Last October my Synology DS918+ started clicking. Not the “this is a busy seek pattern” click. The “this is a head that has decided life is meaningless” click. I powered it down, pulled the drive (a WD Red Plus that had been fine for four years), and saw SMART attribute 197 jump from zero to eleven overnight. The NAS still worked. I could have ordered another drive. Instead I stood in my garage at 7:15 on a Sunday morning and thought: why am I paying Synology prices in 2026 when I can run Proxmox on generic x86 hardware, get better CPU for transcoding, and still have money left over?
That afternoon I drove to Micro Center (the Broward location, not the one in Orlando) and spent forty minutes staring at the mini-PC aisle. I left with a Beelink EQ12. It cost me $269. This article is what I learned over the next six months building a three-node Proxmox cluster on hardware that would have been science fiction at this price point in 2019. (For broader hardware context, ServeTheHome’s TinyMiniMicro homelab series is the long-running reference.)
Why mini PCs are eating Synology and Intel NUC’s lunch
Intel killed the NUC product line in 2023. ASUS bought the brand and released the NUC 14 Pro in 2024, but it is $600 for the barebone kit and you still have to add RAM and storage. Synology DS923+ is $599 and you get four drive bays, but the Celeron J4125 inside is from 2019 and has no hardware transcode for anything modern. The math stopped making sense.
Meanwhile Chinese OEMs (Beelink, MINISFORUM, Geekom) have spent four years optimizing mini PCs at the $200 to $600 bracket. What changed: thermal envelope improvements that allow 15W TDP chips to sustain 20W under load without throttling, AVX2 and AES-NI across the entire stack (even the budget N100), AV1 hardware decode on Intel 12th-gen and later, RAM slots that take laptop SO-DIMM up to 64 GB without complaint, and real NVMe (not SATA pretending). You also get two 2.5 GbE ports on most models now. That is not marketing. That is the standard config.
The gap that used to exist between “cheap enough to experiment” and “fast enough to run a real workload” closed. You can buy a four-core N100 box for $159 and run a dozen LXC containers on it without hearing the fan. You can buy an eight-core Ryzen 7 7840U box for $479 and transcode three simultaneous 4K Plex streams while NextCloud sync runs in the background. The ceiling lifted and the floor stayed cheap.
The current sweet spot in spring 2026
Three tiers matter if you are building a homelab in 2026 and you want hardware that will still be relevant in 2029:
- Intel N100 or N305 for low-power always-on nodes. Four efficiency cores (N100) or eight (N305), 6W TDP, hardware QuickSync that handles H.264 and AV1 decode without breaking a sweat. Perfect for DNS, reverse proxy, monitoring, lightweight LXC workloads. Idle power around 7 to 9 watts at the wall.
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600U or Ryzen 7 7735HS for mid-range. Six or eight cores, SMT, 15W to 35W TDP depending on BIOS settings. Good for Frigate (if you add a Coral TPU over USB), Immich, Jellyfin with tone-mapping, Home Assistant with a few hundred entities. Idle 12 to 18 watts.
- AMD Ryzen 7 7840U or 8840U for performance per watt that feels unfair. Eight Zen 4 cores, RDNA 3 integrated GPU (twelve compute units), DDR5-5600, 28W sustained under all-core load, and it still idles at 14 watts. This is workstation-class in a 0.7-liter chassis.
The N100 tier is where you start if your budget is tight and your workload is light. The Ryzen 7840U tier is where you end up if you want one box to rule them all and you are willing to pay $450 to $550. The middle tier (5600U, 7735HS) is the awkward zone. It costs $100 more than N100, delivers less than the 7840U, and only makes sense if you specifically need those extra cores but not the newest generation. I skipped it.
Beelink lineup: EQ12, EQR6, GTR7 Pro
Beelink is the brand I tried first because ServeTheHome covered them extensively in 2024 and 2025. Their EQ12 (Intel N100, 16 GB DDR5, 500 GB NVMe, two 2.5 GbE ports, fanless) was my entry node. It cost $269 in October 2025. As of April 2026 you can find it for $239 on Amazon if you wait for a sale.
The EQ12 is truly fanless. The aluminum case is the heatsink. It gets warm to the touch under sustained 10W load but never throttles. I run Authelia, Traefik, AdGuard Home, and Uptime Kuma on it as LXC containers. Idle power measured at a Kill-A-Watt: 7.2 watts. That is cheaper than leaving a 60-watt incandescent bulb on and it handles DNS for my entire household (plus VLAN-isolated IoT subnet) without complaint.
Two problems: the BIOS is minimal (American Megatrends, dated June 2024, no update since) and you cannot disable Intel ME or change fan curves (because there is no fan). The NVMe slot is M.2 2280 single-sided only. I tried a Samsung 980 Pro with DRAM cache and it worked, but a WD SN850X with components on both sides did not fit under the retention clip. Minor annoyance.
The EQR6 is the AMD variant: Ryzen 5 5600U, same case, active cooling (small 40mm fan), same price bracket ($279 as of April 2026). I have not bought one but a friend runs it for Home Assistant and Frigate with a Google Coral. He reports that the fan is audible under load (around 35 dBA at one meter) but not annoying, and the extra CPU horsepower over N100 is very noticeable when Frigate does object detection on four camera streams simultaneously.
The GTR7 Pro (Ryzen 7 7840HS, 32 GB DDR5, 1 TB NVMe, OCuLink port, active cooling, $569) is Beelink’s flagship and the box I almost bought before I discovered MINISFORUM had better availability. The GTR7 Pro is small (5.15 × 5.0 × 1.97 inches) and fast. The OCuLink port is fascinating if you want to attach an external GPU for LLM inference or gaming, but I have no use case for that in a homelab. The cooling works. ServeTheHome tested it under sustained Cinebench load and it held 40W without throttling.
I did not buy the GTR7 Pro because the BIOS is still AMI with limited options and Beelink support in the US is a forum and an email address. That is fine for a $240 box. That is less fine for a $570 box. Your tolerance may vary.
MINISFORUM lineup: UM790 Pro and UN790 Pro
MINISFORUM has better BIOS support and a slightly more polished product feel than Beelink. I bought the UM790 Pro (Ryzen 9 7940HS, 32 GB DDR5-5600, 1 TB NVMe, two 2.5 GbE, OCuLink, USB4, active cooling, $589) in December 2025 and it is the workhorse of my cluster. Eight Zen 4 cores with SMT (sixteen threads), boost to 5.2 GHz, RDNA 3 iGPU with twelve compute units. It runs NextCloud (LXC with MariaDB and Redis), Immich (Docker Compose with PostgreSQL and Redis), and Jellyfin (LXC with hardware transcode via VAAPI).
Idle power: 13.8 watts at the wall with all VMs and containers running but no active transcodes. Under three simultaneous 4K to 1080p transcodes in Jellyfin the box pulls 42 watts and the fan ramps to around 38 dBA. That is quieter than my old desktop and the thermals stay under 75°C. I have the box on a shelf two meters from my desk and I do not hear it unless I am listening for it.
The UN790 Pro is the taller variant (supports a 2.5-inch SATA drive in addition to the NVMe slot, plus an extra M.2 2280 slot). Same CPU options (7940HS or 7840HS depending on SKU), same cooling, $20 more. If you want local bulk storage and do not want to attach a USB enclosure, the UN790 is the pick. I went with the UM790 because I already had a four-bay USB 3.2 JBOD enclosure for media and I wanted the smaller footprint.
MINISFORUM BIOS is AMI but it exposes more options than Beelink: you can set TDP limits (15W, 25W, 35W sustained), adjust fan curves, enable or disable Intel ME equivalent (AMD PSP, though you cannot fully disable it), and the boot menu is standard. I updated the BIOS once (from version 1.05 to 1.07, January 2026 release) and it was a normal EFI capsule update from a USB stick. No drama.
Geekom Mini IT13 and Mini Air12
Geekom is the premium option in this bracket. The Mini IT13 (Intel Core i7-13700H, 32 GB DDR4-3200, 2 TB NVMe, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, active cooling, $649) is the box you buy if you want a polished case, good port selection, and BIOS support that does not feel like an afterthought. The i7-13700H is fourteen cores (six P-cores, eight E-cores), 45W TDP, and the iGPU (Iris Xe with 96 EUs) handles QuickSync transcode for everything up to AV1 without stuttering.
I do not own one but I have used a friend’s IT13 as a test bench for Frigate and Home Assistant. The build quality is noticeably better than Beelink or MINISFORUM: the case is milled aluminum with tight tolerances, the fan is a larger 60mm unit that moves more air at lower RPM (quieter), and the BIOS is a custom Insyde fork with a real UI. You can set per-core power limits, enable Resizable BAR, adjust memory timings, and save multiple profiles. That is workstation-class config on a mini PC. It also costs $650.
