Zer0Log1c

Just dug through some truenas/freenas forums and saw the same thing; guess I'm pulling some Cat6 this week... Had planned to use wifi as a crutch for a week or two just to start 😅

I don't remember the specific model since it's been collecting dust for years, but I think I've got an R5 220 or something like that laying around that I'm planning to plant in the HexOS box. If push really comes to shove and the old monitor driving GPU isn't cooperating I'll throw my gaming GPU into it until I can get it set up for remote access. Truthfully, I kind of expect myself to pick up an Arc A310 (or some other Arc GPU) middle of next year to off-load some of the encoding work.

That's definitely an important factor to consider. Meeting my wife has put the kabash to my 'temporary' fixes of an Ethernet cable run across the room, down the stairs and past a bathroom haha. EoP I guess can do pretty ok with 200-300 Mbps in building built since the 80s. The adapters don't seem too expensive either at $60 or so for a pair to test out and return if it doesn't work with your specific residence. Plex's site says the 4GB should be enough RAM for most Plex based media servers (here). So my anticipation is that the game servers should be more RAM intensive than the other services you want to run. I'm still digging into the Plex encoding side of things as I'll probably have to add a GPU for encoding in the future, but I do believe you can utilize Nvidia's NVENC encoder that's on most (if not all) of their GPUs. Intel Arc seems to have some beefy hardware encoding as well, especially for AV1. I'm personally leaning towards an Arc A310 in 6 months or so, but I don't have a spare Nvidia GPU on hand.

This is perfect! LOVE that they equated rough performance required to a PassMark score!! Looks like two 4K HDR streams would be about 85% load (estimated) from their numbers. Guessing I might go reaching for that A310 sooner than later haha. Regardless, glad to see that the two 4K streams that are my priority 'active' load don't immediately stretch beyond the 5900X's capabilities.

Yes! Forgot to mention that the bios should have some degree of fan control to it. Hopefully it'll be PWM (fine grain) control since it's a four pin header for the CPU fan. Even three pin header can have speed control though, but it's a lot closer to low/med/high from my experience since it'll use voltage modulation to change fan speeds instead of of PWM

I don't know with certainty if HexOS can be fully set up headlessly, I think the answer is no, but could be wrong there. If you can't do it headless, then you would at least need a GPU to do the initial setup; but even a GT 1030 or Arc A310 would get the job done. Beyond that, I don't think your hardware selection would have any immediate problems but that'll probably depend heavily on what all you have planned for it. I have similar plans to repurpose higher-end desktop parts (R9 5900X, 128 GB RAM, X470 board) for a HexOS build.

I believe it'll depend a bit on your specific motherboard and what its settings are; but normally, that CPU Fan header will be able to be adjusted fan speed based on the CPU temperature reported. I'd expect that the fans all ramp up as your CPU hits a high utilization and then they'll slow back down as soon as it has either hit a lower steady state or finished its work. As for whether or not it is a bad thing, I don't think you should have any issues. I have once run into a problem with a motherboard burning out a Noctua fan (twice back to back actually) but I believe that was down to the Pump header that I was using pushed too much amperage (presumably) through the fan. I don't think a single splitter should put anything at risk.

I'm a bit late to the party here, but from my experience, the Light > Dark toggle worked every time whereas the Dark > Light toggle seemed to be a bit bugged.... I thought it was just the page trying to save users from themselves lol

+1

If I were in your shoes, I think I'd start by seeing how everything goes over WiFi since it may work perfectly fine. If you see packet drops or an unacceptable latency then you can look elsewhere. I can't say I have any direct experience with them but two out-of-the-box solutions would be ethernet over coax or ethernet over power if WiFi doesn't pass the muster. Both solutions take advantage of what's probably already in your walls, but they both have their drawbacks.

I wanted to follow up with a little additional research I've done. It looks like (for now at least) the Intel Arc A310 dGPU would be a solid upgrade for a Plex setup that doesn't already have an Intel iGPU onboard. Especially since it has some "low profile" single-height cooler designs and only needs PCIe slot power for at least some of the variations on market. Currently, Arc A310 cards are selling for around the $115 price point on Ebay. So this will be my backup plan if I do run into a situation where my Plex performance is hampered from other tasks that the server is performing.

Ok, thanks for the sanity check. I figured the 5900X should be able to handle a fair bit given the higher clocks (vs proper server CPUs) and moderately high core count but really appreciate the sounding board since I wasn't entirely sure what to expect the Plex and HexOS loads to look like. I'll jump it to 128GB of RAM for good measure then. I was already going to be upgrading the RAM for the rig since I knew the 16 GB I had for that gaming rig was going to fall short, but wasn't sure if it would be best to go to 128 GB right away or to attempt 64 GB. I appreciate you weighing in!

I have built/rebuilt my gaming rig four or five times since 2015 but haven't built a dedicated 'server' before. Long term I'd be looking to run a Plex server with two 4k streams, two game servers for friends (probably Palworld and Space Engineers, or similar), Home Assistant, Immich and HexOS. The Home Assistant and Immich services would probably be down the road as they are lower priority, but I'd like to avoid needing a CPU upgrade for this list of services. My main burning question are: 1) Would an R9 5900X be overkill or not enough for this type of workload? 2) Would 64GB of RAM be enough? 3) Would adding a decent dGPU to do some hardware acceleration add much benefit, or are these tasks CPU-dependent exclusively? Thanks in advance for any insights!

I think it took me almost two full days to stumble onto where it was at, a regular search bar being added somewhere would be a bit more intuitive

I hope Home Assistant integration is pretty high on the 'To-Do' list given its prevalence in the community and seemingly frequent pairing with TrueNAS. It'd be my first request as far as home automation handling goes after some searching