🐝 Beelink EQ13 Mini PC

Recently, I was reviewing my setup's power usage and was told of the Intel n100 chip, which is what the affordable $169 Beelink EQ13 shipped with. The Beelink EQ13 ships with the following specifications

• 12th Intel Alder Lake-N100 Processor (up to 3.4GHz)
• 16GB DDR4 RAM
• 500GB PCIe SSD
• Support for 2x 4K Display
• WiFi 6
• Bluetooth 5.2
• USB 3.2
• Dual Gigabit LAN

This little powerhouse can transcode video while idling at 6 watts and maxing out at 20 watts, worlds better than my 4U server with an Intel i7 and Nvidia Quadro P2000 (The GPU idling is around 20 watts alone!).

The form factor of this little computer is pretty fantastic, very close close to the size of an Apple TV as you can see in the gallery below.

I ended up upgrading it to 32GB of ram, as well as increasing the storage to 1TB as not to be worried about running out of room anytime soon, though it will only be running Docker and the containers while most other data is server from the QNAP NAS.

I originally went with the newest release of Ubuntu but was running into GPU encoding issue within the Docker containers so I went back to the previous install of Ubuntu and things have been running perfectly fine.

The network cards are bonded in hopes to get a little more performance as well as fallback redundancy if needed, though crossing my fingers this hardware is not so cheap that is fails anytime soon.

I currently have 28 docker containers running on it and its barely breaking a sweat most of the time, even when I have noticed it running 4+ streams some of which are being hardware transcoded.

Pretty happy with this so far and I am sure my power bill wil reflect this change in the coming months. Ohh and my office is a lot cooler and quieter since getting this all setup in my office rack.