Howdy
Back again for another crazy price on the micro's
Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro
Intel Core i5 8500t
16Gb Ram
256Gb SSD
AC Wifi + Bluetooth (built-in)
Windows 11 Pro
12 Month Warranty
Also, have the 8Gb version available as well for $164 delivered. The same discount code will work as well
I can't guarantee ram configurations, but statistically, it's been 1 x 8Gb.
Now you've got me thinking about bell curves and standard deviations.
Some bells are naturally curved
and would 16gb likely be 1 or 2 modules?
https://youtu.be/h5LXsKLtyzY?si=XgiBhduLNvMhIES8
This YouTube tear down she say Dell optiplex 7060 with a single 16 GB ram stick but based on the OP comments on the 8 GB model I’m guessing that the ram configuration could still vary.
@SilentDissident: I've dealt with lots of these types of mini pcs. 8GB is usually 1 x 8GB module and 16GB is 2 x 8.
the one I received from this seller recently was 1x 16gb. But it can go either way.,
Hi,
I'm uncertain whether this model supports both NVME and SATA drives, but according to Dell's specifications, it seems possible. I plan to get 3 of these for my homelab to learn Proxmox and Kubernetes. Does anyone have a helpful guide for beginners in DevOps that I could follow? I'm new to this field and plan to use these microservers for my learning journey. Appreciate any assistance. Thank you.
I have this model, supports NVMe and sata
Thank you for your quick response.
I have 3 of these in my Proxmox cluster, they support SATA and NVME. I got two from this seller, one of them had some issues but they swapped it out straight away for a new one, hasn't skipped a beat since. I used the SATA for the boot drive and a 1TB NVME in each for VMs & containers. Plenty of tutorials on YouTube if you want to learn, look up the Apalrd channel in particular if you want to start from scratch.
Out of interest, what NVME did you get? Looking to do something similar to what you have setup
This is pretty much my exact use case, although I'm just a tinkerer, I'm not in the DevOps industry. I followed the 'VirtualizationHowto' guide to get the proxmox high availability cluster up and running, and it's been rock solid for ~6 months. Can't speak for K8s though.
Probably worth grabbing 3 of the same SSD to install as well, if you want any kind of capacity. From memory CEPH won't work with the boot drive of the device, although you don't HAVE to use it.
I think YouTube links are ok? I'm sure people will let me know if not: https://youtu.be/-qk_P9SKYK4?si=ZYZ-O7esWSpMU4rT
thank you all! bought 3 for HA cluster
'Sorry, We cannot process PayPal payments at the moment. Please try again later or call during business hours for assistance!'
I can't see any issues on my end. The last payment via PayPal for an order was 10 mins ago.
Working now. Order placed
Are these good for playing PC games?
No dedicated GPU, so no. These are office computers for web browsing and office applications.
It will play games that aren't graphically intensive.
Not really.
Getting negged for asking a question. This place can be so brutal.
Thank you for saying that, I felt I shouldn't have asked this question after seeing people negging me. Then it's a relief to see people offset the negs with positivity :)
You're fine, it comes up every time these gets posted so people probably get tired of answering.
I've daily driven them almost exclusively for 3yrs, happy to help if you've any other questions.
@JJtoTheRadio: PCIe in terms of the M.2 storage yes, but I suspect you're referring to gfx/other expansion cards, then no.
The beauty of these 1L-ish machines is that they're stupidly small and runs on 35W of power and super silent. Their intended use is certainly not games, they just can as components have gotten so good through iterations.
@[Deactivated]: Idle 4-8watts or so. 35w is the TDP of the CPU. So on average roughly 15watts depending on usage.
@skillet: Oh yeah I meant max TDP sorry, real life day to day should yield much lower, mine's on almost 24/7 due to this.
I play portal 1 and 2 on it without any issues. But anything that's more graphically intense it will have trouble.
These are the games I had on 6500T and now 10500T, so adjust your expectations somewhere in between and also consider the onboard GPU differences:
All running from SSD not NVMe, not sure of drive speed of top of my head sorry, probably not important I just want to be through for ya.
