Intro
I just got my hands on a Minix z100-0db, a new fanless N100 based miniPC that I’m super excited about. It’s rare to find fanless devices these days.
For those unaware, the intel N100 is an extremely efficient, low-power cpu that came out last year. While not super powerful, the big advantages of this chip are that:
- It’s much more modern with DDR4/5 ram support, USB3, and PCIE 3.0
- The igpu has full AV1, HEVC, and VP9 hardware decode
Now, a number of other miniPC manufacturers have released N100 machines over the last year that I really enjoyed, but this is one of the first affordable totally silent fanless options.
Overview
The Mini z100-0db, appropriately named for its silence, comes in 2 variants: an 8gb/256gb model, and a 16gb/512gb variant. Unfortunately no barebones models are available.
The chassis is extremely small and acts as a heat sink. Some USB ports are front-facing, while the rear has the ethernet ports. The wi-fi antennas are somewhat oddly placed on the left side of the machine. I believe this was done to save space on the back panel. Also, these machines may commonly be VESA mounted to display units so it doesn’t matter.
Specs
| CPU | N100 (quad core, 3.4ghz turbo) |
| RAM | 1 x 16gb DDR4 3200 |
| SSD | 512gb custom minix SSD (see below), PCIE 3.0 |
| Wi-fi | Intel AX201 Wi-fi 6 |
| Ethernet | 1 x Realtek 2.5Gbe ethernet |
| Ports | 2 x HDMI 2.1, 3.5mm, 1 x USB 3.2 gen 2 (10Gbps) type C, 2 x USB 3.2 Gent 2 type-A, 2 x USB 2.0. Standard Power 12v/3a adapter. |
As mentioned, the N100 is a highly efficient cpu best used for small htpc/nas/file serving usage. It has a modest igpu, and single threaded performance is roughly on par with i5-6500t type models. Don’t mistake this for an old slow machine, though. The modern RAM, SSD, and hardware code capabilities means this machine is reasonably snappy in the $200 range and can handle 4k video av1 playback without skipping frames.
As an intel based unit as well, it supports quick sync which is well supported with Plex hardware transcoding. I personally like AMD Ryzen chips in most miniPCs, but when it comes to lower cost Plex machines, this intel N100 hits the sweet spot.
The machine does support DDR5 ram, but likely to keep costs down DDR4 3200 was selected and works fine. Since the N100 doesn’t support dual channel type RAM this is only a minor performance hit, probably sub 5%, though you could replace it if you wanted to.
It only has a single ethernet controller, but fortunately uses a realtek chipset. For those less familiar, the intel i225v3 controller used by many machines have had a lot of issues with power down and resume from sleep/modern sleep in Windows machines.
For most needs the 16gb/512gb version is perfectly fine, but if you want to upgrade to DDR5 ram or use a faster/larger SSD it may make sense to buy the cheaper 8gb/256gb model for $30 less and just sell the peripherals to make back some money.
The SSD is a custom made model and fairly basic. Using the SMI inspection tool, it appears this is Micron 96L TLC NAND which is good news, using the SM2263XT controller. For most random access tasks it works well, but can’t take on very long sustained writes like more expensive SSDs of course.
Benchmarks and temperature notes
Despite being totally fanless, this N100 based machine was not really any slower than any other N100 machine on the market. I also ran hwinfo to test temperatures during various benchmarking tasks such as cinebench, geekbench, and more and never ran into any throttling issues.
The heat mostly radiates from the top of the chassis which acts like a heatsink, but the bottom remains rather cool. I’d be cautious to not stack anything on top of it.
| Geekbench 6 | 1042 ST / 2983 MT |
| Cinebench R23 | 794 ST / 2392 MT |
| Jetstream | 149.6 |
| Speedometer | 158 |
| Crystal diskbench | 20071 MB/s read / 1588 MB/s write sustained with ~ 48Mb/s random 4k read |
Jetstream and Speedometer help measure browser performance, but also most importantly general javascript performance as well which can impact chromium based apps like Slack, Discord, etc.
The SSD has reasonable sustained write speeds for a PCIE 3.0 drive, though it does exhaust itself fairly quickly with heavier use. The random read performance is very reasonable for snappy usage at 48Mb/s.
I also tried out 4k video playback on youtube with both AV1 and VP9 based videos and didn’t see any dropped frames over a 300Mbps fios connection w/ ethernet.
All of this while being entirely silent.
Overall, for a brand machine in the $200 range, this makes a great HTPC or file server. It’s totally silent without giving up performance compared to other N100 machines.
Summary
Pros:
- Great pricing for a fanless machine which is rare
- Small metal chassis
- Affordable Pricing
- N100 modern hardware decode support (AV1, VP9)
Could be improved:
- No barebones option
- Ram (DDR4) and SSD (Micron 96L) are budget options but serviceable. May want to upgrade yourself.
- Platform in general is on last gen peripheral support: PCIE 3.0, wi-fi 6 (not 6e/7), but at this price point this is not a true con.
- Only one 2280 SSD slot
- Only one ethernet port – for a small router/server the Beelink EQ12 covers this but uses a fan
Buy the Mini z100-0db from Amazon here:
