Hello /c/selfhosted!
Im sorry if this is not the place to ask but i figured id give it a shot. Mods feel free to delete if i should post elsewhere.
Im currently contemplating building an actual home server. My problem is i have no idea what to prioritize in a server. My main concern is probably power consumption and price. It doesnt really need to be a brast. I currently self host a media center on my gaming rig which id like to move over and id like to be able to host stuff like Immitch and maybe some game servers from time to time.
Im fairly confident in my building skulle since ive built a fair share of gaming rigs over the years but i dont really know whats optimal in a server setting. So i come to you to ask about this landscape.
Im thinking good amount of RAM a fairly recent AMD processor on an unspecified motherboard. I do have an M.2 and extra HDD lying around and also an old GPU (GTX 960) but idk if GPU matters. In any case, how would one go about reducing power consumption, my first idea was underclocking the CPU even though i know AMDs recent CPUs should be pretty efficient. But is there any other, better, solutions to bring down idle consumption?
As stated im pretty fresh on this. Closest ive gotten to a home server is a couple of RPis. Any information or tips are very welcomed!
(Edits: typos)
If you have old parts, use those, it’ll probably overkill. Most server stuff isn’t very resource intensive, so a little goes a long way.
If you’re buying something new, I’d recommend something small, like a Mini PC or an N100 rig. 16GB RAM is probably enough, and anything with more than 4 cores is probably overkill. A dedicated GPU is unnecessary, something with a modern-ish iGPU will be plenty to transcode video.
Using recycled parts is the best advice. As you said, it’s almost certainly overkill and the price can’t be beat.
Yup, my first NAS was my first desktop PC, and I’ve upgraded it as I upgraded my desktop. My current NAS is still running my original Linux install, and currently has a Ryzen 1700 and Nvidia 750 Ti… Y desktop has a Ryzen 5600 and an AMD 6650XT, and I’ll upgrade my NAS to that when I upgrade my desktop.
If you can live without the dedicated GPU for the media center, you can get an Intel CPU instead, which have QuickSync for media transcoding. It will use a fraction of the power a dedicated GPU does with the same workload.
That’s likely the place you can gain most power effeciency.
+1
I’m running a media/back up server for 4 households on a single n100 mini pc and a couple USB drives. It’s a “good enough”, low cost, high wife acceptance factor entry point into self-hosting. It’ll happily age into a firewall if I want to build a better box later on.
It’s revealing what I do/don’t need vs what I want. It’s teaching me what people use, what they don’t and where I might want to go in the future.
If I could go again I’d probably get a n100 2Bay Ugreen thing. Then it’d age into a local back up and I wouldn’t have to deal with USB drives.
Same here. My N100 box is running multiple websites/blogs, nextcloud, jellyfin, home assistant and a bunch of other small things.
I don’t recommend buying a discrete GPU. For home-level hardware iGPU systems like Strix Halo are much better than discrete systems. For example Strix Halo can run models that you need multiple 5090s for.
Would not recommend under clocking. Buy a kill-a-watt measure your idle that’s your general power usage. A cpu that has a low TDP and newest generation is going to be the most efficient. After that it’s each item you add adds more usage at idle which is going to be most of your time. Transcoding efficiency doesn’t matter much since you are likely not transcoding when you aren’t watching videos. Have an appropriately sized power supply that platinum or gold certified, usually the extra cost will be justified by power bill usage over a year or 2.
For example my older gen server, a dell r720xd, sits about 120-130 watt but with 9 spinning disk drives each about 5w per hour it sits around 200w per hour. This does go higher when watching videos but is far from the average. 200w per is roughly $15-20 per month where I am located.
I hope this helps.
If power consumption and media server are your goals, an Intel CPU is what you want. Intel with quicksync is the most power efficient way to transcode video. Your GTX960 could do it, but will use more power, be limited to fewer codec types, and be limited to 2 streams.
All the other stuff is true, but on a Linux server unlocking an Nvidia GPU to bypass the artificial transcoding stream limitation is trivial.
If you want to modify the already flakey at times driver.
As people have said, the Intel CPU with quick sync will be much better on power.
You could also use your m.2 to caache your regular hard drive with BTRFS and LVM or something like https://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/
Maybe spin down your HDD when it’s not being used. Most of your power savings are going to come from not transcoding unless you need to, transcoding efficiently when you need to, and powering things down when you don’t need them.
In Linux you can mess with your clock regulation, probably even put the box to sleep when you don’t need it, maybe wake on lan.
Generally intel has the best idle power consumption although amd won’t be terrible either. unless you already have an amd motherboard or cpu lying around I would recommend grabbing a 11th gen i5.
If you want to reduce your power idle power consumption undervolting won’t help you there, it will only reduce power consumption while under load. Generally the biggest killer for idle power consumption is actually your motherboard and for that reason try to find a smaller motherboard. Mini-itx is best but you’ll probably find that micro-atx is a lot cheaper while not sacrificing too much power draw.
I can’t say how useful your gtx 960 will be, I’d test it to see if it can encode/decode/transcode video fast enough for your needs and just be weary that it will likely use a fair bit of power even at idle. If it is fast enough then you can easily get away with an 8th/9th gen intel cpu you’ll find they are a lot cheaper, you could get an even older cpu as per Jellyfins hardware requirements but you’ll sacrifice some power consumption and probably not save that much money. 8th/9th gen CPU’s have pretty good power idle power consumption which is of course what should be targeted here.
At least in the past, if you had a fixed amount of work to complete, underclocking would increase overall power consumption.
