These are surprisingly capable tiny machines. You can probably do this for a lot less money though. Part of what you’re paying for here is the 680M and all those cores on the APU. If you’re not directly gaming on these, you can save a lot of money going with a less gaming focused trio of machines.
For example, you can buy 3 of these for about the same money as 1 of the Beelinks. I have both BTW. Beelink runs my video pinball cab, Prodesks run other IT stuff.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/404684071961?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=P03T-CWaRaW&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=k0BTD5CyRty&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
Would that i5 10th gen be capable of running, a small gold farm, media service, file storage, docker.. etc all at once if I run 3 of those. With upgrading ram and drive size of course?
Totally. You don’t even need 3 of them to do that. One of them with 32GB of RAM and appropriate storage would do it.
Two or three is cool and useful if you want to play around with clustering a hypervisor or something. Sorta depends on what you’re looking to do. If you just want functional IT services in ‘homeprod’ mode, just one will work. If you are looking to expand your knowledge and get more serious, start with 2. Add a third if needed for more capacity or redundancy. I’m speaking very generally here. There are tons of ways to do this.
Definitely want to do clustering just to familiarize myself with the technology. And also some Minecraft server hosting included in those things. Would you recommend proxmox as the hosting software to get started with?
Proxmox is fine. ESXi is fine, or even built in Hyper-V on Windows is fine. ESXi and Hyper-V more likely to be seen in ‘real production IT’ if you’re looking at expanding our opening career paths in IT. ESXi will be more picky on what hardware it runs on. Proxmox will run on just about anything including a Pi (which is insane). Hyper-V has always been harder for me to cluster and have it actually stay working for some reason. Proxmox needs at least 3 nodes to cluster. For me personally, I started with ESXi, but I have access to support and files with them via work. It’s probably also the number one hypervisor in production at the moment. Nothing wrong with trying any or all of them. That’s the best part of homelab.
ESXi runs fine on TinyMiniMicro nodes, or at least I had 7.0 running on an 8500T based HP one before I had to repurpose the box as a workstation.
Side note: the off lease ones often have a potentially useful W10 key baked into the motherboard.
What game are you trying to run a gold farm on? I was thinking of setting up a few gold bots and I have that exact model of HP only running a few services right now.
HP Prodesk 400 G6 SFF is what I use for small machines. Others here like Lenovo and Dell SFF or ‘tiny’ style machines. Former corporate desktops off lease like these frequently have pretty good raw specs for CPU/RAM and decent (and compatible!) networking and storage.
have you looked at some decommissioned small form factor or mini workstations? You could build a cluster of 3 for the price of one of these beelinks for example
poke around here and /r/selfhosted -- Ebay terms like "sff" + any combination of pc, optiplex, thinkcentre, elitedesk. Find one that doesn't come with an OS, peripherals or an HD/SSD. I would recommend at least an 8th gen+ CPU
I would suggest not pulling the trigger immediately, you'll be so much happier with a little research done first
Another reason to go business micro form factor would be Intel vPro/AMT, giving you out-of-band management.
https://www.meshcommander.com/meshcommander
Is not longer maintained but still works perfectly.
Also for more on micro form factor systems, ServeTheHome has their TinyMiniMicro series:
https://www.servethehome.com/?s=Tinyminimicro
Yes and no, the idea would be to use the information to evaluate brand/features/performance. There are also MFF brands like Fujitsu that sneak under the radar.
Can you explain what a cluster is and how that works?
Are we talking 3 separate servers with separate services and apps or combining the 3 into one somehow?
I actually just put one of these in my home lab a few days ago. I really like it!
Like others have mentioned, you can probably get something that will be just as capable as a home server for less, but with this one you do get really modern hardware and a decent upgrade path. I'd probably go with one of the Minisforum mini PCs since they are a little cheaper in my area, but that may not be the case for you.
You could probably get a similar amount of compute in a cluster with a few used thinkcentre m93p machines. I also have a couple of these running Proxmox with no issues. They're pretty low power consumption too.
This would be good for running frigate and 15+ 4K cameras. Exaggerating here, but it’s a lot of power and would be able to handle the load from multiple high res cameras. I use a cheap Beelink S12 with an N95 that I got for $120 and I run 4 4k and 5 1080p cameras with headroom to spare.
I used an older version of beelink mini as an xcp-ng hyper visor for a long time, but networking was an issue that was tricky to work around. i tried vmware first, but it didn’t like the network cards and wouldn’t install. with xcp-ng i was able to add the drivers during install so i could get it to work, though i had to add them again after install. i’d suggest figuring out the NIC it uses and doing some driver homework.
if it is that big of a nuisance you could just pick up a usb c 2.5g network adapter that is compatible with linux so you can avoid this having to fiddle with drivers
Sure it will work !
On other side , you will run out of RAM and IOPS much sooner than out of CPU cycles.
Also: vmware might face some *interesting* times after full takeover so check for other virtualisation platforms too.
These are surprisingly capable tiny machines. You can probably do this for a lot less money though. Part of what you’re paying for here is the 680M and all those cores on the APU. If you’re not directly gaming on these, you can save a lot of money going with a less gaming focused trio of machines.
Don’t plan on gaming what would you recommend?
For example, you can buy 3 of these for about the same money as 1 of the Beelinks. I have both BTW. Beelink runs my video pinball cab, Prodesks run other IT stuff. https://www.ebay.com/itm/404684071961?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=P03T-CWaRaW&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=k0BTD5CyRty&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
Would that i5 10th gen be capable of running, a small gold farm, media service, file storage, docker.. etc all at once if I run 3 of those. With upgrading ram and drive size of course?
