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.
Edit: I ended up getting Elitedesk 800 G5 with i7 9th Gen CPU, 32 GB (Kingston) and 1 TB Nvme (a Chinese brand called Kingspec). I’ll get a new ssd later. The price was 35k BDT ($300 approx). The bios was locked. But I managed to unlock it by booting without cmos.
#homelab #pc #selfhosting #selfhosted #linux #server #proxmox #hp #elitdesk
I like the elitedesk PC for smaller services. My main reason being the power draw and or heat output. The ones I have and plan to use 60w of power which is pretty damn good for a whole computer.
Noise is another factor. Space saving is a plus, helps prevent ewaste since these are almost always refurbished. Its a good deal IMO.
And you can always buy or build a big honking PC or server for something else later on.
Oh god, don’t waste your money on a mini PC unless you specifically have a reason to get something small.
You’re literally paying more for worse hardware because of the form factor.
Instead, try getting a used Dell Optiplex. You can buy them at walmart for under $100.
Also, don’t kid yourself into thinking your server is going to be more popular than it is. If it’s just for you, then there’s no way you’re going to exhaust its resources unless you’re specifically trying to.
@shreyan I’m getting a used Elitedesk 800 G5. Is that a bad idea?
Anything 8th gen or newer is going to run everything you need and then some. Ive seen people using that mini-pc as a full gigabit router even!
The previous comment talking about price to preformance of mini PCs is somewhat correct if were talking anout buying new, but absolutly wrong about buying used/refurbed. Regular PCs are widly more popular meaning they hold onto their price better. For selfhosting a used/refurbed mini-pc is probably the best form factor you can get when starting out
Try searching for dell optiplexes on ebay and see if any of them suit your needs for a better price.
If you don’t need something with a small form, then don’t get it. You end up paying more for less.
This is pretty good value https://www.gmktec.com/products/nucbox-g3-plus-enhanced-performance-mini-pc-with-intel-n150-processor
I bought one for self hosting and flashed it with Linux.
I have many 6th, 7th, and 8th gen machines - yes, it will do just fine, tiny/mini/micro is my entire self hosted experience (with few exceptions).
Do you have an old laptop somewhere? You shouldn’t need a new machine for a home lab if you’re just hosting services. Most of my self hosted services are on a fairly lightweight VPS.
And yeah, I’d second the commenter suggesting you look for a second hand computer somewhere instead of buying HP.
And yeah, I’d second the commenter suggesting you look for a second hand computer somewhere instead of buying HP.
The HPs OP is looking at are secondhand.
I have a G3 and, this might be counter intuitive, but buy an older model that uses DDR3 ram, old ram like that is obsolete and no one wants it, but more ram is more important in self-hosting than fast ram. Of course that limits how much you can do at once, but if you only have 8gb of ram instead of 32 or 64, the lack of ram is going to be very limiting in the sense that you’ll have to run very few things at one time and that becomes cumbersome to manage services “on demand”, starting them and shutting them down to save on ram, instead of letting them all be ready and idle.
Ho you should look into setting up services with systemd socket. This solved my on demand issues. I made a script to generate the services and sockets automatically. It became really really fast to add a container which start ondemand
Maybe a mini PC with a N100 might be worth a look? Especially when factoring in running costs over it’s lifetime
+1 those are really great. And should be just below 150
@golli Hard to find in Dhaka
, unfortunately. Can you please suggest a specific model that I can look for?I don’t have one myself, so I can’t really recommend a specific model from experience. There are many available, but I’ve e.g. seen beelink mentioned a few times. Maybe someone else here is running one and can give some recommendations?
If you are facing availability issues I’d to the reverse and rather then asking for recommendations look at what’s available and then do a quick search or ask about it (e.g. if someone has already used it with whatever Linux distro you plan on using). Should you have access to something like AliExpress then there are plenty of options.
@golli The problem with Aliexpress is shipping charge is often higher than the products price. :)
@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:
@ml @selfhosted HP is on the #BDS list.
@GM7077 @selfhosted Yeah. But I don’t have many options here in Bangladesh. 😓
@ml @selfhosted Then I suggest you buy a second-hand system, so that no money goes to slaughter the children of Gaza.
@GM7077 @selfhosted Yeah, that’s probably what I’m going to do.
Unrelated to Gaza, but “hp” has sucked for the past 25+ years. You’re better off with anything else.
As said it should be fine unless pushing it with something like media files/jellyfin/plex/nextcloud. Nextcloud for example needs few resources but running anything nice would soon crawl. For the best advice a bit more of what you intend to self host would be nice
unless pushing it with something like media files/jellyfin/plex/nextcloud. Nextcloud for example needs few resources but running anything nice would soon crawl.
