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Should you bother with... mini PCs? (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
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[-] DdCno1@beehaw.org 8 points 1 day ago

Not to one-up you, but I'm doing the same with an Odroid H4+ board (no case yet, although I'll probably 3D-print one), which has the exact same transcoding feature as part of its Core i3-N305. It can handle multiple 4K HDR streams just fine (at least in theory - I'm only serving three users at once at most and none of them are using 4K HDR) - all while being passively cooled and using about three smartphones worth of power. Note that I had to use a dummy HDMI plug in order to get the hardware decoder to kick in, since I am using this as a headless server.

I paid €240 for it new, which is a steal (although you have to get SODIMM DDR5 memory for it, which isn't that cheap). On the official website, it's available for $139, but that's without shipping and import duties from South Korea.

Granted, apart from the transcoding feature, general-purpose performance is not even close to your i7, but I'm using less than half as much power for the same job. If you have an i7-1260P, you're about 70% ahead in synthetic benchmark, but my little i3 is still an 8-core CPU that has about 25% more CPU processing power than an old i7-4790k that I was using on my main PC (including for gaming) until last year. Since I am limited by my storage array going through a single SATA cable anyway, that's fine by me, especially since this thing replaced a significantly less performant Intel Atom-based mini PC I was previously using for the same purpose. My priorities were having multiple SATA ports, being low cost, efficient, quiet and small - and in that order.

People have also used the same board as a normal PC and reasonably capable low-end gaming/emulation machine, by the way. You can get a case that looks like a Nintendo GameCube straight from the manufacturer. Here's an overview video that includes it being used for this purpose.

[-] Icarus@beehaw.org 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Very nice! I don't find this a one up but I love the ingenuity. I managed to salvage this NUC from work because we shut down a zoom room from a agency we acquired at work and then disposed all the unneeded /nonuniform hardware. Before that point, I was looking at doing something quite similar to you.

I also had to use get an hdmi dummy plug. That was an annoying stumbling block. Just, why??

[-] DdCno1@beehaw.org 1 points 1 day ago

Apparently, it depends on whether or not a specific BIOS setting is available. I don't think there was on this board, but I might be wrong, since I already had the plug lying around and immediately used it when QuickSync refused to work. If you haven't had any experience with this before, it can definitely be annoying though.

[-] DrFuggles@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago

I'm really interested in this! How do you passively cool something like that? It's to get quite under load, no?

[-] DdCno1@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago

There's just a big ol' heat sink covering most of the board. Even under sustained 100% CPU load, I've never had it getting any hotter than 72° C, which is not even close to the maximum operating temperature of 105°. It's sitting under a desk in a corner with practically no air flow, almost completely enclosed from all sides.

You might need some limited active cooling if you are using the device for gaming, like a large and slow fan as shown in the video, but I wouldn't be surprised if you can get away without it.

[-] DrFuggles@feddit.org 2 points 9 hours ago

wow... that's incredible! thanks!

this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
71 points (100.0% liked)

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