Background and requirements I have been considering x86 based solutions for years. Ever since the 12th generation of Intel CPUs ( Alder Lake ) came out in 2021 I started to consider it seriously, but at least as of 2022 there was nothing on the market that fulfilled following requirements:
enough CPU/GPU power to transcode 4k video if need be I wanted to get rid of separate HTPC cool enough to be passively cooled noise is not fun and I have ~fanless setup in my office (with exception of NAS and gaming PC, neither of which is most of the time running) at least 4x 2,5 gigabit ethernet ports I wanted to upgrade my home infra default from gigabit to 2,5 gigabit ports (and extra switch seemed unappealing at the time) At the time, the best possible option I could find out was Alder Lake-N based Intel N100 boxes, but they didn’t quite have the oomph (just 4 CPU cores) I wanted, and they were also reported to be quite hot. So I left the idea parked in 2022. The Chosen One is chosen (early October, 2023) We had some casual discussion on Aiven Slack channel sometime after summer of 2023 about home routers, and N305 cropped up. There had been large number of relatively recent (released within year) network devices using it, and it motivated me to go looking around the Amazon website for candidates after having read some reviews which stated that the devices were bit cooler than N100 based earlier models.
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