There's a reason why "recycle" is at the bottom of "reduce, reuse, recycle" list. Reusing existing computers is better than manufacturing new ones, unless there's a massive efficiency gap. Especially if they're being powered by clean energy.

The fake out around 9 minutes in, leading into the spreadsheet calculators for both long-term costs and CO2 emissions is why I appreciate your content! This is the type of information so many tech channels skim over with newer technologies, so I’m glad you care to dive into the facts.

To be honest, the N100 from my own perspective is a terrible option for a NAS/home server CPU. It's incredibly expensive at $128 US. The Celerons are much much cheaper at $30-40 and provide very good performance for the money, while the Ryzen Embedded CPUs only cost somewhat more than this N100 and come with SO MANY MORE PCI Express lane, I tell everyone that asks me to put the N100 in the NASes here at work that we're putting something better in.

Thank you for this video! I always appreciate when people don't discount the footprint of producing so many devices (with complex and harmful supply chains) that usually are destined for a landfill after 5-10 years of office use. It's easy for people to focus over minute idle wattage differences and lose the forest for the trees.

I've been using an Intel N95 the last few months on a daily basis in a laptop. It preforms surprisingly well. Cant wait to see this chip start to replace Celerons.

Thanks for this video! I loved the second half when you dug deeper into calculating the 'real' cost of a new pc vs using an older less efficient one. Videos like this makes me proud to support you!

As someone who is currently hosting a mail/web server on a Dual Atom 330 board from 2009 I appreciate your more in-depth view rather than chasing the newer = better. I'm hoping to upgrade soon to a second hand USFF PC then I can move my Home Assistant off of the ancient Celeron laptop into a container on the new machine.

The 3R's - reduce, reuse, recycle. In this order. So reusing old stuff is usually better then recycling it.

good job. i love the focus on wattage and CO2 footprint, even if they were rough estimates. the wattage cost calculation is something i typically do too

Just got this video randomly recommended, and I totally loved this review taking into consideration the environmental impact of the manufacturing, and operating costs into the costs analysis, subscribed I would love to see more videos diving into these subjects, you could probably reach a broader audience by simply showing the results using a bar plot that compares the real emissions and real cost of a product

This is a good shout and a good calculation. I have an old lenovo x260. It will idle at 4w and with a couple of drives on it it will get up to 20 or so when transcoding but i think its doing very well. Thanks for looking at the euro prices, i really didnt expect that vision from someone in the states i appreciate that. My elec is 27p kwh. I think in the grand scheme of things the numbers arent a concern really. As a perspective i measured my old athlon 1800 desktop "retro" machine and it idles at 100w before you do anything at all so we are winning either way.

It would have been very useful to run one day with a fixed set of tasks on each system to get real-world daily KWh usage. As it is, that's the big question that none of us can answer without building both systems and trying it ourselves. But good work to bring more total-cost-to-the-planet-and-mysefl factors to the discord !

I took a lot of interest in the second half of your video. Definitely makes me want to research my rough energy footprint just for the heck of it. Love your content, keep it up!

And this is why I love your channel. Talking about *all* the facets of a little box like this. Loved the breakdown of environmental impact between this guy and that old 6500T system.

Seeing the sustainability calculations was interesting. Thanks for including that!

I really like the in-depth analysis of power consumption and co2 emissions with the spreadsheets.

For me, the biggest draw of these N100-N305 systems is that you can get fanless versions with multiple multi-gigabit NICs, something that not long ago would require a pretty large system with multiple add-in cards. Big tower with 4-6 fans to a small box with zero fans, that's a major win for me.

100%. The single worst thing for the environment, from a consumer angle, is to buy something new. This is pretty much universal (I'm sure exceptions exist, but overall this is holds true). The manufacturing costs, the shipping costs, and the use of more exotic materials involved with "efficient" technology far outweighs the incremental improvement. If you're running a netburst Pentium 4 space heater...ok maybe upgrade. But you're "gas guzzling" 15mpg truck that keeps chugging and only requires a few bolt in replacement parts...starting from today, because buying something new won't erase the environmental impact that has already occurred....will be better for the environment than a new fancy EV with huge batteries filled with rare earth metals being charged by coal and gas power plants. (Side note, look into microplastics from tire debris, and increase wear from heavy EVs for a sobering reality check.) If you can repair a piece of tech, it's almost always better to keep something old running rather than replacing something functional because something shiny and "green" is hiding the real costs from the consumer. I'm also a huge tree hugger and environmentalist, I *WISH* the marketing hype about efficiency was actually true, the data just doesn't support it. The numbers are even worse when you start comparing the sum of our individual footprints against just one megacorp. We can do our part, but every "consumer" could got carbon zero today and emissions and pollution *might* be cut by a third, that's how much industry is the root problem.

