Cheapest NUC for Deepstack/Facebox

I’ve recently moved by HA setup from a Raspberry Pi to an old PC I had hanging around and in the process started to use Docker.

However, now that im semi comfortable with this, I feel I can take the plunge and buy an NUC.

Two main reasons for this being 1;

  1. The fan on my old PC drives me mad and the CPU is constantly high.
  2. I’d like to use Deepstack or Facebox for facial recognition. My current old PC does not support AVX so the only variation of either I can get to run is Deepstack:noavx but it takes about 12 seconds to recognise the face.

Aside from this, I’d rather someone a bit smaller in the room than a big desktop tower which was bought in about 2012!!

That said, I don’t want to spend an absolute fortune on an NUC and do not know enough about computer specs to be able to pick out a bargain. I don’t really want to spend more than £150-£200.

I don’t mind buying second hand off eBay, if what I get will be fit for purpose but I don’t really know where to look.

Lots of the NUC I see on eBay in my price range are from around 2014, are these likely to be any good??

Should I get a gigabyte brix?
What ram do I need?
I3 or i5? What’s the difference
Im thinking 120 SSD is plenty

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-NUC-NUC5PPYH-N3700-2-4Ghz-Quad-Core-4GB-RAM-180GB-SSD-WiFi-Bluetooth/264443250386?hash=item3d920bc6d2%3Ag%3AstoAAOSw1V5dY8mD&LH_BIN=1 What about this?

Any help much appreciated as I’m lost!

Thank you very much

That’s a good price for a Pentium NUC, and far more than enough processing power for Home Assistant. I’d grab it while it’s available.

It would probably help if I answer some of your questions. I use a NUC i3-7100 with 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD. Just upgraded from Debian 9 Stretch to Debian 10 Buster yesterday. The Pentium and even Celeron NUC systems with 4GB RAM will all run Home Assistant with ease. My 128GB SSD shows about 25% use right now, and that’s running the latest/greatest HA via Hass.IO inside Docker containers.

Thank you for your comments, and the additional ones too! I really am in the blind here so appreciate it very much.

Do you run any facial recognition at all, or anything that requires more power than HA?

How does the original NUC sent compare against the likes of;

Or

Is there a clear winner between these 3 or all much of muchness?

Thank you again

NUCs are overpriced. You will get more processing power for your buck here:

https://nl.aliexpress.com/store/3643007?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.500c7408NuHbTx

@tom_l has a point, but it seriously depends on how long you want to wait for your hardware to arrive. :wink: Even with facial recognition, 4GB RAM is plenty of memory. Consider the RPi3B+, which has only 1GB RAM and runs most folks’ HA just peachy. 8GB is definitely enough for anything and everything HA, including facial recognition. An i5 system is certainly overkill, as is any SSD larger than 128GB. At the very most, an i3 system might be a better choice than a Pentium or Celeron, but it’s still not entirely necessary. If I were choosing between a Pentium, i3-4010, and i3-5010, I’d grab the i3-5010 system.

1 Like

Thank you very much for your advice again, very much appreciated.

Picking up on @tom_l point though, I’m in no major rush and not bothered if it is an Intel system or some chinese copy as my house is fill with Xiaomi which has come from gearbest or banggood.

Any advice or a clear winner from Ali please?

The XCY items have been referenced here many times. Anything with an i3-7100 will certainly do the job for you, and those prices appear very, very good. :slight_smile:

i have moved from a RasPi 3 to a Dell Wyse Thin Client, added an SSD, installed Ubuntu -docker and HassIO. restored from snapshot from old HA setup and backup and working great. 100 times faster reboot times, faster transitions between pages and faster generating history graphs on entities. worth the $42 :slight_smile:

Are you taking power consumption into consideration as well?

A home server can account for up to 15% of your energy bill.

A NUC or mini pc won’t come anywhere near that unless you have a hyper low total energy use.

Even if you went for a processor 15W TDP rather than one of the common laptop 10W TDP processors that’s only 0.36kWh per day. The average energy use for countries with electricity is around 10kWh per day. Thus 3.6%, which is nowhere near 15%.

This assumes you are running at 100% CPU use 24/7 (and no peripheral devices) but still the 15% value is not realistic for the devices we are talking about.

The XCY I’m going for has TDP of 15w, not that I understood that at the time of ordering. But compared to the current 8 year old desktop whirling around at a high CPU constantly it must be an improvement :slight_smile:

Thanks for the advice on Ali @tom_l, have ordered but having a nightmare having to confirm my account before they accept payment and ship etc :frowning:

Is it your first time ordering on Aliexpress?

I had no trouble with XCY at all. They took the order and shipped. But I have a fair bit of account history with Aliexpess.

That’s normal for a first-time purchase.
Don’t worry, your information is secure.

Yes guys, my first order. Not too worried, was just a pain after spending hours and hours trawling the site comparing all the options whilst my budget kept getting stretched further and further!! And after all that, I don’t even have an order confirmed yet!! :slight_smile:

Is it with the XCY also possible to just install Hassio native? (With the Intel-Nuc image?) I don’t want to run anything else on it, and so looking for as less overhead as possible… But use the add-ons like granafa, influx, adguard, motioneye,… Like that it’s just integrated at once…
I’m running on my Synology (DS918+) for the moment, but get a gut feeling it would be better to just place it on a dedicated machine. Everything in house is getting dependent on it… :slight_smile:
Please correct me if my reasoning is wrong…

Yes it is possible. The easiest way is to use an external USB enclosure to write the image to the SSD then install it in the mini pc.

My ID verification got rejected!! Nightmare!!

Feels bad, man. Email them, challenge them. For goodness sake, it’s not like a million dollars or anything. Did you use a legitimate residential street address?

Yeh, sent a proper copy of my driving licence as requested which matches all the details in my account and my bank account! Just resubmitted an appeal, but it says they can take 7-10 days!!