Ryzen 7 Mini-PC makes a power-efficient VM host

Finally one can buy these! The sibling model, ASRock's DeskMeet X600, should exhibit a roughly equal power consumption profile, but offers support for proper ECC UDIMM in up to 4 slots, which makes it a premier choice for a cheap, powerful, reliable and flexible (SOHO) server platform.

Even the previous generation - with AM4 CPUs and DDR4 memory - of these ASRock offerings were easily enough for most users' needs (my wife still has a DeskMini X300 with a Ryzen 5 5600G as her daily driver).

This sounds good for a home server if you need to do CPU-intensive things, like transcoding video, or running an ML model on CPU.

But if you only need to do lower-compute things (e.g., file serving, serving static/dynamic Web pages, home automation, running simple other server processes), some other home server options include:

* SBCs (like Rasberry Pi).

* Intel NUCs, and those mini-PCs that are marketed as corporate thin clients, and which can be gotten used for what you'd pay for a modern RaspI plus the required duct-taped supporting accessories.

* "NAS" boxes that people who want to plug&play lots of RAID storage buy, and who sometimes run additional small server stuff on on the "NAS" box.

* Retired datacenter and office rackmount servers, if you can make them quiet enough. I've eyed the Dell R210 II and later versions (1U, short-depth), but ended up going with...

* Retired short-depth 1U rackmount Atom servers. These has been my favorite, and I converted them to fanless, except for retrofitting the Flex-ATX PSU with a Noctua fan. Sometimes I'd buy retired enterprise appliances that I knew were just Supermicro hardware with different bezel or paint, but my current servers are more hand-picked parts. They draw more power than a RasPi, but have a lot less misc. fragility.

Also, if you need a GPU compute server, or a big CPU, you could do a lot worse than building it around a gaming PC that's already designed to cool big GPUs without being too loud. Personally, I squeezed a 3090 into a 4U rackmount chassis, with 3 Noctua fans, which also works, but was harder. (And if I wasn't already married to the PlayStation ecosystem for gaming, I probably would've made the GPU server double as a Steam box that happens to loan out its GPU for occasional ML crunching jobs.)

I don't know that the form factor (mini PC) has much to do with power consumption. If anything, a small case probably obstructs airflow and makes heat dissipation worse. This person had to add another fan.

And that's 10W at idle, which is high compared to any laptop or tablet. It's more energy consumption than leaving a LED bulb on 24/7, and that's when it's not even doing anything. Even among desktops, it's more a matter of power supply efficiency (80 Plus or similar cert) and the ability of the CPU itself to throttle down a lot and/or use efficiency cores.

If power really is a concern, having a more powerful server (like in a data center) split up among multiple tenants will be far more power-efficient. Serverless funcs or hosted CI/CD pipelines even more so. At home, things like a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone or old laptop/tablet will use less power. Even a Mac Mini will use less power (about half at idle, much less at max).

If you just want a small-chassis desktop, well, this fits the bill. It's gonna use a lot of power as soon as any work ramps up, though. That CPU has a TDP of 65W and maxes out at 150W.

I bought one of these boards a few weeks ago, it uses the mobile version of the CPU, great performance and low power usage. https://cwwk.net/products/cwwk-amd-7735hs-7840hs-8845hs-7940...

I put it in a fanless case (https://streacom.com/products/fc9-fanless-micro-atx-case/) with mellanox connectx-4 nic, now I can route/NAT my internet connection in silence at line rate (25Gbps)

I run a small home-built NAS (N100, JBOD) and the thing that surprised me* was how much power the spinning rust draws. I would love to replace it with SSDs, but I've got ~20TB and the cost would be insane right now. I'm hoping that something magnificent will happen to SSD prices in the next year or two. Until then, it's 48W @ ~€0.35/kWh.

*because I'm an idiot. I could've read the disk specs before I bought them. I'm using shucked WD MyBook 3.5" drives.

Instead of installing tailscale in all VMs, the author should instead advertise the whole subnet using --advertise-subnet flag from a single VM

Can anyone tell me wtf happened to SSD prices in the last ~year? I've seen some prices almost double.

E.g. crucial 1 TB SATA SSDs went from a low of 45 to now 90 $.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078211KBB

I wanted to add a couple of 4 TB drives to my mini PC but now the price is ridiculous.

I've been using a Beelink GTR6 (Ryzen 9 6900HX) as a single-node K8s server/homelab to replace a hilariously overpowered Dell M1000e blade server. It works great, and doesn't even register on my power bill (unlike the blade server). No comments about long-term reliability though, I've been running it for ~six months.

I have been down this road a couple of times:

https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/02/18/1845 - Intel form factor equivalent https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/04/13/2100 - Ryzen mini-PC

…and yes, if it were today I’d likely go the all Ryzen route in a DeskMeet case, although the kind of mini-PCs you can get today will suffice for most people.

I'm not trying to sound dismissive or overly critical, but in what way is a $1000, GPU-less computer with 32GBs of RAM considered a "mini-PC"?

The price point seems insane too high to be considered "mini" imo.

No ECC RAM and no quicksync for Plex and frigate.video are the downsides I can see, but I'm not sure this CPU doesn't have an APU for Plex/inference so speculating on that part, can anyone confirm? I'm personally running an R230 with a P400 quadro, it idles at 45 watts with 4 SATA SSDs and is dead silent. I know that's a stretch from the claimed 10W idle Michael gets but that's not bad for me either.

Btw, thank you Michael for running a solid speedtest host which cleared my doubts about the Zyxel router init7 gave me, it's adequate enough :)

I've been using a Minisforum UM790 Pro recently for my Ubuntu desktop. My old Ubuntu desktop is now my Proxmox server.

I maxed out the memory and the storage on the new system myself. At idle its 9W and when I did stress testing to max out the CPU and GPU, it was 70-80W. Even then the fan noise didn't bother my family which are very sensitive to fan noise.

https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-um790-pro

The only problem with these is 2.5g is ass, especially if you want more than one for a ceph cluater (ethernet over usb4 is also ass)

I didn't find it so "mini", at least not compared to other mini Intel offerings on Amazon. Sure, this is Ryzen 7, but let me know when there is something as small as a Mac Mini.

lmao I did almost the exact same thing with my old Threadripper 2950x and now it's my VM-host for a Windows Server 2022 instance and the main proxmox install I use for playing with different AI models from ollama (with my old RTX 2080)

The tiny form factor is great and almost silent. I think the case is almost the same too