I’ve gone down bit of a rabbit hole the past week looking at low power x86 boxes. I woke up last Saturday morning with my home router, a PC Engines APU2 that h

I’ve gone down bit of a rabbit hole the past week looking at low power x86 boxes. I woke up last Saturday morning with my home router, a PC Engines APU2 that had been fault free for the past four years not booting making a clicking noise. In the end it turned out to be a fault with the powers supply but I didn’t know that at the time and needed internet so purchased a Protectli Intel J6412 from Amazon as it had next day delivery and I didn’t have time to wait a few days for PC Engines support who recently announced they where closing down to get back to me or shipping a new unit from overseas. As it happens PC Engines replied very quickly on a Sunday! Anyway the Protectli J6412 turns out to be old gen hardware, however I’ve been extremely impressed. It’s idling away running Proxmox with an Opnsense a VM, Unifi, PiHole and NGINX reverse proxy in LXC containers. That sent me researching some more as I have an old Ryzen 2600 running as a dev server but as idling away most of the time using a good bit more power than the Protectli. That rabbit hole has lead me to Intel N100 boxes such as the CWWK n100 on Amazon/AliExpress. They look like great low powered machines if you can live with a single SSD/16GB memory. They’ll do virtualisation/proxmox, run k3s, 6w max tbp, fanless, multiple nics. Not a cheap option but also not an expensive option all things considered. They even do a N305 which looks to be on par cpu wise to my current Ryzen 2600 It seems the market for small nuc type devices is getting very good right now.