N100 mini PCs had a great run, but it's finally time to stop recommending them

Published Oct 2, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path. Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals. The N100 mini PC has been an automatic recommendation for home lab use since it was introduced, and it earned that spot legitimately. It's low power with cores powerful enough to run a decent collection of services on, and it doesn't cost a fortune to leave running 24/7. It's still a good mini PC, but if you're entering into the market today and looking for something brand-new, the N150 costs about the same. Just don't overpay for it, because the N100 is still a worthy node in many respects. The N100's price advantage is gone The N150 is right there The N100 was basically as entry-level as it got when it came to a small form-factor PC. A Beelink Mini S12 Pro with 16GB of RAM and 500GB of solid-state storage used to routinely drop to around $170, but now, that configuration is over twice the price on Amazon. Other N100s have had similar jumps in price, and that flattens the difference between the generations. The N150 can easily be found for around the same price, plus or minus a few bucks. Beelink's N150-based EQ14, also with 16GB and 500GB of storage, is $385 on the company's store. When memory and storage make up so much of the bill, the processor doesn't move the needle on price much, and that makes the old chip not as much of a bargain anymore. The N150 is the new home lab mini PC for the masses The designs are targeted at that market now The silicon is one thing, but the manufacturers of these mini PCs have changed their designs according to the market that uses these things the most, and that happens to be home lab enthusiasts. The aforementioned EQ14 has a built-in power supply, two M.2 slots, and two Ethernet ports, with an option for dual Intel 2.5GbE. Looking at some of the other popular options, the Beelink ME mini fits six M.2 slots, dual 2.5GbE, and an internal power supply into a 99mm cube, CWWK's P6 pairs the N150 with four NVMe slots and a DDR5 SO-DIMM slot, and HUNSN sells fanless N150 appliances with four 2.5GbE ports for firewall duty. For a Proxmox node, an OPNsense box, or a small all-flash NAS, port count and storage layout decide what the machine can do, and a small bump in clock speeds or efficiency doesn't do much. Plenty of N100 machines offered similar layouts but the refreshed and newly designed models are shipping with the N150 at the same price. The chip is a small upgrade Doesn't do much for home lab use, but it costs nothing The N100 and N150 are quite close to each other, and calling it a generational leap would be seriously overselling the difference between them. The N150 is the N100 with the turbo ceiling raised from 3.4GHz to 3.6GHz and the integrated graphics clock raised from 750MHz to 1GHz. It has the same four efficiency cores, the same 6W base power, the same 24 execution units, and the same Quick Sync support. If I were to run the same set of containers on both systems, you wouldn't notice the difference between them at all. A cheap N100 is still a great home lab node If you can find one pre-owned for cheap, it's a worthy pickup, but hard to find The difference between the N100 and the N150 in terms of performance is negligible for most home lab uses, so if you can find either for a decent price, it's worth pulling the trigger on. The older processor is just as capable as the newer one with very little separating them. If you're not willing to pay the inflated prices for either box at retail, the best move would be to try and find a pre-owned N100 on the used market, but that's easier said than done for a multitude of reasons. The first being that these boxes aren't something users will upgrade from much, if at all. The N100 is really capable still, and home lab enthusiasts are resourceful people—if it no longer fits the bill for the initial deployment, it's extremely likely that they'll find another use for it somewhere in their home before they turn to selling it. Find someone who runs a home lab, and I'll show you a tech hoarder. The second problem follows the first: because home labbers are less likely to let go of their N100s, the ones that do hit the market are at inflated prices. These are users that bought it when it was under $200 and can easily sell it for above that, especially on an auction site where they can set the minimum price higher than what they paid at retail. The N150 isn't Intel's newest budget chip, either. Wildcat Lake boxes like Beelink's EQ mini and EQi start $45 to $85 higher and add a performance core and 10GbE, so if your budget stretches and your workload can saturate it, it's worth picking up. The N150 is the new N100, but there still isn't much to separate them The N100 earned its reputation for all the right reasons, and almost all of that can also be passed along to its successor, the N150. If you already own one, there's no point in upgrading, but if you're in the market for a mini PC to add to your home lab as a node, the N150 is a great choice for all of the same reasons as the N100 was, just don't overpay for it.