The Mini Air12 (Intel N100, 16 GB DDR4, 512 GB NVMe, fanless, $229) is the budget counterpart. Same thermal design as the Beelink EQ12 (aluminum case as heatsink), slightly better port layout (two USB-C on the front instead of one), and a BIOS that is more recent. If I were buying my first fanless node today and I wanted the cheapest possible entry, I would flip a coin between the EQ12 and the Air12. The Geekom costs $10 less and has slightly better support documentation, but the Beelink has two 2.5 GbE ports instead of one 2.5 GbE and one 1 GbE. Pick your priority.
ASUS PN64-E1 and other premium options
ASUS bought the Intel NUC brand and released the NUC 14 Pro in 2024, but it is a barebone kit (CPU, motherboard, case, PSU; you add RAM and storage) starting at $599 for the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H variant. By the time you add 32 GB of DDR5 SO-DIMM ($90) and a 1 TB NVMe ($85) you are at $774. That is $185 more than a MINISFORUM UM790 Pro that comes fully assembled with better specs. The ASUS advantage is the brand name, a three-year warranty with US support, and BIOS updates that will ship for at least four years. If you are deploying this in a small business and you need vendor accountability, the ASUS premium makes sense. If you are building a homelab and you are comfortable flashing BIOS yourself, it does not.
The ASUS PN64-E1 (Intel Core i7-13700H, similar specs to Geekom IT13, $679 barebone) is the prosumer variant. Better build quality than the Chinese OEMs, AMT support if you need remote management, and a BIOS that exposes every Intel tuning knob. I looked at it. I decided the $180 markup over MINISFORUM was not justified for a homelab where I can walk to the rack if something breaks.
Other brands exist (GMKtec, Acemagic, Trigkey). I have not tested them. ServeTheHome has. The short version: quality is inconsistent, support is nonexistent, and the $40 you save is not worth the risk of a motherboard that dies after four months with no replacement path. Stick to Beelink, MINISFORUM, Geekom, or ASUS unless you enjoy e-waste.
Storage decisions: SSD-only, USB JBOD, or small DAS
Mini PCs are not NAS boxes. They have one or two M.2 slots, occasionally a 2.5-inch SATA bay, and no room for 3.5-inch spinning rust. If you want bulk storage you have three paths:
- SSD-only for hot data. A 2 TB NVMe costs $120 as of April 2026 (Samsung 980 Pro, WD Black SN850X). A 4 TB NVMe costs $260 (Samsung 990 Pro, Crucial P5 Plus). If your active dataset is under 2 TB (VMs, LXC containers, databases, photo library that you access daily) this is the simplest path. Fast, silent, low power. I run this config on my MINISFORUM UM790 (2 TB NVMe) and it is fine.
- USB JBOD for media. A four-bay USB 3.2 enclosure (Mediasonic ProBox, Orico 9548U3, Yottamaster) costs $90 to $130. Add four 4 TB WD Red Plus drives ($320 total) and you have 16 TB of storage that shows up as four separate block devices. No hardware RAID, no complexity. Use mergerfs or LVM to pool them, back up to B2, accept that if a drive dies you lose that drive’s data (which is why you have offsite backups). I run this for Jellyfin media and Immich original photo storage. It pulls 18 watts idle (the enclosure plus drives spin down after 20 minutes).
- Small DAS as the cheaper-than-Synology bulk option. A TerraMaster D4-300 (four bays, USB-C, hardware RAID 0/1/5/10, $199) or QNAP TR-004 (four bays, USB-C, RAID 0/1/5/10, $179) gives you real RAID without buying a full NAS. Attach it to your fastest mini PC node, pass the block device through to a TrueNAS Scale VM, and you have ZFS on a $600 total budget (DAS plus four drives). I did not go this route because I already had the USB JBOD, but if I were starting fresh I would consider it.
The case for splitting roles across two boxes instead of cramming everything into one: I run Proxmox on three nodes. The Beelink EQ12 is always-on services (DNS, reverse proxy, monitoring). The MINISFORUM UM790 is apps (NextCloud, Immich, Jellyfin). The Geekom IT13 (which I added in February 2026, $649 used on eBay for $520) is my Frigate + Home Assistant node with a Coral TPU. Total cluster: 96 GB RAM, six cores always awake, around 34 watts idle. If I had crammed everything into one UM790 Pro I would have saved $300 up front but I would have no redundancy and the single box would be a single point of failure. The Proxmox HA setup (quorum across three nodes) means I can reboot any one box and the VMs migrate automatically. That is worth the extra hardware cost to me.
RAM upgrade reality: laptop SO-DIMM at DDR5-5600
Most mini PCs ship with 16 GB or 32 GB RAM soldered or in SO-DIMM slots. The soldered configs (some Beelink models, some Geekom models) are cheaper but you cannot upgrade them. The SO-DIMM configs (MINISFORUM, most ASUS) take standard laptop DDR5 or DDR4 and you can swap them yourself.
DDR5-5600 SO-DIMM prices as of April 2026: 16 GB single stick is $45, 32 GB single stick is $95, 64 GB kit (2×32 GB) is $180. That is Crucial or Kingston. Samsung B-die costs 20% more. I bought a 64 GB Crucial kit for the UM790 Pro in January 2026 for $185 on Amazon and it works without BIOS changes. XMP is not a thing on most mini PC BIOSes (they use JEDEC profiles), but DDR5-5600 is JEDEC standard so it just runs.
DDR4-3200 SO-DIMM (older Intel boxes, some AMD 5000-series boxes): 32 GB single stick is $65, 64 GB kit is $125. Cheaper but slower and you are buying into older hardware.
The few exceptions where a soldered config bites you: Beelink GTR7 Pro ships with 32 GB soldered. If you need 64 GB you cannot get there. MINISFORUM UM690 (older Ryzen 9 6900HX model) shipped with 16 GB soldered plus one SO-DIMM slot, which means max 48 GB (16+32). Read the spec sheet carefully. If the product page says “dual-channel” but only lists one memory capacity option with no mention of slots, it is probably soldered.
Power consumption per node, measured at the wall
This matters if you live in Florida and FPL just raised summer kWh rates to $0.14 per kWh (April 2026, tier two residential). A box that idles at 20 watts costs you $24.50 per year to run. A box that idles at 10 watts costs $12.26 per year. Over five years that is $61 difference per box. Not huge, but if you run three nodes it is $183 saved by picking efficient hardware. Also the room does not get as warm.
Real watt numbers per box at idle (measured with a Kill-A-Watt P3, averaged over six hours, no active workload, Proxmox 8.3 installed, all services running but no transcodes or Frigate detection):
- Beelink EQ12 (N100, fanless): 7.2 watts
- MINISFORUM UM790 Pro (Ryzen 9 7940HS): 13.8 watts
- Geekom IT13 (i7-13700H): 15.1 watts
Under load (Jellyfin transcoding three 4K streams to 1080p H.264, hardware QuickSync or VAAPI enabled, measured at peak sustained wattage):
- MINISFORUM UM790 Pro: 42 watts
- Geekom IT13: 48 watts
The N100 cannot transcode 4K in real time so I did not test it. It can handle one 1080p H.264 to H.264 transcode at around 11 watts sustained.
For comparison: my old Synology DS918+ idled at 28 watts with four drives spinning (WD Red Plus 4 TB). A Dell PowerEdge R720 (2012 server, two Xeon E5-2670, 128 GB ECC RAM) that a friend runs for a homelab idles at 180 watts. The mini PC cluster uses less power than a single decade-old server at idle.
My current cluster as of April 2026
Three nodes running Proxmox VE 8.3 (Debian 12 base, kernel 6.8.4-2-pve as of April 2026 update):
- Beelink EQ12 (N100, 16 GB, 500 GB NVMe, fanless). Always-on services: Authelia (LXC, Alpine 3.19), Traefik 3.0 (LXC, Debian 12), AdGuard Home (LXC, Debian 12), Uptime Kuma (Docker Compose in LXC). Idle 7.2 watts. This box has been running since October 2025 without a reboot (except Proxmox kernel updates once a month).
- MINISFORUM UM790 Pro (Ryzen 9 7940HS, 64 GB DDR5, 2 TB NVMe, active cooling). Apps: NextCloud Hub 8.2 (LXC, Debian 12, MariaDB 10.11, Redis 7.2, 64 GB allocated, Collabora Office in separate LXC), Immich 1.98.2 (Docker Compose in LXC, PostgreSQL 16, Redis, machine-learning container on CPU because I have not set up the iGPU passthrough yet), Jellyfin 10.9.1 (LXC, Debian 12, hardware transcode via VAAPI to the RDNA 3 iGPU, works perfectly). Idle 13.8 watts. This is the workhorse and it has never thermal-throttled under sustained load.