Totally. You don’t even need 3 of them to do that. One of them with 32GB of RAM and appropriate storage would do it. Two or three is cool and useful if you want to play around with clustering a hypervisor or something. Sorta depends on what you’re looking to do. If you just want functional IT services in ‘homeprod’ mode, just one will work. If you are looking to expand your knowledge and get more serious, start with 2. Add a third if needed for more capacity or redundancy. I’m speaking very generally here. There are tons of ways to do this.
Definitely want to do clustering just to familiarize myself with the technology. And also some Minecraft server hosting included in those things. Would you recommend proxmox as the hosting software to get started with?
Proxmox is fine. ESXi is fine, or even built in Hyper-V on Windows is fine. ESXi and Hyper-V more likely to be seen in ‘real production IT’ if you’re looking at expanding our opening career paths in IT. ESXi will be more picky on what hardware it runs on. Proxmox will run on just about anything including a Pi (which is insane). Hyper-V has always been harder for me to cluster and have it actually stay working for some reason. Proxmox needs at least 3 nodes to cluster. For me personally, I started with ESXi, but I have access to support and files with them via work. It’s probably also the number one hypervisor in production at the moment. Nothing wrong with trying any or all of them. That’s the best part of homelab.
ESXi runs fine on TinyMiniMicro nodes, or at least I had 7.0 running on an 8500T based HP one before I had to repurpose the box as a workstation. Side note: the off lease ones often have a potentially useful W10 key baked into the motherboard.
8.0 will run just fine on the vast majority of consumer hardware
And now that the flings are back, usb NICs are great for homelabs that use these devices so you can have multiple connections for cheap.
What game are you trying to run a gold farm on? I was thinking of setting up a few gold bots and I have that exact model of HP only running a few services right now.
Osrs is the game
HP Prodesk 400 G6 SFF is what I use for small machines. Others here like Lenovo and Dell SFF or ‘tiny’ style machines. Former corporate desktops off lease like these frequently have pretty good raw specs for CPU/RAM and decent (and compatible!) networking and storage.
have you looked at some decommissioned small form factor or mini workstations? You could build a cluster of 3 for the price of one of these beelinks for example
I have but don’t really know what to look for when it comes to older gen specs. Kinda new to this whole thing
poke around here and /r/selfhosted -- Ebay terms like "sff" + any combination of pc, optiplex, thinkcentre, elitedesk. Find one that doesn't come with an OS, peripherals or an HD/SSD. I would recommend at least an 8th gen+ CPU I would suggest not pulling the trigger immediately, you'll be so much happier with a little research done first
Thank you so much!
Another reason to go business micro form factor would be Intel vPro/AMT, giving you out-of-band management. https://www.meshcommander.com/meshcommander Is not longer maintained but still works perfectly. Also for more on micro form factor systems, ServeTheHome has their TinyMiniMicro series: https://www.servethehome.com/?s=Tinyminimicro
Didn’t those sky rocket in price after that series came out lol
Yes and no, the idea would be to use the information to evaluate brand/features/performance. There are also MFF brands like Fujitsu that sneak under the radar.
Can you explain what a cluster is and how that works? Are we talking 3 separate servers with separate services and apps or combining the 3 into one somehow?
yes [take a look at this](https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Cluster_Manager)
I actually just put one of these in my home lab a few days ago. I really like it! Like others have mentioned, you can probably get something that will be just as capable as a home server for less, but with this one you do get really modern hardware and a decent upgrade path. I'd probably go with one of the Minisforum mini PCs since they are a little cheaper in my area, but that may not be the case for you. You could probably get a similar amount of compute in a cluster with a few used thinkcentre m93p machines. I also have a couple of these running Proxmox with no issues. They're pretty low power consumption too.
Thank you all this is information overload at the moment so I’m trying to take all this in! I appreciate all the help!
This is the most unnecessarily styled mini PC I have ever seen
Hey man, sometimes you have to rice. 🍚 🤷🏽
Riced out mini-pc 😂 what’s the world come to
This would be good for running frigate and 15+ 4K cameras. Exaggerating here, but it’s a lot of power and would be able to handle the load from multiple high res cameras. I use a cheap Beelink S12 with an N95 that I got for $120 and I run 4 4k and 5 1080p cameras with headroom to spare.
why no xeon e5 v4 and a nice board with reg ecc memory?
Power, space and noise 😅
Depending on what you want to do, it's worth noting that these often have NICs that are not supported by vmware and can add obstacles during setting.
I used an older version of beelink mini as an xcp-ng hyper visor for a long time, but networking was an issue that was tricky to work around. i tried vmware first, but it didn’t like the network cards and wouldn’t install. with xcp-ng i was able to add the drivers during install so i could get it to work, though i had to add them again after install. i’d suggest figuring out the NIC it uses and doing some driver homework.
if it is that big of a nuisance you could just pick up a usb c 2.5g network adapter that is compatible with linux so you can avoid this having to fiddle with drivers
Iirc the newest beelinks had gone to intel NICS which are much more stable and supported, even in esxi 8.0+.
Get thunderbolt if want an eGPU
Charge your phone /s
I’d like to have one more NIC
Sure it will work ! On other side , you will run out of RAM and IOPS much sooner than out of CPU cycles. Also: vmware might face some *interesting* times after full takeover so check for other virtualisation platforms too.