I’m looking at some CWWK, topton, and oaknode boards online for an upcoming build. I’m throwing proxmox and OPNsense on this. There’s a ryzen 8845HS board I’m curious about but there’s also some intel boards I could drop an i5-14600T used CPU into that could work well too. Either way I would have an intel ARC GPU in the PCI slot for media decode/encode and a coral TPU in the E-key M2 slot for frigate object recognition.
But I get conflicting info online about these boards being a waste of time and money. I see things about them burning out, or having weird BIOS bugs that never get fixed. On the other hand, NAScompares seems to like these boards. Are these something I should avoid?
A cheap N100 or N305 mitx with more ethernet and sata ports already attached is one thing, but I wouldn’t wanna risk warranty hell with more money on the line.
Considering you are gonna add a dgpu I would look at a low tdp desktop cpu such as ryzen 7600/9600 from a trusted store instead.
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/topton-warranty-practices.40421/I want zenarmor and suricata. Intel N series chips cannot handle that. The dGPU is just needed for handling media decode and encode, not actual rendering.
The quicksync built-in to the n100 PR n305 is more than adequate to encode/decode media. If that’s all you’re using it for, you don’t need an Intel arc.
Incorrect. The built in quicksync is adequate for a limited number of simultaneous streams. Considering I plan for frigate to handle multiple cameras on this machine I will need more streams.
You are mistaken. Frigate ingests rtsp and direct streams using HLS, which only accepts h264 or h265. The vast majority of cameras encode in h264. H264 is a trivial decode operation on modern hardware within the last decade.
I am currently looking at CPU usage in my frigate container with 5 1080p RTSP streams and it is hovering at between 4% and 8%. Without any quicksync configured, just CPU and coral.
I don’t know what your deal is, or why you think you know more than folks who have been doing this for years, but stop, please. You don’t know what you’re talking about.