Thank you for the analysis at the end! I got into recycled mini pcs and laptops last year and won't go back to buying new hardware again ... there's so much good second hand stuff out there that gets the job done perfectly fine.

I really appreciate the breakdown - power & environment-wise. I think another advantage with buying a much cheaper older system - is the fact that you can even get a 2nd one - to act as a backup / hot spare and still be under the cost of a new one.

You are the first person I see on UKposts whip out a spreadsheet to calculate C02 impact on the environment and I want to take a couple of seconds to applaud you for it. It means a lot to me and I hope you continue to do this. It is important and I want to thank you for the time it took to include it in the video. Thanks.

I appreciate your dive into the cost/benefit analysis here. I was recently working in my home lab and I moved my pfsense from an FX6300 over to a i5 6600T. The FX ran around 75 watts. I also moved my home server from a 8320e to a 6700T. I expect the same result in decreasing power draw.

Really liked the comparison between the older hardware and the n100 power consumption costs. I recently aqcuired a free dell 3040 micro (i3 6100t), upgraded it with 16gb of ram and a 256gb ssd. Currently running jellyfin, OMV, home assistant, tailscale, and ad guard on it with proxmox. Working very well with a lot more resource to go around.

Awesome that you covered the benefit of reuse vs newly manufactured !!

Omg ! I'm only a very recent follower of your channel (and I discovered it by pure randomness), but man, I wish more youtubers did the maths you did at the end ! (costs, environmental impact, etc.) This is a real plus that we don't see often (if ever) on other channels ! That's a great channel for sure that I just discovered ! Now, I'm gonna have to watch the other videos ! =)

Thanks! Thanks! Thanks! One of the few channels that consider the production footprint.

This Changes my understanding of computer, it will take time to implement what i learnt today 😅

These types of videos have so much more value than those that test fully-specced out high-end PCs with RTX graphics or M Ultra Macs. Nobody I have respect for can reasonably afford a $4,000 PC. This is the channel for the digital everyman. Major respect.

Thank you for the video. Based upon cost of ownership, I bought a used NUC7, and am very happy with it. It is faster than I need for my use case.

Really nice little calculator. For even more clarity, I think you should show two graphs with time in years on the horizontal axis and cost/emissions on the vertical axis for the two devices. That makes it super clear when one becomes the preferable option over the other.

Noise, warmth, security is a big reason why I went for a n100. Also, the encoding on the n100 is just insane.

Power efficiency is worth looking at when you need to buy new to access features you can't get on your older hardware, or if you are replacing faulty hardware that cannot be fixed. Both apply to my last upgrade.

One thing that would be worth visiting is that the Intel 6000 series and older is that the GPU can not do any encoding or decoding of HEVC/H.265 at 10bit or better (he covered this sort of in saying the n100 can do that). If you are using Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin, this can be a HUGE power savings if you the GPU does it vs the CPU (if the 6500T can even do real time decoding and encoding of HEVC 10bit in the CPU). I share my library with family and watch while on the road (and I don't want to have to keep duplicates of everything or have to teach my family how to find a lesser version of the file that streams better). Yes the CPU is roughly equivalent to a 6500T, but the GPU is miles ahead.

