I made a similar post on selfhosted recently but I wanted to ask if anyone has experience with these x86 fanless PCs that are sold on AliExpress and similar stores.
Particularly, I’ve been looking at the ones based on the N5100 Celeron processor. Brands that I’ve found sell similar units are x86pi and Protectil. They’re normally marketed for industrial and firewall use cases. I really want to use them to run containerized HA and Plex.
I want to know how’s the heat, and if you see this no-moving-parts device as a real alternative to raspberry pies. I’m allergic to fan noise (jk)
Personally I’d go with alternative ARM boards over Raspberry Pi or low-end Intel chips unless you’re looking specifically for hardware transcoding support for something like a media server like Jellyfin
I’m planning on moving my media server to this machine too 😅
I’m using an Odroid H3 with an Intel N5105 and you actually get a fan if you buy one of the bigger official Odroid Cases
which I set in the Bios settings to start at higher temperaturesso far the loudest noise is the HDD while the fan basically just runs as fallback if needed but even transcoding 4K HDR HEVC content on Jellyfin doesn’t raise the SoC temperature to above 70° C (passive cooled)
