Replacing Pi with Apollo Lake Pentium

[LagrangePoint]

I've been thinking about retiring my Raspberry Pi from the homelab and upgrading to something with a little more horsepower, while still staying around 10+W on energy consumption. The intended use is for a bare metal linux distro providing services that should still be available when my main server is down, like DNS, DHCP, syslog, and OpenVPN.

I was looking at some of the new ASRock Pentium boards like the J4205-ITX (for under $100) and thinking I could fit it in a 1U case, throw in an SSD and maybe a platter drive or two.

My questions are: 1) Which boards in this class would be the best value running as a headless server? 2) Will a board like this physically fit in a 1U case and have sufficient cooling with 40mm fans? 3) Is there anything better in this use case coming down the pike that I should wait for?

 

[pyro_]

One part i would be leary about if you want to use it as a headless server is that it does not have have an IPMI port on it as this is a desktop board and not a server board so you would need to connect a keyboard/mouse/monitor to it to do anything on it if you could not connect to your OS remotely or to work in the bios

 

[LagrangePoint]

Thanks for the caution - My rack is right next to my computer desk, so I can work around not having IPMI if it just has a VGA connector. I figure no IPMI saves me some money and watts. I mention "headless" because a number of these boards seem tailored for HTPC usage rather than as a server. I just don't know enough about hardware to determine if there's a better match for server mobos in this architecture and price range.