A fairly decent video. HP provides dismantle guides for some of their systems, on how to recycle them properly. I've had a Bosgame n95 running Proxmox/ESPHome/HomeAssistant since early May. One point you are missing. The n100 system in a business space, can run on POE+, just like I do. This level of CPU is the future for business, imagine not having to have, power, power bricks, UPS's, surge protectors, etc. Just a POE connection. It's how mine has run since I put it in my rack. With a $12 Edimax Pro Gigabit PoE+ Splitter. That HP MIGHT work with POE++ which is 51-71 watt max, but most businesses wont have these for a while yet. The Amazon warehouse I helped launch had over 200 POE+ switches because every AP and Camera was POE. Now imagine if they could eliminate power bricks for say 50 desks, 200 thin client stations. 250 power bricks not needed.Times 1400-2000 sites. So for home use, old stuff may still be better than buying new, but the new stuff is where its at imho. Lastly, HP has a no bios reset policy since about 2021. If someone has a BIOS password set on a piece of used equipment the only option is a motherboard swap.They have removed the reset jumpers and will not assist even big customers. So buyer beware.

The question is: do you want a used machine or do you have an old one around? If not then you need to buy something new and at that point there's hardly any better option available than the N100 (or N200 sibling). Reliability of old hardware is also a factor - depending on your intended use it might even be a very important factor, e.g. in a NAS. For a small home server I would go for the ASRock N100M mainboard: 2 PCIe Slots (1 PCIe 3.0 16x/2x and 1 PCIe 3.0 1x/1x), 1 M.2/M-Key (PCIe 3.0 2x), 1 M.2/E-Key (Intel CNVi), 2 SATA on board - and it's fully passive. That board is somewhere around 120-140 bucks. Hard to find any board+cpu combo that is cheaper. Throw in a SAS/SATA HBA on the PCIe 3.0 16x slot (running it with 2x should be sufficient for up to 8 mechanical drives - ~194MB/s per drive of bandwidth, mechanical drives don't saturate that) and a 10G fibre adapter on the PCIe 3.0 1x slot (yes, it will be limited in bandwidth but you're still getting real ~6-7Gbps of data bandwidth out of it after considering encoding: PCIe 3.0 1x has 0.985GBps of bandwidth with 128b/130b line code, that's ~7.76Gbps and now it depends on the protocol overhead and encoding). NVMe or SATA M.2 as system drive and you can use the on board SATA ports either as SSD Cache drives or additional ports if SATA is enough for you and you want more than 8 drives (which is A LOT - using 12TB drives with 2 drives parity in RAID-Z2 will give you ~60TiB of usable storage or ~71TiB in RAID-Z1). Any even remotely efficient CPU costs already like >80 bucks - and then we're looking at TDPs of 25-35W and not 6W: The Pentium Gold G6405T, Pentium Gold G6505T and the Pentium Gold G7400T on team blue and the Ryze 5 Pro 3350GE on team red (for about as much as the whole N100 board) - unless you want to move to the Athlon chips but even then you only get a tray Athlon 3000G for less - if you can still find both team red chips anywhere because they are old. And none of those options are passively cooled. There's just no alternative to the N100/N200 systems available on the market at that price point with that efficiency. And as a media device: there're little options fo fan-less barebones with WiFi6 support, at least HDMI 2.0 (you want that for your media center as it supports 4k/60 without compression and it supports HDR starting from rev. a) and up to 15W CPU TDP. At least in Europe you're left with 3 N100 barebones (2x Zotax ZBOX, 1x ASUS ExpertCenter), 1 N200 (1x ASUS ExpertCenter) and 2 Celeron N4500 that are 2c/2t (2x ASUS Mini PC). Shrink it down to release dates since 2023 and the Celerons are gone from the list. Those little N100 and N200 systems are REALLY interesting.

Thanks for that look at the economics of new vs. repurposed hardware. I've always thought of repurposed hardware as keeping it out of landfills, hadn't considered that so long as it's not excessively power hungry it really isn't saving that much vs. new hardware.

I just set up my Kamrui as a Proxmo test server. Works well, but I wish it had a bit more overhead on it, so I have to be more diligent about how many containers or VMs I have running on it any given time. I'm also using my Trigkey S5 as my production Proxmox Server. It's a bit more of a CPU and works well, but the TDP is a bit higher

It is a very specific type of need that leads to buying very new, top of the line hardware. While the rest still have it good to great with hardware up to 5-6 years old. It is something that I found to be valid for a lot of products, be it laptops, servers, home appliances, cars and so on. There is a big deal of FOMO pumped through every channel, and the points you made here makes me look forward with hope that other influencers will start being just as mindful. Thanks for sharing this review with us!

