EDIT 4: I almost gave up on finding the “holy grail” for my use-case. Right price, right specs, etc., and while it’s not perfect, I think I found a solid balance for all. Despite most of the reviews being for a free product, they were well written enough to goad me to purchase. I ended up with the Morefine M9S N305 Mini PC. I grabbed the variant that was still 16GB DDR5, but skimped out of the m.2 size at 256 vs 512. I don’t think I’ll need 512GB for my application. I also went with an older but more powerful Alder Lake i3 n305 vs the flooded market of Twin Lake n150 procs. I would like to think the extra headroom and core count will prove useful with running 3+ VMs. In the meantime, I’ve been slowly tinkering with a VM of Proxmox (VMception?) so see how i performs. I’ve not gotten far with it yet :P

EDIT 3: And Amazon decided to wait until the last minute to cancel my order as it was OOS. Would’ve been nice if they told me sooner. The unit is now also $60 more than before. GREAT.

EDIT 2: I’ve chosen the Beelink EQ14. It had the best “last-gen” specs, lowest price, and better hardware (BT 5.2 vs Pulcro’s 4.2, as well as Wifi6 vs Wifi5). I also ruled out the Morefine because all of its reviews were paid, not very reassuring imho.

EDIT: Holy shit, was not expecting so much support for my inquiry. Thank you all for the bevy of ideas and solutions. I think I’m still gonna go for the Intel 12th Gen+ NUC style, although some of your setups seriously made me quite jelly. Maybe I’ll get there one of these days. I’ll update this when I finally lock down my purchase :)

Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because I’ve started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope it’s simple). For the past couple years I’ve been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. I’ve also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in RAID0 RAID1, which is about half full atm. I’m not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so I’ve pivoted to an attempt at combining the 3 Pis above into one NUC/SFF/etc device with a roughly similar power draw. Also looking at re-jumping back into 3D printing using OctoPrint.

I’ve looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerling’s article/video on Pi vs. NUC. I’ve continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only because… it’s all I know. I’d like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as I’m a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as I’ve primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. I’d like to try staying with AMD as I’ve slowly moved over from the “dark side” (don’t hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.

Last nugget is that I’ve never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. I’ve new-ish to VMs too, so anything “Baby’s First VM” would be nice.

I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if there’s no magical unicorn, I’m cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and I’m really keen on seeing what options I have.