GMK M2 Mini PC: Intel Core i7-11390H, 16GB DDR4, 1TB SSD

I've been considering mini pc's for nas' too. Here's what I've found:

- Most anything above a celeron processor is overkill for just a NAS.

- You'll have to add DAS (direct attached storage) to this if you want several platter drives

- The Intel N95 or N100 cpus are less expensive and can run JUST a NAS just fine.

- if you want emulation or graphics prowess you'll want AMD, preferably a version with the AVX512 instruction set that can handle up to PS3 emulation pretty well. Intel used to have AVX512 in their 11th Gen (alderlake) chips but removed the functionality.

- If you want plex transcoding of 4k streams, the Intel N100 can handle 2-3 4k transcoded streams because it has quicksync instructions that no AMD chip has. Even a J4125 chip can probably handle a couple of streams. Plex also only supports Intel hardware transcoding, and while modern Ryzen apus are strong enough, they're not officially supported, so it's hit or miss if Plex will actually use the horsepower they have for transcoding.

- Intel added Quicksync on 6th gen Intel chips, but imperfectly. The best quicksync chips are 8th gen and later, and like I said, the n100 is a beast for transcoding for how low power it is.

- I watched a video of an 11th Gen i3 that had avx512 enabled and it handled ps3 emulation pretty damn well without breaking a sweat, so future generations should be pretty damn great.

- AV1 decoding is a new function of what is likely the next big codec, and it's only available on the newest amd and intel chips, but don't currently remember which ones

**EDIT** Adding more info:

You probably can't have the overhead of running Windows as well. Having to burn in subtitles is apparently a herculean task, even for top of the line processors.

Here is what I read about the J4125, which is older than the N100:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/com...&context=3



N100 info:

Link 1
https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/..._plex_and/

Link 2
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/com...anscoding/

Link 3 (one of the comments mentions 10x 1080p transcodes going at once on an older N5105)
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/com...?context=3

AMR5's 5800U is faster with a passmark of 18,691 compared to the GMK's 11390H passmark of 10,485. The 5800U also runs cooler with a 15 watt rating compared to the 11390H at 35 watts. AMR5 has two NVME slots, GMK has one. AMR5 has 1 gigabit ethernet and GMK has 2.5 gigabit ethernet. The AMR5 won't ship until 07/25 or later due to a manufacturing defect they're having to fix, while the GMK also ships slowly.