Recently, I did the same calculation for a new fridge, because my wife thought it was to old and a new one was cheaper in the long run. After measuring the the amount of kWh used for one week, it will take 7 - 8 years before break even. The conclusion was, that we will keep the fridge until it breaks. I often buy refurbished computers for my mini home lab and antenna hobby. I use Debian stable, so I don´t mind to buy 2 - 3 generation old (refurbished) computers, because of driver / firmware support.

That part with the spreadsheet at the end was great, it might not be exact science but very few other UKposts channels talk about that subject

Exactly! Thank you very much for the video. In fact, the only reason I bought one of these (Beelink, but still pretty much the same specs) is the HDMI 2.0, to watch movies on 4K with HDR and HEVC support.

CO2 emissions is the smallest concern for environmental impact. The pollution from mining and manufacturing (especially outside Western countries) is far nastier than CO2. Environmental impact from running an old computer could be rounded down to basically 0 compared to manufacturing a new device. On the flip side, for use in the summer or hot climates you have to double the energy use. You're spending that energy to run the computer then spending it again to run your AC. On the 3rd hand, for running in the winter you can halve or eliminate the energy use. I mine crypto in the winter - it might be an inefficient use of computing power, but as a space heater it's 100% efficient.

I’m running the beelink eq12 pro with dual 2.5g and an n305 I love it specially because I can run a few of them in a promox cluster with 1 2.5 as the stoarage network and the other 2.5 as the Lan network

I'm always surprised at how anytime the topic of computer energy efficiency comes up, the focus is on wattage with the points you brought up being many times just skipped altogether. This should be a mandatory watch for anyone thinking of setting up a modest server setup.

It's rational well thought out takes like this that made me a new subscriber. Thank you

Really love the second part of your video! Finally someone is getting numbers and counter argument. It's like people thinking that their electric car is saving the planet. I really like your videos keep it up man!

I have been using Raspberry Pi 4 for self-hosting wordpress and plex. It's been great and I have no plans on changing. Very low power use, reliable/stable and easy to update. It takes up almost no space too.

When you review things in regards to transcoding, it might also be beneficial to evaluate it as a Tdarr node

Thank you for the video and the sheets very helpful stuff as always

I've considered single board computers, which can often have the power advantage, especially ARM boards like the Orange PI 5 Plus & Raspberry PI's, used computers, and even mini-PC's like the Beelink EQ12 and Beelink EQ12 Pro. (N100 and N305 ) . There are advantages to each; but it depends upon use case. For me, it's a consideration of heat, power, noise and flexibility. The most flexible tends to be the mini-PC's. There are things I decidedly SHOULD do using ARM and other stuff where I should choose a mini-PC. For the most part, if you had to buy a used PC or a new mini-PC, I'd buy the new mini-PC. The 2 Beelink's above can run with 32G DDR5, have dual 2.5G RJ-45's, and can take a NVME+2.5 inch SSD. For smaller projects, often the SBC is a better choice, especially when it comes to power and size. Point is: It depends upon what you want to accomplish. I'm focusing on going mobile, where power, size and noise are significant considerations.

I use a BeeLink 12 that runs proxmox, which hosts my OpnSense router and a pihole. It runs with an N100 in it. I have 500/500 and the machine has 2x2.5 gbit ports. Runs great.

Great job on discussing the power and environmental impact of using old hardware! These HP office computers are extremely efficient. I bought an HP SFF G9 on the marketplace with a 12500 Intel CPU, and it idles around 8W-crazy, right? The same CPU in a regular PC idles around 30-40W. It's a shame that we can't undervolt and underclock these to achieve even lower power consumption.

Cool you actually included the chart I was thinking for the very beginning. I recently got i5 6500t Lenovo mini system with was it 90 euros and got 3,5" drive and big NVMe SSD in it. Way cheaper than getting new machine. Oh and tbh I'll trust that Lenovo business line oldie WAY more than manufacturer like "Kamrui" which I've never even heard of.

4:23 This is the exact model I recently picked up. The only "gotcha'" being that the video defaults to the USB-C port when running without XOrg, and that the rubber feet pop out super easily.