Runs perfectly at 1080p (nil to minimal fan)
- Back to the Dawn
- Door Kickers 2
- Hearthstone
- Into the Breach
- Mark of the Ninja
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl
- The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians
- The Final Station
Runs great on 1080p (GPU usage is always maxed and fan is always on, not obnoxious, but you get so used to dead silent after a while)
- Fallout New Vegas (perfect on both, just fan)
- Graveyard Keeper (perfect on both, just fan)
- GTA 3 (not enhanced ver, perfectly playable, just fan)
- GTA 4 (not tested on 6500T, I won't say perfect, but good, just fan)
- Ori and the Blind Forest (6500T is ok, 10500T is perfect, just fan)
- Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (not tested on 6500T, there's tiny bit of lag entering a new section, perfectly playable)
- Project Zomboid (runs fine on both, bit of lag in heavy areas, just fan)
- The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion (not tested on 6500T, plays perfectly with no lag, just fan)
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (not tested on 6500T, just fine, gameplay is smooth, tiny bit of lag entering new section or heavy activity on screen, have only played 30mins so not sure in later stages)
- Terraria (fine, just fan)
That should give you some guidance to the sort of games you can play, imagine if you drop to 720p for the more demanding ones performance will improve.
How much RAM? Thanks for your list!
16GB on both, 10500T has slightly faster RAM, not sure spec difference off top of my head sorry.
They're really excellent machines, and are far more capable than I initially gave them credit for. Basically if you don't (new)game/video edit, I can't imagine they'd not be enough for 99% of tasks.
To add on to mysticalrealm 's question, could you add a GPU to play more modern games, passably well?
On this particular unit? Not internally. For certain alternatives such as one that HP sells you can kit a higher wattage one with a GTX1660 but they're never seen in the wild standalone unless you opt for it initially, and those are expensive ($1k-ish), I know cos I've been looking for the card only for many months now and can't find it anywhere.
You can get an external GPU sure, ignoring any bottlenecks/power constraints, but an enclosure is expensive and you have to source a GPU so now you've another case next to this tiny case, kinda forfeits the point. By the time you get it you might as well go down an ITX route with more power/capabilities/etc.
These are designed to be ultra compact.
No, but they’re great for hosting game servers!
Hey I bought one of these the last cycle.
They are fine to play low requirement games. I've picked back up civ v, binding of Isaac, ftl, stardew valley. Definitely wouldn't run anything remotely taxing
I've played many hours of StarCraft 2 on one of these. Lots of games run on them, just not AAA titles
You can play those games
Minecraft
Stardew Valley
Among Us
Terraria
Undertale
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
Rocket League
League of Legends
Dota 2
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Always jump when I see these, before I remember I already have 3 in a perfectly fine cluster and I don't need any more :(
What did you use them for?
Proxmox cluster, same as probably everyone else with more than one of these. Run a bunch of self hosted services, Plex, Mealie, HomeAssistant to name a few.
Can you help with getting plex on proxmox to see network attched hdd?
@Jklaro: I'm not an expert by any means - just did a quick search on YouTube and the first half of this Craft computing video does a pretty good job of explaining it: https://youtu.be/-HCzLhnNf-A?si=2KnA0PDBtb-a4Lpv
@bonechiller: Do you guys recommend one of these to run Home Assistant instead of a raspberry pi or home assistant green?
I'm tempted to give this a go since it's not much more expensive than the home assistant green
How does a “cluster” work? Does it distribute the work, like can it distribute transcoding?
@Larsson: I'm not a pro, but would you need distributed transcoding with an 8500T? It should be able to quicksync easily enough…?
@Thiefsie: Also this: Intel quicksync crushes transcoding. My Plex instance went from 100% CPU utilisation to like 5% once I got it working properly.
@Larsson: Afaik it's not possible to distribute transcoding as that's a single process. I think you'd generally want a cluster for high availability (i.e. one of the nodes can be faulty, or down for maintenance, with no loss of service).
