Comment by ww520
4 days ago
Just a note on OP's hardware choice. I used to have a Beelink with the N100 CPU. That thing overheated and reboot intermittently after couple months of usage. I suspected they overclocked the CPU to look good in benchmarks. I tried to underclock in the BIOS. The temperatures dropped but the setting was reverted after the next power down. Nothing in the BIOS stuck. Their support was worse than useless. The machine ended up as spare parts.
You are better off getting the used business mini-PC from HP/Dell/Leveno/Asus. They have better specs and run great.
This. Or just buy an N100 motherboard (Asrock makes one) and put it in a standard ATX case with a proper cooler, power supply, and enough space for expansion cards and hard drives etc. Maybe you will want a GPU in the future, even if it is unncessary now. Small nonstandard form factors always come back to bite you sooner or later. It's better not to cut corners and build something modular.
I have the opposite experience. Plex, nextcloud, minecraft servers, and ~10 websites are all hosted on a Beelink N100. It stays cool and quiet.
Most likely something wrong with the cooler, maybe it's not making proper contact with the CPU. Should be repairable if you give it a try, but yes, the used thin clients are higher quality.
I did clean the thermal paste between the CPU and the heat sink, and re-applied new thermal gel. That didn't help. It was the raised voltage preset in the BIOS. If I lowered the voltage, the temperature stayed low and it would run fine, until the next power down reverting the BIOS changes. The box was too small, the heat sink was too cheap, and the fan was too lacking to be a proper overclocking setup. It would run fine out of the box for couple months until the CPU and hardware worn out due to stress and heat.
Hmm that's too bad. I have bought a few of those (different models) over the years to use as HTPCs for different family TVs. Only one had cooling issues (bad fan bearings). I avoid the extra small ones and just get the NUC-like ones.
New CMOS battery might’ve fixed the BIOS resets
I just got a bee link with intel i3 304, idles at 40c with fan off.
That's i3. Also what's the temperature when it's doing work instead of idling?
I'll see when I got it set up more. The i3 304 is essentially the successor to the n100/150/200 CPUs.
Just another data point, I got a Beelink S13 Pro N150 running similar things as OP and haven't had any issues. I made changes in BIOS (set "Chipset > PCH-IO > State After G3" to S0 so it boots up again after regaining power) and they are sticking for me.
Same here, N150, no issues. Don't think I've made any changes to the BIOS.
Fans spin a lot near-constantly though, I think it is the on board M.2 SSD that is hot, I need to get around to adding a thermal pad or something one of these days.
It's the CPU voltage setting in BIOS that got reverted.