Hello all, I recently setup jellyfin on my RPi 4 with an external HDD attached and after a few tests I decided to move on. On ebay I found a refurbished Fujitsu Mini PC with a Pentium G4560. It is way cheaper than the Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q (with a G5400T) which I saw being recommended a lot.
My question is:
how does the higher TDP of the former 54 W with a base frequency of 3.50 GHz compare to the latter with a TDP of 35 W for 3.10 GHz in a real world scenario running jellyfin?
For now I will continue using my external HDD because the prices for new drives is too high for me.
For Jellyfin, dont get any lower than 8th gen if you want to transcod using quick sync. And if i correctly remember, you will nee 10th gen or higher for 10bit transcoding.
Can’t answer your question but I got a refurb corporate m715 for 60 bucks, I haven’t bothered upgrading the 8Gb ram^* and it runs a full dockerized arr stack, vpn and jellyfin without any issue. I don’t reencode and I don’t use 4k media, so I can’t talk about that either.
But if you’re looking for cheap that works, it’s not a bad little machine.
^* The system actually run on 6Gb since 2 are reserved for video and by the time I realized that everything has been up and running fine for a while, so I didn’t even bother rebooting in the bios to change it, I just added a bigger swap 🙄
Whats your budget?
My go-to recommendation is the barebones CWWK N100 development board. Then you can add as much RAM and storage as you want. Up to 4xNVMe and 2x SATA drives are supported.
It also uses a normal PC fan jnstead of those whiny-ass laptop fans.
Thats what I use.
The thing that matters more than the TDP is how much power they draw at idle. It’ll likely be idling or turned off more than it will be on. And even when on, it probably wont be hitting its max TDP just playing some media unless you’re transcoding to 4k or something.
Is there a percentage of the TDP which is usually the idle power draw?
No, they’re almost entirely unrelated. Almost all CPUs will idle close to 0 W (with correctly working drivers). The main idle power contribution comes from the mainboard and other devices (e.g. disks). The Mini PCs you mentioned should have a very low total idle power, probably below 10W.
Check out Wolfgang on YouTube, he has some great videos on the topic: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM
Gamers Nexus reports 44W at idle with the G4560 which is already more than the G5400T’s MAX TDP of 35W, so it’s a pretty significant difference.
Assuming the RAM and other components are similar, I’d go with the G5400T system.
Unfortunately no, which can make it a pain to figure out. You’d have to research the CPU itself.
I run Emby and MythTV on a Beelink Mini PC. It is a little pricey compared to some of the options you mentioned but not by too much. It works really well and is very quiet:
https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-SER5-5560U-500GB-Computer/dp/B0B3WYVB2D
It really depends on if you need transcoding or not. If no, it doesn’t matter. If yes, check for integrated GPUs on both models and check that it will work as a transcoder for jellyfin.
What do you think about a i5-7200U? It has a Intel 620 iGPU.
People generally recommend 8th gen or higher Intel chips for transcoding so I’d look at alternatives. I have a Dell with an 8th gen i5 and that works very well.
How much was it?
the question is: why do you want to move on from the Rpi4? Also, how do you plan to handle video decoding 0f x265/av1 streams? Do those miniPCs have a video card with hardware transcoding capabilities? If you plan to do it on software (i.e. CPU transcoding) the CPUs will run hot most of the time.
Alright so I checked the docs but I’m not fluent with video codecs. For av1 you need basically a new integrated gpu, right? But for x265 (is that the same as H.265 in the docs?) a kaby lake should be fine if I read that correctly.
So maybe a i5-7200U should be capable enough?
Edit: And to answer your question about the RPi: it seemed to me that I had to reduce the quality to watch a film without stuttering and in the future I might want to stream on a projector so I want the highest possible resolution.
NUC is good for transcoding if you really need it. NUC11 i3 i think has 30w tdp and draws sub 10w at idle and does transcoding fine. Check specific HW codec support for your needs but stick to Intel because they will generally be the best in this space.
Also can confirm Jellyfin doesnt run well on a rpi4. No problem on a NUC.
Is a NUC better or similar to a N100?
Check the CPU, every NUC has a different one. An 11th gen i3 (i3-1115G4) will generally offer better performance than a N100 but a N100 may offer slightly better power efficiency since it was designed for it and is newer. Also when keeping in mind power draw and thermal efficiency, newer CPUs will usually do better. I personally would stear clear of older machines for that reason.