In my case, I have maybe a dozen services on half a dozen VMs/containers, and they're load balanced across the three nodes. If something fails, the system (should) automatically huck any services to a working node with minimal downtime.
To be clear, there are use cases for clusters to share one big multi-threaded workload (crypto mining, protein folding). I'm just pretty sure transcoding isn't the kind of thing that you could run on multiple systems.
@SnootyAl: @SnootyAl
@Larsson
I believe there are versions of ffmpeg that will allow a whole transcoding job to be farmed out to another node, but not splitting one job across multiple nodes afaik.
So if you were transcoding a library of files that might be useful with each being sent to different nodes.
Or if you were transcoding a single file on the fly it could just send it to a more powerful external machine as needed.
I have not done this, only read about it.
@rygle: You can set up things like Tdarr (https://home.tdarr.io/) on that work on different nodes, being sent out as you said. I have this set up on my Plex server: the server monitoring folders as various programs dump files in, which are then pushed out to different nodes to be re-encoded if required
@lano: I think I might have been thinking of something like this - https://www.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/comments/hirn1b/ever_wante…
Or a similar interesting discussion here
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/947
These past two links seem to be sending a while monolithic job over, by another post I found mentions splitting a single job into threads/chunks, which could potentially be on a local or remote CPU/GPU/APU - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48679961/distributing-ff…
@Larsson: A cluster allows multiple nodes to talk to each other about system state e.g., shared storage. It won’t distribute transcoding as far as I know.
Do you guys recommend one of these to run Home Assistant instead of a raspberry pi or home assistant green? Running only one box instead of a cluster that is.
I'm tempted to give this a go since it's not much more expensive than the home assistant green.
@jgkeightley: I've never used home assistant but I'm assuming that you could run it on one of these. If you install a version of Linux or a Linux based server operating system like Truenas Scale or open media vault you could possibly run home assistant in a Docker container. I have not done this with home assistant but I use a server running open media vault with various Docker images running for Jellyfin, Syncthing, Tailscale and more.
I don't believe home assistant would need much grunt.
I also think the performance to cost ratio of these is compelling compared to a Raspberry Pi, though maybe not so much the computing power per watt compared to a Raspberry Pi, though it wouldn't be ridiculously different. These come with the case, WiFi, power supply, so convenient.
@rygle: Thanks for this, it's a super helpful bit of information. HA seems to require very little memory, and I've been considering buying a used NUC or similar for a while, so this is just what I needed.
As in my other comment, if it all goes pear shaped, then I can always just use it as a home PC for my wife and son when he is a bit older.
@jgkeightley: In my opinion much easier - as it runs Windows. Using Linux if you haven't done it before is a whole new kearning curve.
It also falls back to a windows PC which is much more useful (in general) than a RPi unless you are a power user/programmer.
Definitely the way to go whilst RPis were quite pricey.
YMMV.
@Thiefsie: Looks like you can install Home Assistant on Windows either by running a virtual machine or by using Windows Services for Linux.
See https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/windows/
I would say that either method is going to require a bit of a learning curve if you are not already familiar with the systems used, but this guide seems helpful. I am sure that there will be videos on YouTube and discussions in their forums where you can learn and ask questions.
I think this system would be able to use either method to run this on top of/concurrently to windows, as long as you're not doing really heavy stuff on windows.
If you are not experienced with this stuff, this is how I learned most stuff I know, by trying and making mistakes, sometimes fumbling through, sometimes failing and starting again/reinstalling the whole system. The beauty is that if you're doing it on something cheap that's not your main system then you can make mistakes without losing family photos etc. The main skills needed will be patience and a bit of perseverance, but you will get there.
@rygle: Yeh sorry, I just assumed HA may have a windows port, but WSL add's to the learning curve to get it going under Linux (or within a VM).
100% agreed on your last statement. If you have time and don't mind fiddling and troubleshooting - its really not that hard. There are guides for almost everything, and forums/reddit for anything you can't find a solution for.
