đź’» Is this $100 Intel NUC enough for a small Fabric server (3 players + bots + heavy farms)?
Hey everyone,
I recently picked up an Intel NUC for just $100 USD — it seemed too good to pass up. I know it's not meant to be a proper server, but I impulsively bought it thinking it might handle a small Fabric server for me and some friends. Now I'm unsure if it was a mistake.
Here are the specs:
Model: Intel NUC
CPU: Intel Core i5-1035G1 @ 1.00GHz (shows boost to 1.19GHz)
RAM: 16 GB (15.8 GB usable)
OS: Windows 64-bit (can switch to Linux if it helps performance)
My plan:
We're aiming to host a Fabric 1.21 server, eventually moving to 1.22, with Sodium, Lithium, Phosphor and other optimization mods. It'll be 3 active players, possibly a 4th occasionally, plus 3 Carpet bots running 24/7 (mainly for farms/testing).
We already have farms that push around 1 million items/hour, so this won't be a super-lightweight world.
My questions:
Is this setup even viable for what I'm planning?
Would switching to Linux or a headless setup improve stability?
Should I cut down on bots/farms to avoid bottlenecks?
Any specific performance tweaks for low-power U-series CPUs like this?
I know this isn't the best hardware for hosting, but for the price, size, and power draw, I really want to make the most of it. Any tips, benchmarks, or shared experiences would be super helpful 🙏
Thanks in advance!
4 Replies
I bet it’ll do fine, a n100 should be able to handle that no problem as well
What rlly kills performance is when you have multiple players loading chunks, even the most monstrous of farms aren’t as performance killing as a single player flying full speed with an elytra generating new chunks
And the i5-1035 g1 single threaded performance is a decent jump over the n100
I personally just picked up a mini pc with a 5800u, 16gb ram and it runs amazing, and I crank up the render distance and stuff
Just make sure you squeeze everything you can out of performance mods for fabric
Thread tweak, vmp, phosphorous, lithium, uhh server core without the gameplay modifications, c2me, noisium
But for 3 players and some farms I doubt you’ll have to do much if any tweaking to get it to run fine
@lucridd Hey! Quick question — I’m setting up a Fabric Minecraft server and was thinking of using Ubuntu (normal desktop version) and Pterodactyl panel for hosting and managing everything. But I’m wondering if you’d recommend something more efficient or lightweight for performance?
Is there a better OS or panel combo you’ve had good experience with?
I’m fairly new to Linux so take everything I say with a grain of salt but
From my testing I’ve installed pelican and pterodactyl on both Ubuntu and Debian which are the most used ones
Both installation guides are written using Ubuntu but the process is the same, just don’t put “sudo” before commands on Debian
Debian is generally regarded as more lightweight for server applications than Ubuntu, and with Debian you can install a fully stripped down version by unselecting all the packages that are installed with the OS
While with Ubuntu you can install a “minimized” version which still has a good few applications
So I went with Debian 12, and it works amazing with pterodactyl
I uncheck every application package when installing and just get the barebones OS and install Pterodactyl and all its requisites
Don’t forget to use SSH if you want to access the machine from your main computer
apt install openssh-server, then systemctl enable ssh, systemctl start ssh, and systemctl status ssh to check if you did it correctly
Run them all separately, On Ubuntu just add “sudo” before each of the 3 commands
Oh and don’t go with a desktop OS, it’s not worth it
You will never use the desktop and once you have pterodactyl installed you will never even have to mess with the terminal
Just use the headless server for maximum resources
its an Ok cpu, absolutely swap it to linux.
Headless cli, ubunutu 24.04.2 or Debian 12.
Its viable, but you need to optimize the server for it