I would go with an AMD APU when talking low power video decoding, it is hard to beat the 5600G for that. I don’t expect the 7000 APUs to be out for at least 9 months after the regular CPUs are released, even though everything will have integrated graphics now.
If you go with the 5600G, I recommend 32 GB of RAM and a decent B550 board, if possible - though A520 isn’t too shabby either for that CPU.
Otherwise, yeah, perhaps the Fractal Design Node 304 could be a good starting point for a combined NAS/Media Theater PC. Geizhalz.eu is a good place to look for prices in Europe.
Unless you want to go for the rather old Xeon E-2300 series you’re pretty much out of luck right now and need to jump to Threadripper or “enterprise” Xeon platforms which gets expensive very fast. You might also want to pay (Home-) Server/Workstation Forum | Hardwareluxx a visit since you’re in .de
Any old toaster could do that, as has been explained a couple of times already
You will want something that does hardware encoding for sure.
Some headroom required for extra performance, meaning at least hexacore, maybe even higher.
Ok, you really sure you want to spend €500-600 extra on this thing on something you will most likely never really have much use for on the build? ECC is great for reliability but is the ECC worth the premium for this use case? I’ll spec it out but at the same time I’ll give you a non-ECC, non-IPMI board too.
Pretty much all modern hardware got that
Yes, but this quickly rules out discrete graphics then. Fortunately AMD APUs are extremely capable now.
Anyway, quick spec of two comparable cores (RAM / CPU / Motherboard) depending on where you want to go, first the expensive version with ECC and IPMI:
I would go with the more expensive version if this is supposed to be something that generates money and reliability is critical for business revenue. Otherwise it’s just money down the drain to save yourself .01% of time over the course of five years. The given core should be able to run at around 30W in general and both cores are comparable in performance and size. If anyone else has an ECC+IPMI capable PC core below €500, I’m interested to hear about it.
Yep that makes the core cost €850 instead of €900.
ECC is an awesome technology but it is not worth it to pay triple for the questionable use case of preventing a server crash once a year. Not unless you really lose serious money from that.
Big Iron today resolves it with redundancy, if one server crashes it lowers total capacity by .001% or so. Meanwhile data integrity is better kept by having three separate computers keep tabs on the data and vote on the correct version.
ECC only makes sense in systems that does not have redundancy and need to be correct at all times. I would say those are rare enough, that the tech will go either extinct or exceedingly common now.
Please note I am not against ECC I just find it overrated just like Optane is/was. This does not make it useless, but neither does it make a.panacea to all problems.
Is ECC really the factor that drives up the cost? Seems like there are a lot of boards that support ECC, but only 3 that support IPMI.
Personally I would value ECC, while IPMI is a feature that I was looking forward to, but which I could probably live without.
Some more follow-up questions:
I also read something about DDR5 supporting ECC by default, would that be an angle to explore?
I read that it would be neat for streaming to have the recent generation intel processor for hardware transcoding vai supporting the newest quicksync. Does Ryzen do something similar? How would consumer grade intel cpus hold up against my use cases?
I’m following this thread as Im looking to upgrade my current truenas server running a really old i7 920, 24GB ddr3, and I think is bottlenecking my 10Gbit card, and has a really high power comsuption.
And I’m on the fence about ECC vs non-ECC and Im from Europe as well. IPMI for me is not really necessary.
AMD seems the way to go . I was looking at intel 12th gen too as a 12400 (and I don’t probably need more than the 4 cores to saturate 10Gbit?) it’s supposed to have ECC support with the W680 boards? but I don’t find anything on stock, and those seem to usually come with DDR5 ECC which I guess is unicorn’s blood.
Well, not only, but kinda? Like shown above 32 GB ECC vs 32 GB regular is $100 difference, the 5650G is $30 difference and then whatever tax you have on the motherboard you choose. So ECC is a $150 tax minimum, to prevent One bit flip every 40 days or so, depending on your daily use and whether or not you got a bad RAM stick. Some systems have a bit flip every three years. Since it sounds like you are doing a home server, utilization should be quite low.
All else being equal ECC is great but paying that much extra is like hiring a secret service squad to escort your kids to the school and your wife to the grocery store.
No, but the hardware/market segregation is unfortunately :-/
Keep in mind that regarding AMD supported is equvalent to “boots” , there have been multiple reports where the ECC part just gets disabled/ignored which makes it useless as the memory acts like a non ECC stick.
Intel Quick Sync works very well in general and is well supported, you can still achieve better results with software encoders but at the cost of a lot more processing power required. AMDs VCE engine is worse, it’s not by a huge margin but H.264 is a lot worse. I think H.265 is performs much better in that regard and is closer to what nVidia and Intel achieves. What might be of interest is actually Intel’s new graphics card series as they support AV1 encoding however you might need to wait a bit for driver and software support to catch up.
AMD do make decent hardware but I’m old enough to just wanting things to be working even if it may not be the best performance available because time > performance so I tend to gravitate towards Intel in most cases.
I personally do however consider Zen 4 as if rumors are true AVX512 is supported while Intel still limits it to workstation and enterprise grade CPUs. This is probably not something the average user will care about much less in a NAS/Media Server.
