Re:Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts
by seemaze on Saturday July 27, 2024 @09:56PM
(#41090717)
I tried one of those N100 mini pcs and went back to the J4125 purely for the thermals. My needs are not great, and the fans on the mini pc were quite loud quite often. The J4125 hums along fanless with a small heat sink no problem.
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You can get passively cooled versions like the Asus PN42 or the Zotac CI337, though not exactly cheap.
Odroid H4+ ($140 for the SBC, $10 for a case; extra cost for memories) is an example of a cheap passively cooled version. It can also use a fan, but the fan is optional and not required.
There is an even cheaper version Odroid H4, at $100, which has a single 2.5 Gb/s port instead of two and it lacks SATA ports for HDDs (the fewer peripheral controllers also lead to a lower idle power consumption).
I’ve seen these, and am intrigued. I went with an eBay lot of (5) Dell wyze 5070 @ $30 per unit. Tough to beat the economics.
Supposedly it should be not too difficult to downclock the N100 such that you get same/similar performance as the J4125 for less heat/power?
It’s a bit tricky to do that, and hardly justifies the effort. I have a J-series, an N100 and an N5105, and the biggest bottlenecks are always about I/O. The N100 makes a great Proxmox server solely due to the faster cores.
Different workloads I guess but context-switching/CPU (and associated increase of memory bandwidth) is/was holding my N5xx/N6xxx back from properly utilizing I/O.
But this was in the context of someone who has an N100 but prefers running a J-series over due to lower power consumption. It seems like it should be worth the effort?