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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

Intel NUCs are so *insanely* good for homelabbers.

I got a few recently, and they're just great, particularly in terms of power usage. I hooked mine to tasmota-powered smart plugs, and they idle at something like 6W ... Granted, I always tune hardware (from bios config) and software (tuned profile) for low power... But long story short, my nucs rarely spike over 30W.

Literally half of one of those old tungsten-based lightbulbs.

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Personally, I thought the NUC style boxes were really expensive. I like odroid H2/H3 SBCs[0] - they have much less compute power, but support large memory (DDR4 up to 64G), SSD/NVME, dual on-board nics (up to 2.5Gbps), X86 based and just sip on power (2 watts idle, 15w stress, 18w cpu+gpu stress).

0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

I got a Ryzen 7 5800H with 32gb of ram and a 1tb hard drive for 320€... I don't have the dual on board nic, but beside that, it's quite great cpu wise with Proxmox — multiple VM on it, doing transcoding, DNS, dealing with download and search, Home Assistant. Of course transcoding 4k live is costly, but that's an exception. I can use NVMe and SATA hd, that's nice.

And I can update the ram and use ECC.

Not bad all in all !

Still, I got a Dell SFF with an I5 and 16gb of ram for less than 100€ — updated it with a 4 2,5gbps NIC, will be good for OPnsense... If I don't switch to a Melanox Connect 3.

Very Nice :-)

I don't really need that much horsepower (My stuff is like 90% idle - git server, etc.) but I _really_ appreciate the lower noise and power usage compared to my old Xeon blades

I didn't know ODROID was in this market, that's awesome! Definitely checking them out next time I need hardware, the H3 looks perfect.

I sound like a shill - I have no affiliation, just a customer but I _LOVE_ the H series :-)

plenty of power for my needs, silent, low power ... and CHEAP! I especially love the large RAM capacity as it lets me run a lot of docker/vm/etc without swapping. Most of my stuff is idle like 90% of the time (stuff like git servers, etc) so the CPU is fine for me.

I've had mine for a few years now (I had the first gen..) and never any problems!

Don't worry, I'm actually (the original?) ODROID shill!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32619740

Glad to hear they never stopped doing what they were good at, sounds like they've gotten even better!

One of us...One of us :-)

I really hope more people hear of the H2/H3 stuff...I'd love for Odroid to keep making/improving them! :-D

Oh hey - that post was pretty cool :-)

Amazing how much a kind gesture sticks with you! Glad to see stuff like that these days :-D

NUCs may be expensive, until you see a 40% discount on Amazon :) I've got mine this way. Now they are discontinued so one may expect to get them cheap on eBay. Anyway, I'm talking about the box itself and MB/CPU only. Vendors/people often sell a good box with bad RAM/disks at a very low price.

They were discontinued by Intel but the brand was picked up by Asus [0], so not discontinued [1].

[0] https://www.asus.com/us/content/nuc-overview/ [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/say-goodbye-to-intel-nuc-as-asus-t...

Not only do NUCs sip power but they're embarrassingly fast for most "I want to play with servers" jobs. RAM is cheap and 32GB goes a long ways.

Any power tuning tips?

How do they compare to SFF (like thinkcentre tiny) or other minipcs (e.g. Minisforum um790)? Power usage seems to be fairly similar (5-7W) but maybe there are less obvious perks?

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