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Desktops and mini PCs · Intel N-series

Intel N-series N150

7owners with an opinion
100%of verdicts positive
5/0positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability.

What owners wrote

Neutral
I already commented on this twice here, but here it goes again: I self-host Immich with Caddy as TLS terminator, and it's far from obvious. They all run on a small N150 PC in my closet, the same PC serves as my internet router. Both Immich and Caddy run in podman-compose, and there are firewall rules that allow incoming traffic to Caddy and outgoing traffic from Caddy to update certificates. There's also a tricky setup of Systemd dependencies that make sure podman networking and firewall rules play nicely together and with other system config, like the bridge for the 2.4Gz range internal Wi-Fi and for external 5Gz Wi-Fi 6 card. If not for the LLM help, I would have spent many days figuring out all the rough edges of this setup. Which is exactly the point OP is making. Hobbying webhosting is hard nowadays.
Neutral
While true, modern implementations use hardware blocks for acceleration AND for just terminals, with spare displays, you'll likely be using lower resolutions at lower refresh rates. We've used a series of n150 based mini PCs (priced at $200 each) to power three dashboard displays at the same time. I guess it's a matter of calculating power usage and figuring out how that translates over 4 years
Likes it
It's hard to recommend one thing because there are so many options and they all have different trade-offs in terms of initial cost, ease-of-use, reliability, performance, etc. A year or two back, I was able to get a brand-new fanless Intel N150 with 4x2.5G ports with 16 GB memory for about $150 from AliExpress. I run Proxmox on it, with OpnSense and a couple other things in virtual machines. These days, due to tariffs and the memory shortage, that is more like $440 now, unfortunately. I am kicking myself for not buying two, not so much because of the price increase, but because it would have come in handy multiple times to have a second one on-hand for random experiments. Given that CPU performance does _not_ tend to be critical for firewall/NAS use cases, if I had to replace it tomorrow, I would go onto eBay and get the highest-spec'd used Dell or HP mini workstation I could find for $120 and plug in a USB3 1gig ethernet dongle for the WAN side.
Likes it
This is my experience as well. I have a couple PINE64 devices, a Rock64 (Rockchip RK3328) and a RockPro64 (RK3399). And an N150 device. Both ARM64 devices run headless, make use of GPIO, and have more than enough CPU. In fact, these are stable enough that I run BSDs on them and don't bother with Linux. The Rock64 runs FreeBSD for SDR applications (e.g. ADS-B receiver). FreeBSD has stable USB support for RTL-SDR devices. The RockPro64 runs NetBSD with ZFS with a PCIe SSD. NetBSD can handle ARM big.LITTLE well. I run several home lab workloads on this. Fun device. I also have an N150 device running the latest Debian 13 as my main home lab server for home automation, Docker, MQTT broker, etc. In short: SBCs are cheap enough that you can choose more than one, each for the right task, including IoT.
Likes it
I'm running Immich, syncthing (watching about 2TB in 150,000 files), jellyfin, and pihole, as well as remoting in to a browser session, on this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH81C4K3 which is a $125 NUC with 8GB of RAM and an Intel N150. I know from experience that adding NextCloud to it would work out OK for a family, and I imagine you could shove most of the rest of that list on to this system as well, though in the case of ProxMox I'm just talking about the management. Obviously I'm not running very many full VMs on that before it runs out of RAM. (I don't even know if it can run VMs. Everything's docker in this setup.) The bottleneck appears to be RAM as that is eating about half of it right now. The CPU only works when someone is doing something, and there is some contention at startup as all of the services start scanning their storage for changes, but it gets through it. jellyfin is configured to not transcode anything. The vast bulk of my library is DVD/BluRay rips of my own creation and I just ripped them in the desired format in the first place. This could probably keep up with a single DVD-quality re-encode, I dunno about Blu-Ray (depending on config, perhaps), but I just have it serve the correct files in the first place. There's a ~$125 5TB USB drive hanging off of it for the media storage, which syncthing syncs to another 5TB drive in the house. (I don't actually "back up" my media storage in the full sense; everything else is actually backed up in the full sen…
Likes it
Chiming in to say I also run an n150 with mostly the same software. It does fine. Storage is 50tb of old server HDD so pretty cheap. I ran an n100 until last week. Worked fine. I have plex setup to transcode and it serves about 10 users just fine. My plexamp sonic analysis took like 4 days though, lol, but everyone says it takes forever. My immich import took about 20 hours? So not bad. I run all my home automation off it. 100+ devices, logging, etc. no issues. I also sometimes run an OBS stream on it to transcode for YT. The n150 does fine. Total cost for me is about $550. I saved a lot on HDD by going used server drives. $140 for the n150, $300 for drives, then a cheap UPS and router running openwrt. As for difficulty, most of this is deployed in a few minutes using docker or install scripts. The hardest part is the choice between various solutions.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
The new Intel NUCs are only like a hundred something dollars for an N150 CPU and come with 16 gigs of RAM and a SSD. Why pay so much more to fight an uphill battle? Unless you desperately need the hot garbage that is Xcode there isn't much reason to deal with Mac Minis running MacOS as a server. One update and it will suspend and be unwakeable without physical interaction.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
I think the N100 and N150 suffer the same weakness for this type of use case in the context of SSD storage 10gb networking. We need a next generation chip that can leverage more PCI lanes with roughly the same power efficiency. I would remove points for a built-in non-modular standardized power supply. It's not fixable, and it's not comparable to Apple in quality.