And otherwise, if you give up on HA or whatever, you have a functional PC, which is much more useful than a RPi, to me at least. Could be a Kodi box, Jellyfin/plex, router, server, NAS, emu station, etc etc etc etc - that's the beauty of these cheap refurb micro PCs.
@Thiefsie: Thanks for this. I ended up grabbing one before I saw your reply (a colleague is a bad influence).
I've run linux boxes as home servers back in the day, but nothing as advanced as VMs or Docker containers (docker was in its infancy).
I'm actually thinking that if it doesn't work out for HA, this will likely serve a purpose as a home PC if needs be, so more extensible than a RPi as you said. Also, the same bad influence colleague is gifting me an old NAS (incredibly generous bad influence) so a little home server could be a go.
@jgkeightley: If you have run Linux before then Docker is not going to challenge you too much.
There are also instructions for running home assistant in Linux here. They seem to follow the windows ones and describe using a virtual machine or Docker.
https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux
In some ways the virtual machine would be easier (in either windows or Linux), but it will use more resources on your machine. Docker containers do not run a kernel, but use the host system kernel (in windows this would be the WSL kernel) and are therefore much lighter resource wise than a virtual machine that emulates BIOS and virtual devices and runs a separate kernel, so you will be able to run more things on the system using Docker, including other Docker containers, but it is a learning curve, but it is not that hard and it is how lots of stuff is going now so it's not a bad idea to get on that train.
In the instructions for Home Assistant, either windows or Linux, the home assistant people have made a Docker image that is available on the Docker Hub, but there are probably images made by others on Docker Hub too. You load that image into Docker and tell it what resources on the host equal whatever resources the hosted container needs and or uses. For networking it is the same IP address normally, but you can tell it that port xx on the host equals port yy on the container. For example the home assistant server running in the Docker container may run a web GUI on port 80, but the host may already be using port 80 for something else, so you can redirect an unused port number on the host like 81 or 8000 to port 80 on the container. You can do the same with data directories, and in more advanced cases resources like com ports, graphics cards. The home assistant docs talk about com ports but that is likely only if you have external devices hooked up directly to your machine, while in many cases I would think it would be done through the network, which will just be the port redirection. I use a graphics card with a jellyfin media server container to enable transcoding, but that is not something you'll be doing in this case.
You can also point a Docker container to your data directories (if needed, like videos for a Jellyfin container), or in many cases if is just configuration files it will use Docker's default location.
There are lots of videos on YouTube about this sort of stuff like I'm sure technodadlife or Lawrence systems will have something.
@rygle: Wow, thanks so much for this level of detail! This is super helpful. I found a video on YouTube and followed a blog post with instructions for how to install docker, docker compose, and portainer via CLI. I gave this a crack on an old machine with Ubuntu installed on it and found it easier than trying to figure out docker desktop!
Docker is actually a much more elegant solution, because I actually have been wanting to run other services like Plex and/or Immich. I haven't run a home server in about a decade because a decade ago I was running it off my parents' electricity bill!
I need to do a lot more reading, but I think the docker containers will be a bit cleaner than running all of the services natively on the server machine. Thanks for the help :)
@jgkeightley: Portainer is an excellent webGUI for Docker.
If you run multiple Docker containers I would recommend using an application dashboard webGUI like Heimdall.
I would recommend using containers by a group called Linuxserver, the same people who are behind Heimdall. They have regular security updates and use a web based GUI server called novnc, which is cool and routes gui apps to http.
@rygle: I have an OpenMediaVault server with various Docker containers running on top. When I started using OMV the OMVExtras add-on would install Portainer for managing Docker, but they have since moved to their own in house Compose plugin that is similar but different, and really you can use either but they handle the containers just slightly differently so running both together they may not be able to see all the info on whether a container is up or down and they may name things a bit differently but it shouldn't affect the containers too much as both are GUIs over the top of the CLI based Docker and are only using it's functions slightly differently.
You can install Docker containers on top of various other server OS's like Synology, any Linux OS, I believe TrueNas, I believe Proxmox.
