I want to build myself a picture and video storage server/Nas. First project will be de-googling my partner and my lives with immich. Possibly Plex or ai homelab fun projects down the road. I’ve got some spare parts and my PC case can house 1 ATX and 1 m-atx, with plenty of room for storage. I’m wondering if my old 3800x would be a good starting point for the build? Or should I look for a nuc to keep power draw low as the 3800 may be a bit dated for its power and performance? Also have a 2080 super gathering dust I could throw in there save myself couple bucks. I was thinking if I can find some am4 m-atx board that supports ECC would be ideal? Maybe overkill?
I would reuse that existing hardware and resuce your out of pocket. Dont sweat the power of the cpu vs that gpu. If power efficiency is your goal get an intel i5 gen 12 or newer. The integrated gpu sips power vs that nvidia and will handle plex.
Hey currently run my own AM4 server at home on a 3600 and it’s running several game severs, NAS, and a media server(Jeyllfin). 3800x is more than enough. I don’t currently have ECC in my device, but I’m not running or storing anything critical. However, if you want ECC support most ASUS and MSI boards support unbuffered ECC. Just make sure to confirm on the vendors support page for the boards you are considering.
right, awesome ok thanks. I’m wondering is ECC overkill for what it will be initially? Just an Immich photo and video backup platform? Seems kinda tedious to find the right board that’s compatible with ECC and all the other functionality I’m looking for in a m-atx formfactor. ECC seems to not be officially supported (marketed) on anything but will still probably work? My other thought is to steal my 16gb ddr4 out of my current system and buy myself 32 or 64gb for what might be my last am4 upgrade. Might do that just because it’s easier than getting the wrong board or memory combo.
The reasons I’m conflicted which way to go is now that I’m starting to dabble in home lab stuff;
- I’d like to keep it cheap until I feel more confident.
- Is there any point slowly piecing together/upgrading a system that’s going to loose support soon?
- With what I’m going to be needing this system for, I’m wondering if a little nuc, one of Intel’s new i5 line with integrated GPU would be better in the long run on the power bill? And then I build another system for dabbling with home assist or LLM’s or whatever because I know you need a lot more powerful system for that?
Power consumption concerns are really only important if you live somewhere with a high electricity cost.
1w, 24/7 is 8760Wh, or 8.76kWh. Let’s say you use the 3800 and 2080 super, with 6 SATA disks.
3800/motherboard: 20w idle
SATA disks: 6x5w = 30w idle
2080 super: 15w
so, 65w idle power consumption. 65*8.76 = 569kWh per year, if you’re running it 24/7 all year.
Now, I ballparked that, so maybe throwing a kill-a-watt in line with it would be your best option to really gauge the power consumption.
ECC is almost always overkill. If you’re worried about errors, run your memory at JEDEC instead of an XMP profile.
Stick with what you’ve got for compute, but storage is much easier to buy ahead of time rather than adjusting your config every time you add more.
ZFS/BTRFS can make this easier, but it’s not exactly ideal to upgrade a storage pool without just doubling your capacity.
Old hardware does surprisingly well for servers. I’ve got 3 Dell 7060 Micro servers running 8th gen Intel in my homelab and a 7th gen NUC for my NAS. Not planning to upgrade anything any time soon. “support” is relative. If you want your hardware to stay in warranty you’ll be spending a lot of money.
I use my desktop for LLMs when I need it. (a single 6900xt does just fine for anything sub 80b on ollama) My home-assistant runs on a Pi 4, which does just fine for that use case. Everything else is on SFF PCs.
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