Slightly OT but Proxmox is something else I see is suddenly everywhere - is it only for a container-based homelab setup, or do people also run a full desktop distro like Debian or Fedora as one of the VMs? Since GPU passthrough is supported, seems like a nice neat way to have your cake and eat it too. In which case I might splurge on an N305 with a bit more RAM and migrate Plex and other containers (currently on an always-on M1 which is supposed to be my workstation), plus the Tailscale exit node (currently on an RPi4) to the same machine the kid uses as his DE.

This may help, and you may be surprised at how well an N100 can run Plex. https://www.doscher.com/gpu-passthrough-for-intel/

It's not a container-only distro, that's secondary, it's more like VMware Esxi, does VMs, too, but with extra bits (like ceph). It's good stuff, try it.

Yep. Been running it for a few years, am very happy with it - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/12/17/2000

I've rebuilt my PC for Proxmox. 7950X3D, X670E, 96G, 18TBx4.

I run TrueNAS with my storage. Give a GPU to a main system (Bazzite/Fedora/NixOS). Distro hopping is one VM away.

I don't run Windows guests.

Nice machine, was looking at something similar but never pulled the trigger because of (possible) long boot times. Any problems with that?

The only long boot times I have is for memory training and that happens once when you change it on any am5.

Always look at what people say about a motherboards IOMMU groups.

On mine I can pcie passthrough 4 of the 8 SATA ports for TrueNAS