Big homelab, tiny footprint.

Start here

The guides most people arrive for, in the order a build usually happens. Everything else is in the full index.

1. Intel N100 mini PC buying guide Which specs decide whether a $150 box is still fine in two years: NIC chipset, SODIMM slot, firmware quality.
2. N150 vs N100: what actually changed The chip on sale in 2026 is no longer the one every buying guide describes. What the refresh does and does not fix.
3. Measuring mini PC idle wattage Spec-sheet TDP is not wall draw. How to measure it, and the BIOS settings worth two or three watts.
4. Best mini PC for a Proxmox homelab Three tiers, from a $150 N100 box to dual 10GbE, with the three-year electricity cost next to the sticker price.
5. Proxmox on a mini PC Whether a hypervisor earns its place on one small box, and the LXC versus VM call that follows.
6. How many VMs an N100 can run A per-service memory budget for 16GB, three worked stacks, and the symptoms of a host already over-committed.
7. N100 Plex transcoding limits What Quick Sync handles in hardware, where it falls back to software, and how many streams that really means.
8. pfSense firewall hardware Intel NIC chipsets, AES-NI and the multi-port appliances worth trusting with the whole network.
9. The $40 Wyse 5070 thin client The cheapest sensible way into an x86 homelab, and the storage and RAM ceilings that come with it.
10. Mini PC dark after a power outage The one BIOS setting every headless box needs, named vendor by vendor, plus how to test it safely.
11. The BIOS pass for a 24/7 box Everything else worth changing in the same sitting: Wake-on-LAN, VT-d, boot mode, C-states, radios off.

Comparing specific boxes? The mini PC picker and TCO calculator ranks them by five-year running cost against the workload you pick, at your electricity rate.