I agree, it is overwhelming how many different models and features are out there. Let alone the price. I've never used AliExpress before so was a little hesitant, so I ended up going with Amazon, well and CWWK had a 20% coupon on two of their products on there. On AliExpress it was confusing trying to figure out if the coupons worked for every store or just certain ones, I heard that PayPal works sometimes and other times it doesn't. Since some had spend $20 get for off up to $16 of total on just some of them for Black Friday / Cyber Monday.
I have watched A Lot of YouTube videos over the last 4 months or so off and on. Started jotting stuff down a few weeks ago but got serious on 112423 and made a spreadsheet for the deals.
I would look at CPU-Money.com , NanoReviews.net and Versus.com for CPU comparisons and benchmarks.
Personally, I would go with the
Intel Pentium Gold 8505 over both of those just for more future proofing, just in case.
Reason is N100, N305 is Single channel memory and Max memory is only 16GB. Single channel is the main reason. Gold 8505 is Dual channel and 64GB max, so could put in 32GB and put many VM's, IDS containers and loggers in there and be ok. Maybe switch to Proxmox and Proxmox backup solution and run other IDS - IDR systems with logs within another
test Proxmox system while still running your firewall and current ID & Adguard... The 8505 should be able to handle that better also. Gold 8505 is also PCIe 4.0 where as N100 and N305 are only PCIe 3.0. The N100 not so much I don't think, the N305 probably would, so I'd go with that for sure over the N100. But the N305 price is way to high compared to the Gold 8505 and the 8505 is faster.
Both of these do have fan options, I think it's wise to add fans if you can, heat makes everything not last as long. Just need to figure out what size. Or maybe those fans they make you put on the floor or table underneath for routers and such and plug into the USB if nothing else ( have some already saved in Am wishlist for other things ).
Like this from AliExpress;
WooYi Store (Gold)
Fanless Mini PC Alder Lake Intel Core i7 1265U i5-1235U Pentium Gold 8505 4x Intel i226V 2.5G LAN DDR4 pfSense Firewall Router G31-Core
Intel Pentium Gold 8505 $179.84 Barebones - $20 Coupon I Think so
$155.84
--
Or the newer version G32-Core. This one from this same Gold seller, but this one says uses DDR4 Crucial memory if don't get the Barebones one. That G31-Core they sell does not say Crucial memory, so just get generic DDR4.
12th Alder Lake Mini PC Intel Core i7 1265U i5-1235U 4x Intel i226V 2.5G LAN DDR4 NVMe Pentium Gold 8505 pfSense Firewall Router - AliExpress
WooYi Store (Gold)
Intel Pentium Gold 8505 $187.26 Barebones - $20 Coupon I Think so
$167.26
Intel Processor N100 vs Intel Core i3-N305 Benchmark, comparison and differences (cpu-monkey.com)
Intel Processor N100 vs Core i3 N305: performance comparison (nanoreview.net)
Intel Core i3-N305 vs Intel Pentium Gold 8505 Benchmark, comparison and differences (cpu-monkey.com)
Intel Core i3-N305 vs Intel Pentium Gold 8505: What is the difference? (versus.com)
If your threshold is around $200 then maybe this N305 one after a quick search from CWWK:
12th Gen Intel Firewall Mini PC Alder Lake i3 N305 8 Core N200 N100 Fanless Soft Router Proxmox DDR5 4800MHz 4 x i226-V 2.5G - AliExpress
After Coupons, which are ending tomorrow. Total is $211.44 if I did it right.
$279.44 - $16 -$2 -$50 = $211.44 |
From two months ago.
This is why you may want the N305 at least and maybe the Pentium Gold 8505;
Homelab Monitoring Made Easy - Part 1: Tools Overview - Grafana, Prometheus, InfluxDB, Telegraf
Next one talks about CrowdSec. Later YT vids, shows how to install OPNsense and talks about getting rid of Sophos XG, but this is still relevant.
Homelab Monitoring Made Easy - Part 2: Creating Dashboards For Docker, Crowdsec, and Sophos XG
