are quite a bit more powerful than Pis is the best new in itself.
yeah it handles 4k streaming fine, everything else is easier than that so all good to me!
I think the N100 units are still the best value.
While N100 is great for what it is, especially at a $200 budget, it can be limiting with its fairly small core/thread count if you expand beyond a handful of applications.
OP mentioned tinkering with multiple Linux flavors. A higher end cpu, with more cores and threads, would allow them to virtualize multiple instances on top of whatever other workloads they have and potentially not break a sweat while the N100 could struggle. While such an upgrade would be more expensive, price for performance will likely be significantly better if you can make use of it.
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I've found that you don't need to go that far above the $200 cost of an Intel N100/150 system to get a mini PC with a significantly more powerful AMD processor. It won't be the latest generation but it will be capable of a lot more than those low-power Intels, and from my measurements many AMD processors of the last three generations or so are good at saving power when they're idle, so it won't use a ton more electricity. Sometimes you find used ones on eBay at a decent price because someone upgraded.
But is it necessary? I'd rather focus more on the tdp.
I know I could just boost the tdp of the n150 if I did want more power, but I see people here running stuff on 10 year old laptops and older Intel n series stuff seemingly without a problem.
Wouldn't that laptop use so much more power that it costs you more in electricity though? At least that is usually the problem I hear with it, not sure what a good low spec option is currently once electricity prices are included. IIRC N150 is pretty good, not sure if there are other good/better options though.
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I was hosting most of my Docker stuff on my Synology DS920+, use Docker in a Pi 4B for AdGuard Home and WireGuard, and found myself wanting to use Home Assistant.
Can't use Docker for HA if you want HACS (addons) and Synology decided to kill USB drivers some time back, so looked around for options. Considered a Nabu Casa Yellow with a CM5 compute module (for Voice PE) and its price was more than a GMKtek N150 NUC, which has far higher specs and enough headroom for other things. So I got the NUC.
First thing I did was nuke Windows and replaced it with Proxmox, then installed Home Assistant OS (HAOS) as a VM in it. Plenty of headroom left, so now it's also got a Linux VM, a few LXCs, etc. (The Proxmox Helper Scripts site makes it very easy).
Could easily install AGH or PiHole and a bunch of other things on it. Think it's the best bang for buck thing I've bought in years.
Yeah the HA Docker ish is the one thing I got concerned about, as I already needed to install HACS to integrate my Govee lights into it. For now, I'm also looking at the HA Voice Preview for voice integration, as I'm sick of having my shitty Google Homes all around unable to handle simple requests (like failing to turn on/off lights).
As much as I want to nuke Windows on my main rig, I try to play a lot of VR (especially heavily modded SkyrimVR), and after getting those games tweaked just right, it'd be quite the hit to me if I had to redo all of that again.
Genuinely interested in ProxMox tho, as if I can run all systems in their individual containers (a la Docker w/o the HACS issue) on one main device with a low power overhead, I'm all ears.
The NUC def seems like the best option, although from an earlier replay of mine, I'm still looking into seeing how far I can take the Pi4. MicroSD cards are still far less pricey than a new system after all.
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