Not really. The HP Elite 800 G3 mini and G4 mini make up 2/3 of my Proxmox nodes. The G3 currently hosts the VM that runs my entire media stack (Plex, *arrs, TMM, torrents/usenet, etc), and it’s not stressed at all
notice the bit about pushing it… say transcoding all the streams etc. I don’t know what or how it will be used… thus saying should be fine. Everyones mileage varies no talk about network either, far too many variables to consider thus saying it should be fine!
notice the bit about pushing it… say transcoding all the streams etc.
6th gen Intel CPUs support quicksync. This is a non-issue for most self-hosters.
I don’t know what or how it will be used… thus saying should be fine.
Here are some stats for my particular HP Elite 800 G3 Mini (i7-7700T/32GB RAM) over the last 18 months, running various VMs and LXCs with varying services (including the VM running my media stack from which my kids stream music and shows quite frequently):
Peak CPU usage is never more than 50%, and the vast majority of memory usage is just cached. Actual memory usage by each VM or LXC is far lower. The IO delays…that was user error (my NAS was having issues at the time).
Don’t get caught up in having a completely un-stressed machine. Too much overhead means wasted potential.
Everyones mileage varies no talk about network either, far too many variables to consider thus saying it should be fine!
Fair, but we’re talking about the actual machine on which the services will run - not the network. If the network is garbage, then the $150 machine isn’t going to matter a whole lot.
Pretty pictures don’t always translate into another users experience though do they, but I appreciate you wanting to argue just because you can
8th gen Intel igpu and it’s transcoding streams and supporting a very active immich stack. I have 12 containers and 8 VMs. It’s been awesome.
What is that infographic from? Looks like Home Assistant…
OP has a budget of $150. I doubt they are going to be running a full suite of self-hosted replacement services right off the bat. The machine in question is perfectly suitable for quite a lot of things.
@3dcadmin Those are actually what I will be selfhosting. I’ve decied to get Elitedesk 800 G4 (around $160 USD).
If you are going to run Jellyfin or some other media sharing, the key is if you need to transcode media (recompress because the playback device cannot handle it or not). Likely not, nowadays, but research that. If you need transcoding, research; you might get by with an old CPU, or maybe hardware transcoding support, but it’s difficult.
Outside transcoding, for file sharing/streaming, every simultaneous client will require additional horsepower and disk transfer usage. If you are the sole client, then likely you can do with an old CPU. But if you and three people more in your household are going to be using the system at the same time, it might be a bit complex.
One of my home servers is a 4gb of RAM, with a “Intel® Celeron® CPU G1610T @ 2.30GHz”. It’s very old and low end, but for file sharing it works quite well, but it rarely has more than a single simultaneous user.
@koala I ended up getting Elitedesk 800 G5 with i7 9th Gen CPU, 32 GB (Kingston)
Is it the Mini variant? I have the G4 Mini with an i7-8700T. Great little machine.
A word of advice: If yours is the G4 Mini, and you run it headless (no monitor), you’ll likely run into random crashing/freezing. I’m assuming you’ll be running Linux, so if that’s the case, it’s really easy to fix by appending an extra command at the end of a line in
/etc/default/grub.All good, should be alright!
@ml
I’m hosting home-assistant and nextcloud on a raspberrypi4 with 8GB of ram. Anything bigger should be good enough. Invest in a decent disk array, though. It’s not fun when you lose data.
@selfhostedrunning a jellyfin server on something like this may not be pleasant, so it depends on what you are trying to do with this machine.
for most things, yeah - it will be fine; however, if you are planning to do live transcoding, running an llm, or other compute-heavy tasks, the box will need to be upgraded.
I convert my files to avoid transcoding but my Raspberry Pi 4B handles Jellyfin just fine.
@ml @selfhosted Very suitable, my lab runs on the older G2. As mentioned in an other reply RAM will probably be your first constraining factor, try and get 16GB
@ml @selfhosted old hp kit works great - a 6th gen is actually fine just get enough ram
@gary_alderson @selfhosted How much ram do you recommend? 16 GB seems good enough.
@ml @selfhosted you can always add more - good upgrade path
@ml @selfhosted you have options and a good upgrade path - you may want to look at hp 800 g4/5 for 9th gen - you can add 128 to those - doublecheck the specs
Those are great little PCs, I have a G3 and a G4 (plus a handful of other minis and SFFs).
If you can, grab an i7-7700T off eBay, it’s maybe $60 at the top end. It’ll drop right in.
@lka1988 Sometimes delivery charge is higher than the product itself when ordering from Bangladesh :) … Also customs processing will take a while. I found a G4 with i5 in a local store.
Ah, gotcha. Well, the G4 w/i5 is more than plenty to get started.
