First home server, hardware choices.

[Thanlion]

Hey all. 👋

My google drive/photos is getting full and it gets annoying constantly trimming it i chose to building my first server.

Main use case is for plex, smb share and maybe something like Immich.

Secondary if possible, time wise and hardware wise some VMing like playing with Proxmox, vanilla trueNas etc.

Not now, not yet, maybe a year later some VMs for living room entertainment (game emulation & media player).

I have been looking in the market and i think my choices are like these. (prices with only one system NVMe)

⟦⟫ Second hand AMD Ryzen 7 5700G 350€ (if i play the waiting game, most second hand market is a bit dry)

⟦⟫ New AM5 Ryzen 7 8700G 480~550€

⟦⟫ AOOSTAR WTR PRO AMD Ryzen 7 5825u 530$ (which just right now got a price rise and i dont know how mutch it will be in €)

Any thoughs on my options?

I am looking for reasonable energy consumption and i dont know how the 8700G will fair on that.

By the way Intel is missing because i dont know there equivalen offerings and the second hand market is mostly AMD.

[PsychoWards]

Hey, 

For Plex/Jellyfin the recommendation is generally to go with Intel CPUs (at least 12th gen) because Intel Quick Sync is really great for decoding/encoding, much better then AMD in fact. Some people would say to avoid 13th & 14th gen and to go for either 12th or Core Ultra (or how are they called again, the latest gen ?) due to the issues which 13 and 14th gen had/have. i5 or i7 are a good option for Intel.

Also if you plan to use Proxmox, use it as the OS and not Hexos. You can host Hexos as a VM in Proxmox but you definitely should not host Proxmox as a VM in Hexos. This is a decision which you should take and already deploy now, because changing it afterwards is a lot of work and hassle.

[Duncan Innes]

I would agree with above.  I am currently running on a rather speedy Ryzen 7 7840HS with 64Gb RAM.  I am being frustrated at how difficult it is to get the iGPU or NPU used for anything.

When I pull the trigger for a proper build, it will likely be an Intel CPU.  i5 or i7 or whatever they're calling them.

I would like to know what others think, especially about these problems in the 13/14th generation chips.  Desktop or Mobile chips?

Would be fascinating to see something like the BeeLink ME Mini with a more capable CPU in there.  Lunar Lake perhaps?  But that might be straying into the power territory where a custom NAS build is necessary?

[Thanlion]

21 hours ago, PsychoWards said:

due to the issues which 13 and 14th gen had/have

What problems they had;

 

11 hours ago, Duncan Innes said:

running on a rather speedy Ryzen 7 7840HS

It's a mobile chip, how did you found one? Did you build it or is premade?

 

It feels like building something you risk the chance of having a les than ideal energy consumption.

But buying something prebuild is going to be under powered or expensive.

It's a server for only me and i think i am not interested in transcoding.