I’ve been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is… delicious!

I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).

So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).

Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?

Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.

  • manitcorEnglish
    4•10 months ago

    Have a J4125 driving an entertainment center fairly competently, was eyeing a N5105 as a personal device.

    • @damnthefilibusterOPEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      What all do you run on it? Does it support 4K streaming? Remote Plex users or just local for you?

      • manitcorEnglish
        2•10 months ago

        Just local, streams 4k fairly OK but will studder sometimes, not enough to be a problem in general but if you want a perfect image full time you might be disappointed.

        Its primarily a media player and runs 8 and 16 bit emulators. Haven’t tried anything more ambitious yet. It streams content from my NAS just fine. I don’t think multiple users would work on it for video streaming however others uses maybe.

        • @damnthefilibusterOPEnglish
          2•10 months ago

          Thanks for the rundown. My other usecase is running a GitHub Runner and running some CI/CD or automations kind of work. Some data pipeline work, some npm builds. Right now that all runs on my main Windows PC that’s also the media center and gaming PC. Overloaded that fella, so thinking of expanding the homelab to purpose-based machines.

          • manitcorEnglish
            2•10 months ago

            this is the usecase i want a personal unit for. I have a Pi4 which I use mostly for Ci/CD and maint but sometimes there is just no way to easily get something to run on ARM and I’m firing up a 800watt PC or a 160watt laptop again.

            IMO either of the Intel options we are discussing here will work well for you.

            • @damnthefilibusterOPEnglish
              2•10 months ago

              Thanks! I think I’m gonna go for the N5105. I was looking at the spec diff between that and the N100 and though the N100 has more processing power, it seems the N5105 has better GPU for less price. Strange.

              • manitcorEnglish
                2•10 months ago

                It’s always those details. I want the gpu so I can do transcoding of new files. Is you don’t need a gpu go for the 100

                • @damnthefilibusterOPEnglish
                  2•10 months ago

                  definitely considering transcoding as an option. Even if I use it for the github runner work, some of the data pipelines use puppeteer and Chrome, which needs a GPU for nicely rendering CSS. So I think the 5105 is the better bet… :)