Ideas & uses for a low power motherboard/cpu combo

So, i bought a low power motherboard/cpu combo on a whim, but have not decided on a purpose for it. Any ideas?

It's an Intel Quad-Core Celeron Processor J1900 Micro ATX Motherboard/CPU combo.

Specs: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157513

I was thinking of throwing a linux distro on it and using it as a plex media server as it is low power so i could theoretically have it running 24/7 instead of the spare laptop that i currently use.

I don't think a HTPC would be useful as I already have a smart TV hooked up to my LAN.

What do you guys think? Should i be running anything else while i use it as a media server? Do you have any alternative ideas?

smart tv's suck. you should use it as a HTPC if you can, or surveillance. or a personal cloud server. NAS is a good option too. maybe even get some multi port pcie network cards and make a pfsense router.

Yeah, my smart TV's interface is mediocre and it is probably spying on me, but it can access my media files through DLNA. This is what i use it for. Would i be able to use this motherboard as both a server and a HTPC or would that be asking too much of it?

The personal cloud / NAS solution sounds interesting. I always wanted to check out owncloud or YunoHost. I'm a noob when it comes to most of this stuff, so it would be a nice project to toy with.

Update: Here's the build:

The innards...

Needs tidying, but I've managed to fit a second 2TB hard drive in place of the optical drive bay. Should tide me over until i want to expand and need more storage.

I agree ... most bang for the buck

The personal cloud / NAS solution sounds interesting. 


Looks great! The HTPC and sever idea isnt bad. the HTPC aspect doesnt take up a whole lot of resources but what kind of server? Terraria server?

I'm running FreeNAS on it at the moment as a home server. I have Plex Media Server plugin running in a jail.

Will set up the owncloud and bittorrentsync plugins on it next weekend.

Performance update:

  • Plex Transcoding: I can transcode a single blu-ray stream on the fly, but it pretty much maxes out the CPU @ 370% (it has 4 cores, so 93% of the CPU total).
  • Very little CPU load when streaming without any transcoding, which works well for me.