I’m really happy buying refurbished thinkcenters and ThinkPads from the 2018-ish range through guaranteed and warrantied sellers. I expect them to last for a very long time, and they can be pretty efficient. The M700 tiny even has a tiny footprint like the elitedesk in this video.

Living in Portugal, I do pay a bit more for energy (around 0.18€/kWh, but might be able to get around 0.10€/kWh if I switch providers) but my energy is 90-95% clean (hydro & wind, mostly).

thank you for doing transcoding tests, most important feature for me.

In the EU those systems you can find in the USA for 100$ they cost roughly 150 euro second hand [rarely are they under 120 euro] SO a N100 system would be more affordable and cheaper to run. Not forgetting if you underclock the N100, you can reduce its power consumption by another 10-20%

Just recently gone with the Morefine S500+ with a 5800H, dual 1TB NVMe SSDs for ZFS mirror and 2.5" SSD for the host OS storage. Can go up to 64GB of ram eventually and have dual nics, one being 2.5Gbe. They're a reasonable amount more on Aliexpress, but less than double, than these N100 devices most of the time but they're certainly also more than twice the machine for that money

Excellent video, it's very important to think about total costs, and not just "cpu efficiency", and a second hand pc is hard to beat.

I'm a fan of re-using older hardware, I saved a mini PC from e-waste at work and took it home to run as a home server instead. It's not very powerful, but it's enough to run a minimal Debian install with Docker for tinkering and running some home services. I'm also a big fan of using Raspberry Pi's where possible as the performance per watt of ARM makes it a good choice when you don't need x86 software support (even though box64 is a thing) i have 2 Pi 4's running ESXi Arm Fling running off a USB SSD so i don't have to constantly re-flash an SD Card, i can just add/delete VMs according to my needs at any given time.

I got this machine on Aliexpress for $95 for 8/256 version to run Home Assistant. Although it is called FIREBAT AK2 PLUS for those interested. The main benefit of this device over my HP Elitedesk 800 G2 mini is that it runs from a 12V DC and I can get a cheap DC UPS to run it from. I'm from Ukraine, so my use case is running home lab even during power outages.

The bottom usb-c is for a storage expansion, they use that exact motherboard in multiple mini pc's and some have a bottom addon that can hold a 3.5 ssd that connect through that port.

I managed to fully build my HP ED G3 Mini about a week ago. Managed to get a great deal on an i7-7700 processor and 32 GB of RAM. I ran my HTC Vive as a joke to see if it would even perform okay, and was shocked to find that mini PC was able to run at about 30fps with VR... I only intended on running a Plex Server, and maybe a small game server or two, so it was a welcome surprise for the performance lol

Awesome video, both the review and especially the cost reflection. Quite unique perspective on youtube! Power cost is such a big consideration in EU and the CO2 impact is an eye opener in itself.

The fakeout got me. Great video! Intel Arc has been updating their drivers pretty regularly and id love to see you take a look at some of the lower end single slot made for server loads.

Thanks for posting the spreadsheet

if that internal usb-c port is active you could possibly stick a low profile thumb drive in there for the servers that run off one saving the 2 sata spots for data drives.

Great video and insight about long term cost and environmental impact. The use of new raw materials, manufacturing and transport almost never are taking into account. Thanks

Excellent video and research, great job !!

For a portable cyberdeck, the low power of the N100 means better battery life. For a home server, lower power is "nice to have". It's only when you want intensive processing (gaming graphics, or maybe NAS) that the limited IO becomes an issue.

Was supposed to go for an N100. I live in a tropical country and heat from the box was a big consideration. I was thinking the N100 would have lower idle and low load temps. But I found out it's no better than an old i3-4150. I went with the i3-4150. Active cooling or not, my consideration was the heat it produced and how it will affect my small living space. I might hunt for an old "T" version of any Intel Haswell processor. Wish the N100 ran with lower temps. Great video. Not everything can be explained by tech specs. This is a great example of that.

The N100 systems will support modern I/O say PCIe v3 x2 for M.2 NVMe SSDs like the GMKTec Nucbox G3 that I just ordered. Older systems may only support slower SATA, obsolete 2.5" format, etc. Proprietary SFFs and Chromebox have almost no expandability / repairability like a microATX minitower with standard parts will.

