I ordered a Protectli FW4B on Cyber Monday right before I stumbled upon servethehome. I'm pretty sure I'm going to send it back now and get one of the boxes discussed here. My question is what is the real world, performance difference between the N5105 and J6413 boxes. They seem to be the most popular choices here but it's not clear to this newbie why to choose one over the other since they look so similarly speced.
The conclusion that Patrick came to in the videos, was that the slight boost in performance
may be worth it if you want to run multiple things in a virtual environment, but for a bare metal router or basic VM configs, the N5105 is plenty for most people.
Doesn't seem to be worth the price difference imo.
If you really need more power for VMs etc., it's better to move up to Ryzen or i3/5/7 systems.
I actually picked up the N5100 version from the WooYi store on Ali, because it was ~$15 cheaper than the N5105, and it's close enough in performance to not matter for most people. The bios on these systems allows you to run all cores at what would typically be the max single core turbo speed, so the difference between 5100 and 5105 is 100MHz. In actual use, I have the CPU limited to ~1.6GHz to save power.