My homelab started as a Minisforum MS01 and slowly turned into a frank stain. I connected an HBA for more drives, and the fan controllers run off a second PSU — so it's two wall plugs, loose parts everywhere, all crammed into a 3D-printed case that runs warm. It works, but it's ugly, hot, and fragile, and I've got some travel coming up so I wanted to wrap up a new build before.

Workload: Frigate NVR, Whisper STT, \~30 Docker containers, 1-2 Plex transcodes at a time, and eventually some small local LLMs, home assistant and ofc Running Unraid. I'd keep my existing HDDs + SSD either way.

I'm torn between two directions:

Option A — Minisforum N5 Pro (Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, Radeon 890M + NPU): tiny, \~25W idle, and it reuses my SO-DIMM RAM. Downsides: needs a €30 Intel NIC to dodge the Realtek/Marvell port issues + a boot flag for a known JMicron SATA bug, from what I could see before NPU is usable it would be around 15-25 tok/s on an 8B model, and any GPU upgrade means an external OCuLink dock.

Option B — Custom Intel i5-14500 ITX + RTX 4060 Ti 16GB in a Fractal Node 804: everything enclosed with an internal PSU, native Intel NIC + SATA, QuickSync for Plex, 50-60 tok/s on 8B. Costs \~€400-500 more, and I'd need new DDR5 since my current 64gb are sodimm 4800mhz.

For this workload, is the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB worth the extra cost and size, or is the N5 Pro's iGPU + NPU enough?

Ms01 upgrade, DIY or n5 pro?