By default OMV wanted ports 80 for HTTP and 4343 for HTTPS, but I went into the OMV settings and changed these so that I could put Heimdall Application Desktop on the default http/s ports, then put a clickable link to OMV and numerous other Docker container GUIs on that Heimdall desktop. There are other similar alternatives to Heimdall but it is relatively simple and does the job. I looked into doing all sorts of reverse proxy setups that allow you to assign sub host names to containers and apps, but I couldn't be bothered spending the time wrapping my brain around that level of complexity.
Docker containers I use or have used include;
* Jellyfin Media Server - I'm currently using the Docker image by Linuxserver with a plugin that installs updated GPU drivers and passes through the GPU to the container with minimal configuration on the Docker side of things. The Docker image by Jellyfin themselves is pretty good and has most GPU stuff built in, so choose what works for you with stuff like that.
* Tailscale for remote access to my server
* Syncthing for backup from multiple devices including phones, tablets, laptops, desktops to the server and from the server to other computers. Syncthing can be two-way and is very flexible in terms of versioning.
* I run MediaElch for media metadata and sorting using the image by the Linuxserver team. I was making my own image and an old version is still up on Docker Hub but theirs is much better built and constantly updated so the readme for mine tells people to use the Linuxserver image instead.
* Heimdall as previously discussed.
* I have run handbrake in a container
* I have run MakeMKV in a container
* I have run MKVToolnix in a container
* I have a free to air TV metadata thing running by SteveX or something like that.
* I did run a Cloudflare container but they get very narky about people using their service for media streaming so now I just use Tailscale.
* I have run various other containers but haven't kept up with them and I shut them down to minimise security footprint if I'm not using them actively.
@rygle: Thanks for another super detailed reply! I was reading the docker quick start guides when I had the little one falling asleep on me last night so I'll start there and expand!
Any thoughts about jellyfin vs Plex?
@jgkeightley: Can't properly comment on Plex as I've never run it. My understanding is that Plex is becoming more paywalled, so less OzBargain friendly, you might say.
I think Jellyfin is quite mature and stable. It definitely does what I want. I use the Android TV client mostly with my NVIDIA Shield TV box. I have used the web client a bit with both Firefox and Chrome at home. It will do Chromecast to an off-site TV's Chromecast using Tailscale via the Chrome browser with tab casting from a laptop, but I haven't been able to get casting working offsite with Firefox or my Android phone, though I can watch stuff on the device itself for these.
Another option is Kodi. I stopped using that because it didn't have enough access control for my family about five years ago, but I think that might now be sorted. It is definitely much more powerful and doesn't require a server client setup like Plex or Jellyfin (although I think you can just connect the Jellyfin client to a local folder etc in some circumstances but have not tried this, see here). Kodi doesn't care where the media files are but it keeps the metadata locally on the "client" usually, where Plex and Jellyfin usually store metadata on the server and not the client end. There are plugins that will keep Jellyfin and Kodi in sync, or there is a Kodi headless Docker image available but if you're doing that you might as well use Jellyfin, as mentioned here.
Kodi obviously does a lot more in terms of PVR/DVR, TV tuners, various emulators, plus a bunch of other stuff, but those are all more complicated.
I think both Jellyfin and Kodi will do overseerr related stuff with plugins like Jellyseerr, but I've never used that on either platform.
I have had only minor success with FTA streaming (XML)TV on Jellyfin using the Xteve metadata/EPG Docker container I mentioned (I wrongly said SteveX not Xteve) but to be honest it's a bit hit and miss.
cluster
"Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?" for those old /. reading geeks amongst us…
Be careful what you wish for. Goats are not always fun.
I just poured hot grits down my pants.
Natalie Portman may or may not have been involved.
Thanks, finally bit the bullet on one of these. Jellyfin here I come.
HEVC supported btw.
Do you guys have any towers with 3.5” bays to turn into a nas?
Also does this one have a fan?
Yeah thanks for the his mate, problem is most don’t have a photo of the guts, don’t say anything about the amount of bays or the psu.
