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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

To me the main problem would be the noise. I don't have a dedicated server room and even if me and my wife's bedroom + living room is quite big it'd still be annoying during the night. But I am quite fond of the idea to reuse old laptops regardless.

Can you post a link to those 7 year old micro towers, please?

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Yeah noise is why I didn’t go with surplus servers, and the power requirements. Proper servers are actually pretty cheap, less than these tiny towers even. But the power and noise is just too much. Plus less horsepower is actually more interesting to me so my workloads have a hope of hitting scaling limitations.

The tiny tower I have on the way is one of these: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/desktops/thinkcentre/m-series-t...

They’re available in a bunch of configurations and on multiple sites so you can look around for a good deal that fits your needs. I found one with an SSD for additional power savings.

Thanks a lot, I will.

In regards of power efficiency I'd still be drooling over one of the Xeon D-1600 configurations but haven't found one that's not in a rack form factor yet.

These industrial ones can be made quieter with Noctua fans:

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/Mini-ITX/SYS-E...

Also available with AMD Epyc Embedded (35W for 8 cores).

Question is: would they be quiet enough for a bedroom? I have a small closet where I could probably put 1 or 2 racks but not sure yet.

As a router, it's quiet in a desktop environment, unless the CPU is fully loaded. For a bedroom, silent is better than quiet, which could justify investment in a fanless case for mini-ITX. These are not cheap, e.g. Streacom or Akasa.

Broadwell NUCs are available on eBay and Newegg has a matching Akasa Plato X case for $100. With an SSD, that has no moving parts. But only dual core, single NIC.

> silent is better than quiet

In most cases the beefiest air cooler + the lowest tolerable fan curve (meaning no overheating) will do the job just fine, especially if the CPU TDP is between 35-65W. Alternatively you can also limit the CPU power usage by disabling turbo or doing other tricks that forces it to run slower, but more efficiently.

Woah these are really cool. $$$ for what amounts to bling in my case but I might still be interested in something like this. The NUCs are great but I don't see many of them on the second hand market. At least not as many as these thin clients.

This Broadwell 5th-gen NUC board is $135 refurb, https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-BLKNUC5I5MYBE-NUC5I5MYBE-Refu...

Some fanless cases here for different NUCs: https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/productlist.aspx?subm...

If you run plex, grab one with a 6th gen or newer Intel CPU as quicksync is brilliant for transcoding many streams on my 6500T and newer CPUs.

There are advantages to this, but do note that earlier core i* chips had earlier versions of QuickSync that work, it just wasn't as good as new versions (5th gen and newer).

Plex can use nVidia cards for hardware acceleration for encoding.

These features do require an active Plex Pass.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware...

Different gear, but you’re starting to see HP t630 thin clients on the market for <$100. They are silent and have standard m2 interfaces for storage and sometimes come with a bunch of memory.

Pretty good pointer, thank you!

Noise can be lowered cheaply on adapted laptops with a little work. Re-paste, cut out the fan grill plastic, keep the HSF assembly clean and fluff-free, run the fans slower. Keep the unit elevated on feet.

Replace the fan with a Noctua-type quiet model bolted on. If the HSF needs that airflow directed, hack a simple shroud (or 3D print a replacement.)

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