Couple of weeks I found a great deal fora MSI Cubi with the N200 for a 180 bucks. I replaced the RAM and M2 plus put in an "old" 2TB SSD and installed PLEX. It's astonishing what that N200 system now is capable of

Absolutely splendid job ! Using older hardware is not as costly or as bad for the environment as many people think . well done. Also note electricity cost more 60c a kWh in the UK

this was a very good video coz this is mostly how I think, I use an old 7500t for this bought from a office nearby

A different way to say the old system has no cost of manufacturing is by saying it's already sunk or paid for by its first lifespan of use. It's good to do a life cycle analysis like this because it factors out the sunk cost of its previous life.

For the power efficiency comparison, I think what would make the difference to me is the difference in power draw between idle state and the cpu and drive under heavy load or loaded with the designated application/task, then compare that with other machines. Whichever option uses more power is the less efficient system. Just a thought for those concerned about power usage/cost.

love that you used 35 cents per kwh in your first example. That's exactly what I'm paying (NY). Definitely need to replace my home servers with something more efficient. Now if I can get that N100 cpu in a desktop chassis so that I can attach 8 hard drives to it.

I like those "mini" alder lake CPUs. Intel got it right this time with this hybrid microarchitecture. Out of all models I could test, the N100 is in my opinion the most well balanced one in terms of cost, availability, performance and efficiency. Specially for these tasks scenarios. The N95/100/N200 get shadowed by the 8-cores-intel i3 N305 due to the increase in core count. I found a laptop with a quite decent price featuring this cpu. Nice video

For that cost spreadsheet you should see what type of transcoding is supported and how long that lease is for. If your pc supports some proprietary transcoding and after 7 years won't be able to do it any more and needs replaced what's that cost vs getting one new that has a longer time frame that it can do the transcoding?

I would consider a computer like the Kamrui AK2 Plus Mini suitable for an always-on communications terminal to handle email, video conferencing and possibly voicemail, especially as electric rates have been increasing astronomically in places like California. Idling at 6 watts vs. 7.5 watts, let alone 200 watts, would be very noticeable on the monthly electric bill.

I adore this video. You hit so many nuanced points that nobody talks about and left us to decide for ourselves what works best for us. Being somewhere with hydro electric power myself, I have to think critically when it comes to efficiency, which is important to me. LOVE this video!

Great to see comparisons of this to an HP EliteDesk G3 Mini and how newer is not always better or more environmentally friendly. Funnily enough, I recently picked up three HP G3 Mini units for $28 CAD each (a little over $20 USD). I'm going to use two and keep one as a spare. I would trust these to last far longer than this KAMRUI disposable PC. Plus they have NVMe support as well as SATA.

What I find most interesting is how efficient these new processors are compared to my old 6th gen desktop that I run as a server with 3 Hdds and a SSD, my idle power is around 24-30W. Solar covers most of my energy costs

Thank you so much for bringing up this perspective. I feel like the environmental cost of manufacturing is an aspect that everyone in both the tech industry and us tech enthusiasts very conveniently like to gloss over and conveniently forget about - no doubt in no small part because accounting for it would require us to seriously check our gear lust. What you're saying here is an undeniable fact - that putting old hardware to new use, even if it's less power efficient than newer hardware, will always be better for the environment (unless that hardware is extremely old and inefficient to the degree that it's essentially unsuited for the use case). As someone else said below, there's a reason why the three R's are reduce, reuse, recycle and in that order: by far the most efficient thing to do is reduce consumption (and thus production) of new things, then the next most impactful is reuse of old things, and only when those two are no longer feasible should we recycle things into new components or products. Your calculations clearly demonstrate that even when only focusing on generating electricity, for most people today and going forward, keeping old hardware in service is far more efficient. And that ignores mining and materials production as you say, but also chemical waste from silicon production (which has _massive_ waste output), water consumption, and more - none of which is accounted for when just counting CO2, yet all of which makes a difference.

If you search for "grid greening" and your area, you should be able to find a projection of % energy on your grid that is coming from renewables. Pretty cool, where I am it's about half. So 0.5 would have been a good figure to test in your assumptions.

I bought one with a ryzen 7 5700u and 32gb dual channel ram (2x16gb) it's amazing !

got me a 5500U Mini pc for below 200 with 16GB/500GB as my main pc, with 24" LCD it's below 20w now. It has a fan but it does not run most of the time and even it's one of those small fan it's not loud. Almost 10y old PC was up to 100w so in my high power cost area it might be even withhin 2-3 years with the power costs.

I so much want to buy one of the current mini PCs - one with better connectivity than this, but in this category. But my 5 year old NUC and my 12 year old laptop are still doing fine for all my computing needs, since I'm not a gamer and I don't do much video processing. I'm having to grit my teeth and wait until the laptop finally gives up the ghost - but it was a good one when I bought it, so it's holding up really well with just minor upgrades along the way. They might both outlive me. I had the same problem with my giant Trinitron CRT years ago - I wanted a flat screen modern monitor, but couldn't justify it until the Trinitron screen stopped working. It weighed a ton, worked really well for many years, and cost $1000 new.

Vehicles are a great example of secondary emissions (like manufacturing). So long as an old vehicle is running reasonably it ends up being FAR greener to keep it on the road versus buying a new vehicle. Even with massive improvements in fuel economy.

Interesting information. I am glad that you enjoy running the numbers so that I don't have to...

I have always found its the storage that eats the watts. As its fairly easy to undervolt or otherwise lower the watts of a PC. Its the storage NAS, especially with HDDs that jack the watts used. Not everything spins down drives well. Nor do MB makers think about efficiency.

The i5-6500T is 6500 with limited TDP, from what I remember. (T) in intel CPUs is mostly made for 1L PCs, due to thermal constrains.

The N100 system has an appeal for running video on convention / trade show stands with it's dual HDMI 2. On the other hand, that HP can be upgraded to an i7- 7700, Which means you can keep using that server if your productivity requirements change.

I’m with you on keeping older kit running up to the point where reliability and power usage becomes an issue. Todays low end that people say is underpowered, is yesterdays powerhouse, power user machine. So I think these small machines become ‘better’ by loading them up with LOTS of workload.

The designs of these N100 minis are a bit different from manufacture to manufacturer and some of this is going to come down to how open the BIOS is. I bought 3 of them when I first saw them on AliExpress as I wanted to get some virtual machines off a NAS I was about to rebuild. On Cinebench R23, all of mine do just shy of 3000 points with PL1 & PL2 at their default of 4095W. Only one is still up running pihole and while it's way overpowered for that, it's nice to know I can add other things. The 7w idle draw is the same with the el-cheapos I bought.

QED ! "Quod erat demonstrandum" is a Latin expression often used in mathematics, which means "that which was to be demonstrated." (Reverso)

The problem with these older HP, Lenovo, etc., mini-PCs is that they are noisy and don't turn off the fan/fans even during idle/low temperatures/light tasks, whereas there are completely passively cooled N100 units.

Good analysis, very helpful! It might still be the better option for me, but that's because I don't live in the US. I don't have access to cheap-o used HP mini PCs, power prices are a bit different over here, and there is one specific case format I've been eyeing with the N100 - it's a dual HDD barebones NAS. I'm currently using an older PC for the task, but man, I already had lots of headaches with it... it's a 4th Gen Haswell Core i7, and it draws insane amounts of power. I already had to buy new RAM plus a new power supply because I was having problems with those, and there are still some weird unsolved issues I can't find answers to. Might be related to SATA ports. I thought it was going to be a good fit because I'm trying to run some more resource intensive stuff like Nextcloud packed with tons of add ons, which is why I still didn't pull the trigger on the N100. It's likely going to be a bit better than my current setup, but I'm not sure if enough to run all the stuff I want. Then again, perhaps I should just scale down... it's a bit ridiculous how many apps I want to run, test and make work all at once. I'm not sure if waiting for the next thing, N200, is worth it. In the end, it'll be a matter of timing... when I have the time to work on the project, I'll just get what is available. Can't delay this thing any longer because I don't have a lot of free time to work on it, and I've been waiting to have a NAS/basic home server thing for years now. Actually, well over a decade that I've been messing around with these things.