homelab

Another vote for TMM. Pi type devices will use less power at idle but probably by only around 5w. I have a Pi 4 that idles at 4-5w and HP Elitedesk g5 with i5 8500t that sits at around 9w. The performance difference between the two is night and day. Used Intel 8th gen really is getting to be the sweet spot with regard to price, performance, and efficiency.

Many of the business TMMs often use hardware that is easily supported across a variety of OSes common in homelabs as well, plus some have features like vPro that can provide OOB access similar (though not as full-featured) to IPMI

I'm adding yet another vote for the little 1 litre x86 thin clients. I run the HP 800 Minis but lots of people also enjoy the tiny ThinkCentres. My use case is very similar to yours - JellyFin for home media plus a few other services. I run them in VM's under Proxmox. For transcoding, you can pass the Intel Quicksync into the VM (works without it, but is quicker to start up with it and doesn't peg the CPU).

These little ex-business PC's are really nicely made - upgrading anything the HP's is a delight. There's great technical manuals and they look good enough (and are quite enough) to have in your lounge or bedroom. Businesses tend to replace them at the three or four year mark so there's always plenty around. I also find them more convenient than a Pi - proper hard drive bay, SODIMM memory etc.

What do you mean Tiny/Miny/Micros?

If I know that I have a very specific use case in mind, and it doesn't require a lot of CPU power, then I get a Raspberry Pi. I have learned the hard way though, that I should try to by original Raspberry and not one of the many alternatives that latch onto the same brand name. So, personally, I wouldn't go for something like an Orange. Raspberry Pi might not be the cheapest nor the fastest, but it has the most reliable infrastructure and software support.

And I find that all of my devices inevitably live longer and need to be supported for longer than what I originally anticipate. And that's a big pain, with hardware that has unpredictable and spotty software support.

If I need more power, then I absolutely prefer a full PC. As is, x86-64 still has the best support. I am getty too old to want to tinker for months on end to make my hardware work, when I could have spent a little more money to get something that works right away.

For containers/clustering, the nice thing is that you can split them across hardware devices pretty easily. A single powerful PC can run tons of containers that otherwise would need to be distributed across multiple smaller devices.

Having more than just one physical device can have advantages when upgrading gradually. But other than that, I would avoid gratuitously buying more devices than necessary. That just increase the burden to administer all these devices. More moving parts means more things that will break.

Well I want to do HA cluster with proxmox. Technically that requires x86 but if I understood the github page correctly pimox should be compatible to create a hybrid cluster. Because of the HA I am going to run them 24/7 which is why I want to have them a low energy to computation ratio. Any recommandations for stores ? But yeah the

get whatever is cheaper

Is the question. I am not able to compare them as I am lacking a bit of knowledge about stores and retailers

I'm curious, can it handle transcoding? using the RPi 4 while direct playing works great, but for transcoding not so much... I see the OrangePi5 8GB is currently at 85$ looks like a good deal to me. The MC server would be another plus.

Do you know other alternatives like the OrangePi?

Just small demanding services as a pihole, pfsense, openvpn. Stuff that permanently needs to run. Maybe a website or a minecraft server but probably not.

I was actually looking for the orange pi (learned about them from ltt) but I can't find any rackmount (I want everything nice and clean in there) and reasonable prices.

Also I don't think I can use raspberry pi rackmount can I?

Thank you great tip