Mele's $70 X86 Bay Trail Mobile Ubuntu Compute Stick


Grench

Grench

Forum Addict!
Joined
Oct 3, 2008
Messages
6,629
So, I've ordered one. It's supposed to be here in 7-64 days. But, hey, free delivery.
http://www.aliexpress.com/store/pro...l-BayTrail-Z3735F-2GB/715968_32653580885.html

So, it's a little HDMI stick with 100baseT ethernet, USB 2.0, 32GB eMMC and a uSD slot running Ubuntu out of the box.

My tentative plan is to use it as a very efficient 24/7 home game server for Minecraft and maybe Neverwinter Nights running in command-line no-graphics server mode. Neither game is particularly compute intensive and 100Mb wired is plenty quick to keep up with both and not subject to the pitfalls of running on wireless.

Has anyone else got any experience with one of these or their Windows equivalent?
 
Can't say that I do. Let us know how it works out though, looks like a neat little toy :)
 
I always thought, Minecraft-Servers need beefy hardware, they have to calculate all the chunks actualy, not sure how much CPU Power that needs.
By the way, the stick you've linked is a older baytrail Atom, but already 64 bit, not sure how good these are. Has a heatsink solution "heat-conductive silicone rubber", interesting.
 
fusion_power said:
I always thought, Minecraft-Servers need beefy hardware, they have to calculate all the chunks actualy, not sure how much CPU Power that needs.
By the way, the stick you've linked is a older baytrail Atom, but already 64 bit, not sure how good these are. Has a heatsink solution "heat-conductive silicone rubber", interesting.
Click to expand...

Fixed the title - it is Bay Trail.

The headless server has to keep track of the world map and positions in it in RAM and on storage (disk) - but it doesn't have to do anything about the graphics display. My understanding is that running that way as a server-mode it's fairly low impact.

I've run a 5 'server' at 32 connections per 'server' NWN world on Linux before. It ran fine in a VM with 512MB RAM and 4 virtual CPUs capped at 800Mhz each.

If the silicone cooling isn't enough, maybe I'll sandwich the thing between two massive copper heat sinks - that should be interesting.

Regardless - I plan to have some fun with this little $70 Linux box.

Still, I won't have to worry about it for some time while it travels here. I didn't want to spend $30 to ship a $70 PC stick.
 
Well, if I play Minecraft online, the Server defines the loaded chunks and the Server restricts these, you can't go over "server side view range" on your client for example if you want to set the view disance bigger. Server may not be doing graphics but the Server for sure has to load all the active chunks (1 chunk is 16x16 blocks and full height) and that for each player, afaik alot of data. And Minecraft updates all the Chunk data when you manipulate the environment. Our little Minecraft Server result in noticable lag when placing a block, not much but it shows that MC is doing alot in the Background.
However, with 64 Bit and some RAM it should be no problem, I'm sure such a small Stick can run a MC Server if not much players are online.

I personaly was looking into some of these Mini-PC's too, Amazon has these nice little "Orbsmart" devices.

Fascinating how far Computers went within the last 20 Years or so. :)
 
I believe that by far the most intensive thing Minecraft is doing overall is lighting computations. Those has to be done even for server hosting. Make of that what you want.
 
I've got a Z3735F and noticed that it gets very hot running stuff on Windows. (Setting it to power saving mode) Edit: Disabling turbo frequencies in power settings and choosing 'no active cooling'(?) seemed to fix that.
Running bluetooth and wifi at the same time makes the latter drop frequently - annoying. Don't think there's a fix.

It's enough to Steam-home-stream XCOM
 
Last edited:
i am also interested in how this works out. i'm in the market for a very low-power Minecraft server, and was looking at the RaspPi 3 or the Odroid C2. RPi3 didn't seem quite fast enough, and Odroid C2 is stuck on a soon-to-be EOL'd Linux kernel (Hardkernel maaaay have a solution for this, but no further announcement has yet been made).
 
I am running a minecraft server with a fairly large amount of plugins and a huge world. i can say that it is pretty demanding, but that strongly depends on what you want to do and for how many players you want to make it work. if you stick to a simple home server, setup spigot in an efficient way (and I would recommend spigot over a vanilla mc server any daya s it supports proper multithreading and is way more optimized) and don't host a huge world but instead limit it's size this could work. you will need a lot of RAM though! 2 gigabytes might be a little slim.
 
it wouldn't have any plugins, and 3-4 simultaneous players max, so i think the SBC would work ok. i'm trying a Lenovo Ideapad netbook as a server right now (model #S10-3t, with an Atom n450 1.66GHz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM, 40W power draw; running Ubuntu 14.04LTS and SpigotMC) with one other person, and there is an occasional lag, but not too bad, usually. i was running it before on a first-gen i7 desktop with 2GB of RAM, an SSD and no Linux desktop environment (command-line only) and it worked flawlessly, but even so, this netbook surprises me with its performance. (tho forget using Unity on the netbook while the server is running, ha.)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top