Is this a good Mini PC option for Home Assistant OS?

Hardware
1

Hi all,

I know this question has probably been asked a lot, but I can’t seem to find one related to this specific mini PC, so I figured I’d ask. I’m curious whether I should go ahead and purchase this PC in the hopes that it will outperform my RPi4 2GB. I’m sure the sheer difference in RAM is obviously better, but how about the CPU? I just don’t want to be bottlenecked at all.

I currently run Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi 4, but I’m really being bottlenecked by my memory usage at the moment…

I run MotionEye with 1 camera at the moment, but I would like to a) future proof my setup for more cameras, and b) switch to Frigate and run object detection. Will this PC be able to handle that? Or am I going to need a Coral USB Accelerator on top of this PC eventually?

Aside from that, I generally just run pretty normal add-ons from the official add-on store like InfluxDB, Grafana, Visual Studio Code, Samba Share, Google Drive Backup, etc, nothing too demanding, but I’m hoping to be pretty future proof here in terms of CPU and Memory usage.

Another thing I’m potentially worried about is the onboard bluetooth… I use the BLE monitor in home assistant for quite a few things, and this PC says it has BT 4.2 but is there going to be any measurable difference between the RPi’s BT 5.0? I want to make sure I can still talk to all my BLE devices with this mini PC.

Lastly, are there really any differences in terms of installation/running HA OS on this machine? Or is it as simple as making a backup, installing HA OS on my PC, and then restoring that backup and it functions all the same?

Thanks

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Here I did some benchmarking of different systems a while ago. Among the tested systems I had a Pi4 with 4GB RAM and a MiniPC with an Atom x5-Z8350 CPU and 2GB of RAM.

My benchmarks did not include any Video-related tasks, only stuff Home Assistant itself is doing. But it still might be helpful. In my tests the Pi4 and the MiniPC where pretty close to each other. But as the MiniPC you’re looking at has a faster CPU and more RAM, you should see the performance improve. Additionally the CPU in your MiniPC has more support for hardware accelerated Video-stuff. If the software you’re using is able to make use of that, then this should have an impact on the performance as well.

So my guess is, that your MiniPC will certainly be better than the Pi. But I can’t say if it’s powerful enough for your requirements, especially regarding the Video stuff.

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