So I am asking the OP to point me to one that can handle being turned into a nas basically. They know what we use these for and which ones are well suited to what tasks…
Google the make & model, there's no shortage of info on the internals…be quicker than a rep response. FWIW these guys are great with eBay returns.
Sorry mate, there's nothing specific that I'm able to do there.
Seller does have this one: https://www.australiancomputertraders.com.au/dell-optiplex-7…
If you do an online search for the model, specify it's a tower (or just Dell 7060 MT) you'll find some pictures showing you it appears to have a bay for 2 3½" drives.
Next to it there is room for more, but no specific provision for it. If you like to do some MacGyvering, guess you could fabricate your own cage.
Note that the motherboard only has 4 SATA connections.
Yeah, I do this too. Also track down a maintenance or hardware reference guide, will have details on things like # of SATA ports.
Yes, I am a fan of these.
This is all I wanted to know. Thanks! Now I can buy it knowing there is at least one person out there!
It has a CPU fan, barely audible.
Do what I did which was to 3D print a HDD enclosure and install a JMB585 M.2 to SATA expansion card. Able to turn one of these into a frankenstein 5 bay NAS :)
I used the following threads for inspiration:
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/zct0j6/comment/iyy…
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/xfh8p9/the_janklab…
This is excellent thanks I’llook into these. I basically have the 7070 from the last deal and bunch of hard drives and ssds laying around, just want to make them into a jellfin server basically
Ugh so tempting, but I have 2 already
Would make a great HASS or Proxmox box
Agree - I'm running two of these and highly recommend.
One is a dedicated HAOS box, installed bare metal as this runs my house.
The other one is running Proxmox, with VMs and LXCs.
Also have a Synology DS916+ for bulk storage.
Can you share a bit about your HA setup? I'm considering one of these instead of HA green or a raspberry pi. How does it compare with power consumption? Did you install HA ok windows, in a VM, or install Linux? Did you get 8 or 16gb ram? Would appreciate your help 🙏🏻
Curious: what are you running proxmox for?
For running virtualised servers (I'm running Home Assistant, Next Cloud, a Caddy reverse proxy in an LXC etc). Proxmox makes it easier to manage them.
Does Proxmox take the place of something like Kubernetes?
@kiitos: No, it's like a free version of VMware ESX but it can also manage LXC containers which are a middle point between Docker containers and fully virtualised VMs.
If you need Kubernetes you could possibly run it inside a VM (KVM) managed by Proxmox.
I run the following on Proxmox:
- Ubuntu VM with Cockpit Management system and Docker installed, also with iGPU passthrough. Docker runs Plex (incl hardware transcoding) and *arrs
- Nginx Proxy Manager LXC for external access
I originally had many docker containers running on the Synology but moved them to the Proxmox Ubuntu VM as its much faster.
Synology still runs Surveillance Station for my 4 cameras which record 24/7.
Home Assistant on the other Dell Micro also runs Scrypted as an Add-on. Scrypted provides Homekit Secure Video for the cameras so they show up in Apple Home. Scrypted has a Synology cameras plugin, amongst many others.
Heaps of LXC scripts for use with Proxmox here which gives you an idea of what you can do with it > https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox?tab=readme-ov-file
Yep, I have one running as a test bed for XCP-ng and it's been absolutely flawless. I migrated almost my entire stack of plex, *arrs etc over and no one even noticed. Only thing my old server is still doing (5600g + 128gb Ram) is TrueNas (VM in Proxmox) and various Windows VMs - Just waiting for a solution to my NAS issue before I get 2 more of these for cluster fun times
does this support an low profile graphics card somehow ? or more m.2 storage or something
No, this is micro size. You need SFF size to be able to fit a low profile graphics card
![[Refurb] Dell 7060 Micro i5-8500T 16GB RAM 256GB SSD Wi-Fi Win 11 Pro $194 Delivered / BNE C&C @ Australian Computer Traders](https://files.ozbargain.com.au/n/42/842242.jpg?h=4fdd2cb8)
Does the 8gb model have 1 * 8gb stick or 2 * 4gb?