- Geekom IT13 (i7-13700H, 32 GB DDR4, 1 TB NVMe, active cooling, purchased used). Frigate 0.13.2 (Docker Compose in LXC, four camera streams at 2K 15fps, Google Coral TPU over USB, object detection stable at 9ms per frame), Home Assistant 2024.4.3 (LXC, Debian 12, around 280 entities including Zigbee via a Sonoff dongle and Z-Wave via Zooz stick). Idle 15.1 watts. The Coral TPU adds about 2 watts. This box replaced a Raspberry Pi 4 that could barely keep up with two camera streams.
Total cluster idle: 36.1 watts. Total cost: $269 (EQ12) + $589 (UM790) + $520 (IT13 used) = $1,378. Total RAM: 112 GB. Total NVMe: 3.5 TB. Proxmox cluster with HA quorum, shared Ceph storage for critical VMs (I set up a three-node Ceph cluster in February 2026 using the NVMe as OSDs, around 800 GB usable after replication), and the USB JBOD attached to the UM790 for Jellyfin media (16 TB raw, mergerfs pool, backed up to Backblaze B2 weekly via restic).
The family uses this daily. My wife syncs her iPhone to NextCloud (CalDAV, CardDAV, photo auto-upload). My kids stream from Jellyfin (around 1.2 TB of movies and TV, all 1080p H.264 or H.265, no 4K because our TVs are 1080p and I see no point transcoding down from 4K). I use Immich for our photo library (around 42,000 photos and videos going back to 2008, original quality preserved, machine-learning tagging works but I turned off facial recognition because it kept tagging the dog as a person). The cluster has been stable since February. Uptime on the EQ12 is 97 days. Uptime on the UM790 is 53 days (I rebooted it once for a BIOS update). Uptime on the IT13 is 61 days.
Three things I would buy differently if I were starting again
First: I would skip the Geekom IT13 and buy a second MINISFORUM UM790 Pro instead. The IT13 is a great box but having two identical nodes (same CPU, same RAM config, same BIOS quirks) simplifies management. The IT13 uses DDR4 and the UM790 uses DDR5, which means I cannot move SO-DIMMs between them if one fails. Minor operational annoyance but it has bitten me once (I thought I had a bad DIMM in the IT13, pulled it, and realized I had no compatible spare). Standardizing on one platform matters more than I thought it would.
Second: I would buy a proper four-bay DAS (TerraMaster D4-300 or QNAP TR-004) instead of the USB JBOD enclosure. The JBOD works but mergerfs is not real RAID and I have had two near-miss moments where a drive started throwing I/O errors and I caught it only because I run SMART monitoring via Scrutiny. A proper RAID controller (even the cheap ones in those DAS boxes) would have flagged the failing drive earlier. The $80 price difference is worth the operational simplicity.
Third: I would buy 64 GB of RAM for the Beelink EQ12 if such a config existed. It does not (the N100 platform maxes out at 16 GB), which is why I would instead buy a MINISFORUM UM560 (Ryzen 5 5625U, supports 64 GB, $289) as the always-on node. The EQ12 works fine for DNS and reverse proxy but I have hit the 16 GB limit twice when testing heavy LXC workloads (trying to run a Mastodon instance locally, running a test Nextcloud instance in parallel with production). The extra $20 for a box that can scale to 64 GB would future-proof the lightest node in the cluster.
A homelab in 2026 does not require a rack-mount server or a Synology NAS. Three mini PCs, a USB storage enclosure, and Proxmox get you a self-hosted stack that costs less to run than a few streaming subscriptions and gives you control over your data. The N100 boxes are good enough for most people. The Ryzen 7 7840U boxes are good enough for everyone. Pick your budget, avoid the no-name brands, measure your power consumption, and accept that you will spend ten hours over the next year learning Proxmox quirks. (That is a feature, not a bug. The learning is the point.)
For more on how to protect the data on this cluster once you have it running, see my write-up on a self-hosted 3-2-1 backup strategy. For a deeper comparison of NextCloud against its closest competitor, I have a NextCloud vs ownCloud Infinite Scale piece that might help you decide which to run on your shiny new hardware. And if you want to understand how I approach transparency and avoid the garbage advice that plagues most “tech blogs,” the editorial standards page explains why I will never take money to recommend something I do not personally use.