Homelab Low(ish) Power Media Server CPU Choice

[pooter]

Howdy,

I am in the process of building a low(ish) power home media server. I am conflicted on CPU/Mobo choice and the more news that rolls out the more conflicted I become. I say low(ish) power because I currently pay ~7.5 cents/kWh so it’s not paramount that it consumes sub-100w but would be neat. Wendell has got me considering an Alder Lake because of the P-cores and I’m not really entertaining 13th gen because single-threaded performance is marginally better and power usage is higher. However, the Alder Lake boards that support ECC are astronomically priced for what they are, not even factoring in the lack of DDR5-ECC to begin with. I have the following hardware already and plan on running TrueNAS Scale (Potentially virtualized in Unraid?) and use services such as Plex (Sonarr/Radarr/etc.), VPN, Homebridge, Handbrake, Time Machine Backup, NextCloud, etc.

• 4x 8TB Samsung Sata SSDs
• 6x 16TB Exos HDDs
• 2x 2TB NVME (1-Gen4 & 1 Gen3)
• 6900XT, 2080 Ti (Will likely buy a small ARC GPU for the transcoding engine at some point)

I don’t plan on using the two GPUs in this build because of power draw & size factors. I’d like the MOBO to be Micro ATX / ITX but once again, not a deal breaker if ATX. I have a rack if needed but feel like rack mount & low-power border on an oxymoron in most cases. As I see it these are my options:

• Alder Lake w/ Non ECC RAM
• AM4 CPU w/ ECC
• Xeon of some sort w/ ECC

2x 10G ports would be neat but I can always get a PCIE card for that. IPMI would also be neat for some added peace of mind.

What are your thoughts? I’d like to have the machine be above mediocre for 3-5 years… Bonus if you have any chassis/case recommendations too! If any of my opinions are misguided PLEASE let me know. I am a firm believer in “buy it nice or buy it twice”… just don’t know how “nice” it has to be.

Thanks so much in advance!

[wertigon]

Well, you pretty much got two options here, the 12100 / 12400 or the 5600G. Both should be fairly capable and the 5600G should have most hardware codecs you need for the server.

Like you say, it’s not only a question of choosing ECC RAM, your motherboard needs to support it, too. Given that, if the only reason you are buying an ECC board is because of the ECC, then forget about it.

ECC is nice but not necessary unless you absolutely positively 100% require flawless data. The chances of you encountering a memory error from a good RAM stick is around once or twice a year, and the chance that this particular memory error causes anything more severe than a reboot is pretty much nil.

It is possible in theory that this memory bug could eat up your wedding photos or turn an rm -rf ./* command to rm -rf /*. The chances of this happening to a low-traffic, occasionally used always-on server in practice, are less than the chance of you getting struck by lightning, or the chances of you winning the grand prize in the lottery. Most memory errors, if and when they occur, will change the color of a single pixel to a slightly more red tone, or similar. It is much more efficient to implement a 3-2-1 backup strategy for data protection.

All else being equal, ECC is better than no ECC. Is it worth paying more than 10%-15% extra for your use case? Nope.

It is worth it for giant databases with thousands of requests per second though.