Intel N100 fanless boxes

  • I'm looking at buying the gmktec NucBox G3, it's not fanless but I believe you can mod it for under $6 and get it to be fanless

    (guide here N100 FANLESS GMKtec NucBox G3 mini ~ $100 (Thermal MOD) 8GB 256GB PCIe M.2 SSD WiFi 6 BT5.2)

    sky42 mentioned his box uses less then 0.18 Wh per day used 4-8h, no sleep or poweroff. I'm not sure what that means. can someone compare to say the Odroid N2+ running CoreELEC which uses like 2W Idle and 6W load

    this is the box I'm looking at

    N100 8 GB DDR4 256 PCIe M.2 SSD WiFi 6 BT5.2, running just LibreELEC. I like the single core performance, or my upgrade is maybe the SK1 with the S928X running CoreELEC. just like some figures if someone is kind enough to help out. thanks

    also if the Mod works well then you can get the whole package for around $105 which is like half price compared to anything else and the G3 mini has been in peoples hands and certain bugs addressed so it looks to be a really good steal. need to test if the thermal mod will work though. thanks

  • I'm still curious about these things, they have no own IR, no CEC and , being Intel, they have been essentially abandoned by the community with all really ancient bugs, no HD auidio passthrough, no uhd via live tv

    What is the intended use case for these then?

  • no own IR, no CEC

    There are better ways to make those boxes work with IR remotes. FLIRC USB is the most obvious one.

    no HD auidio passthrough,

    You mean this? Your NUC11PA does not have a native HDMI, as can be seen on that block diagram. You simply bought the wrong hardware.

    no uhd via live tv

    The only non-working live tv stream I have ever encountered is a HotBird 4K HLG test channel. I actually try to find a solution for that. It appear to be a bug in Kodi's VAAPI code.

  • There are better ways to make those boxes work with IR remotes. FLIRC USB is the most obvious one.

    No, for me, just ugly addons. Compare to clean NUCs with proven Ir capability incl. Power on/off with the ancient but still undefeated MC remote functionality.

    You mean this? Your NUC11PA does not have a native HDMI, as can be seen on that block diagram. You simply bought the wrong hardware.

    As for the 11gen nucs, yes that never got fixed after it used to work as far way back as the nuc5. But then the change to the all new and improved graphics subsystem a few years ago, and we lost (on Intel) hd audio passthrough, multiple hdmi outputs (for everybody) . The LSPCON problem was supposed to have been 'resolved' years ago, according to the wiki. But that was to optimistic, it seems.

    The only non-working live tv stream I have ever encountered is a HotBird 4K HLG test channel. I actually try to find a solution for that. It appear to be a bug in Kodi's VAAPI code.

    I am seeing this on Astra 19.2 on the UHD channels of Pro7/Sat1, RTL, SES-UHD-Demo and some others . And also on the Hotbird UHD Demo channel. My setup here is a remote tvheadend server, maybe a local one behaves differently, I don't know. I see on github, that activity has taken up, thats's good, as you can already reproduce the problem. When I did a ts capture and tried to playback, it actually worked, so I thought it was essentially the same as a 'recording'.


    I kind of gave up on Intel, since I understand that their Boxes are/were pricey compared to a raspi, and Intel's support for OSS, especially when it comes to media, is rapidly deteriorating. The new N100 boxes seemed to be a way to go, esp. the ASUS one actually has IR, but who knows how long that would last, and I still haven't heard any confirmation that HD audio passthrough works there. The live UHD issue is a minor inconvenience compared to that.

    Thanks anyway.