I’m considering setting up a home lab and truly self-hosting my own services. Unfortunately, my budget is limited to around $100-$150. I’m wondering if the HP Elitedesk mini PC is suitable for this purpose. I’m particularly looking at the HP Elitedesk 800 G3 or G5 models. Unfortunately, finding these devices in Dhaka has been challenging. So far, I’ve found a G3 on bikroy.com, but it comes with a 6th gen i7 CPU.
@ml @selfhosted
Not sure what you plan on hosting but it looks like the G5 uses 9th Gen Intel. That should be plenty capable of doing 1080 transcodes if you run something like Jellyfin.
Before I built and migrated things to my NAS, I used a Lenovo m70q with a 10th gen i5 and 16GB of RAM as my docker host. Jellyfin ran great. Everything else I ran was pretty lightweight with the exception of TubeArchivist. It uses ElasticSearch which can grow pretty RAM hungry when caching large libraries.
@__hetz @selfhosted Thanks for the info. Let’s see which one I can find in the market. I will get either G4 or G5.
@ml @selfhosted
Yeah, RAM is probably the biggest thing. Being able to upgrade it, particularly, if it only comes with 16GB. After that is processing power. When I was looking for hardware I think anything 7th gen and newer was recommended for Jellyfin (they recommend 11th and newer for new hardware purchases now).
In truth I used a Pi4B and external HDD for media storage when I first started. It could manage a single transcode at a time but the CPU was pegged at 100% doing it. :thinking_fire: