Recommendations for a $1400 home server

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1

I love tech but its only a hobby for me so i am not that knowledgable in it

Assuming you had ~ $1400 to spend on a motherboard, cpu, ram and PSU what would you get

I am currently running the following containers

SWAG
Minecraft Server
Jellyfin > Benefits from iGPU for ffmpeg
Frigate > Benefits from iGPU for ffmpeg AND i have a Edge TPU for the object detection
Home Assistant
Node-Red
Vault Warden
Next Cloud
MariaDB
Collabora
Wireguard
Airsonic Advanced

Not entirely sure if
#1 Ill use Proxmox to virtualize TrueNAS SCALE and a Linux Server to run docker
or
#2 Run TrueNAS SCALE on metal and virtualize a linux server for docker inside of TrueNAS

Requirements:
ECC needs to work 100%
Low power draw hence the 65 watt CPU
Some sort of GPU for ffmpeg (jellyfin and frigate)
Has to be WHISPER quiet since it sits right next to me
I do NOT need redundant power supplies

I already have:
Large Tower Case
LSI 9211
8 x SATA 3.5" Hard drives

What i am thinking of putting together is as follows

$500 AsRock Rack B650D4U-2L2T/BCM Micro-ATX Server Motherboard
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=B650D4U-2L2T/BCM#Specifications

$420 AMD Ryzen™ 9 7900 12-Core, 24-Thread 65 Watt Processor
https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-9-7900

$130 Micron MTC20C2085S1EC48BA1 Memory 32GB DDR5 4800MHz UDIMM MEM-DR532L-CL01-EU48
Micron MTC20C2085S1EC48BA1 Memory 32GB DDR5 4800MHz UDIMM MEM-DR532L-CL01-EU48 | Wiredzone

$130 Micron MTC20C2085S1EC48BA1 Memory 32GB DDR5 4800MHz UDIMM MEM-DR532L-CL01-EU48
Micron MTC20C2085S1EC48BA1 Memory 32GB DDR5 4800MHz UDIMM MEM-DR532L-CL01-EU48 | Wiredzone

$200 Corsair RMX Series, RM850x, 850 Watt, 80+ Gold Certified,

Is there something else for $1400 that would better serve my purposes?

I saw some people recommended getting on ebay AMD EPYC 7302P CPU + Supermicro H12SSL-i Motherboard COMBO for around $800

But comparing the Ryzen 7900 to the EPYC 7302 it just doesnt seem like a fair fight with the Ryzen coming out on top

Ryzen 9 7900 Pros are:
Ryzen has a built in iGPU
Ryzen 65 Watt compared to the EPYC 155 Watt + I have to buy a video card
Ryzen wins all the perfomance benchmark and even doubles CPU-Z single thread

EPYC + H12SSL-i combo i have to buy:
$?? GPU for transcoding
$115 10Gb PCI-E NIC Network Card, Dual Copper RJ45 Port, with Intel X540 Controller, PCI Express Ethernet LAN Adapter
$50 Heat Sink and Fan
$?? 64 gigs of ECC RAM
$200 Corsair RMX Series, RM850x, 850 Watt, 80+ Gold Certified,
I am guessing around $80 for the GPU and at least $200 for 64 Gigs of ECC DDR memory

So around $650 for the extra stuff just to bring the features up to par with the B650D4U-2L2T/BCM

So now i am comparing a new $1400 AM5 system to a old $1450 AMD EPYC™ 7003/7002 Series Processor where the ONLY benefit would be more PCIE lanes and expandability which im not looking for right now

Am i putting too much epmphasis on CPU performance and power draw for my needs?

I am open to any and all thoughts

2

Don’t stare yourself blind on the latest gen tech hype. Consider using AM4/DDR4: much cheaper and less power hungry. Power==heat => cooling!

As for EPYC: unless you do video transcoding, you don’t need a GPU. Even then, 80 bucks isn’t gonna get you any decent transcoding performance, you’d need at least triple that budget for a decent GPU. Do note that on EPYC you’d really need 4 RAM sticks minimum. And they need to be RDIMM, not UDIMM! I’m running my H11SSL system (with 7551P CPU) on a pair of 8GB sticks, but I really need to put in more RAM as budget allows (which it currently doesn’t, regrettably).

3

You can set TDP for all Zen3+4 Ryzen. No need to buy a 65W TDP CPU. x-series can be set to 65W as well and you may want some features later.

If that’s on AsRocks QVL list, this probably has the best chance to work. Good choice on 32GB DIMMs, you may want to upgrade later. ZFS loves DRAM and VMs and containers only get more over time. I’m glad I got the full 128GB, totally worth it. AsRock Rack memory compatibility is very much a gamble judging from the X470/X570 threads here in the forums.

You’re not pulling any more than 200W, so get a PSU that has the efficiency sweetspot in the ~100-200W range. My 5900x (ECO@65W) with 128GB memory and 6xHDD, 4xSATA, 2x NVMe pulls 85W idle and 125W full load. So you know what to expect. I don’t have a GPU, so add this to the equation.

Both HBA and GPU need a PCIe slot. One x16 and one x4 slot (all CPU lanes) on the board. Decisions. But the x570D4U-2L2T has x8/x8 option, so I never had to deal with a x4 slot. GPU might be fine on x4, but I wouldn’t run my HBA on PCIe 3.0 x4

I’m running a similar system, with Zen3 equivalents also using AsRock Rack board. Can’t say anything about the Broadcom NICs because my board has x550 intel on-board. All 4 NICs are solid and doing gods work.

I started with Proxmox + virtualized Core, switched to bare-metal Scale after 8 months and got back to old setup a month later. Too many bugs in Scale made this a very bad experience. Core is rock-solid as a storage server. ZFS is good on Linux, but ZFS on FreeBSD is best. No reason to run Scale on top of Proxmox. Proxmox has clustering features and much better KVM/QEMU virtualization options as well as LXC, so you don’t always need nested containers with docker.

VM is running flawlessly and the PCIe passthroughs for TrueNAS is just point+click in Proxmox GUI. I didn’t tweak a bit.

Server running 24/7 for years…power draw concerns are way more important than for other PC stuff.
If you have stuff that needs CPU, you need cores. Cores/threads more than frequency. ZFS Compression, maybe CPU encoding and the background noise of 10-15 VMs/containers, perhaps some very noisy VM that needs a lot of CPU is probably what you are dealing with. You can always adjust core allocation to the VMs to optimze things. Tweak TDP/CPU governor if you need more or less performance. Ryzen is very flexible in this department.

Yeah I can agree on that. But AM4/5 power draw is similar as you can set TDP to 65/105 on AM4 and 65/105/170 or manual settings on AM5.

12 Zen3 cores are still overkill for most homeserver stuff. Probably the single most overbuilt component in my server. But 5800x wasn’t that much cheaper and I like the dual CCD of the 5900x.
And AM4 ECC memory got dirt cheap lately.
AM4 is still a great choice today. But depends on how the price for the board is, I heard the X570D4U-2L2T series got really expensive. I got mine for 320$ before all the board price hikes and COVID madness.

4

If I had $1400 to burn I’d buy one of the below for $1000 and supply it with four SSD drives.

I own two of these already. Fully Windows / Linux/ ESXi / ProxMox compatible, low power use, iLO and very small form factor. I have them behind my big screen TV in my living room. Mouse quiet, it’s the tiniest Enterprise grade server you can buy.

5

@shadragon
Thank you for the recommendation
i looked at

added max ram which is only 32 Gigs, and it came out to around $1414

While the price is comparable to the AMD AM5 system when you compare processing speeds

It just doesnt make sense i dont think, the only positive is it comes pre assembled in a box ready to go with no tinkering but performance wise it just seems so slow on paper with only 4 cores… is there something i am missing?

        Intel Xeon E-2224 vs AMD 7900

PassMark single thread 2,635 VS 4,186
PassMark CPU Mark 7,306 VS 48,347
(Linux | Windows)
Geekbench 4 single core 5,708 VS 8,866
(Linux | Windows)
Geekbench 4 multi-core 17,233 VS 62,780
(Linux)
Geekbench 5 single core 1,296 VS 2,190
(Linux)
Geekbench 5 multi-core 3,932 VS 19,129
(SGEMM)
GFLOPS performance 358.98 GFLOPS VS 1,220 GFLOPS
(Multi-core / watt performance)
Performance / watt ratio 243 pts / W VS 966 pts / W

6

I got the base model with a single 1TB HDD and base 8GB RAM, then updated it to 32GB (It will go to 64GB) RAM. Then added 4 x 1TB SSD in RAID 5. Yes, 4 cores, but perky performance, low power and quiet. The prices have gone up as I only paid $699.

Your list included:

ECC needs to work 100%
Low power draw hence the 65 watt CPU
Some sort of GPU for ffmpeg (jellyfin and frigate)
Has to be WHISPER quiet since it sits right next to me
I do NOT need redundant power supplies

And that unit ticks all the boxes. Not as flexible as a DIY project, but best I mention it and have you say no, than to say nothing and have you see it the day after you buy something else. :slight_smile:

For anything requiring power, I have a 32-core Threadripper PRO workstation, so for me the home lab does not need raw power.

7

@shadragon
Well thank you for the recommendations i like seeing all my options before pulling the trigger

It does tick all the boxes for sure just for the same price now i am eyeing the AM5 platform for now unless i can find a good reason for something else

8

$125 - ASRock X570S PG RIPTIDE
$185 - 5600GE (35W)
$192 2x32GB ECC 3200 https://memory.net/product/m391a4g43ab1-cwe-samsung-1x-32gb-ddr4-3200-ecc-udimm-pc4-25600e-dual-rank-x8-module/
$90 - Noctua NH-D12L
$170 800w+ Zero RPM PSU of choice
$40 - Quadro P400

$820 can up ram if you want more then 64gb

main 16x slot free for w/e
HBA in 1 4x slot
Quadro in other 4x slot

9

@mutation666

thank you for the recommendation, does that board officially support ECC?
i currently have a 5800x with a X570-AORUS-ELITE that i could easily repurpose into a home server but since ECC isnt guaranteed im thinking of just going for a dedicated hardware setup what say you?

10

yes asrock is good for ECC on AM4, err wait might need to swap cpu apu might not be ECC

Board does

“- AMD Ryzen series APUs (Cezanne) support DDR4 5000+(OC) / 4933(OC) / 4866(OC) / 4800(OC) / 4733(OC) / 4666(OC) / 4600(OC) / 4533(OC) / 4466(OC) / 4400(OC) / 4333(OC) / 4266(OC) / 4200(OC) / 4133(OC) / 4000(OC) / 3866(OC) / 3800(OC) / 3733(OC) / 3600(OC) / 3466(OC) / 3200 / 2933 / 2667 / 2400 / 2133 ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory*”

Claims ECC but pretty sure AM4 APU does not support it

65W options
5900,5800,5600(x),5700

11

@mutation666
yup i cant use a AM4 APU for ecc, one of the big reasons for AM5 is the igpu that comes with all CPU, of course i could always get a dedicated gpu for ffmpeg but since im starting from scratch i just thought the 7000 series with igpu was a slam dunk

12

They make 1x GT710 Gpus that are passive and cheap

Thats what i run in my servers

image
image766×381 59.2 KB

Sometimes need to wait for a deal, but they sell around this price often enough

13

I’m building an almost identical system as an upgrade for a Ryzen 5600X system I built on AMD’s older board. Even have the TPU!

One difference I have… and a suggestion for you is that I will be reusing my old 700W 80+ titanium PSU. At least for my build a big part of the system is efficiency, and there is very little chance of this system exceeding 200W under any load but benchmarking. A titanium PSU will be quieter too as it can mostly run fanless.

I also went with an RTX A2000 for transcoding, it’s a quadro so it has no streaming cap, the latest NVENC and NVDEC hardware and a 70W TDP

One issue I am thinking of is how to RAID 1 my NVMe drives. I’ll be fitting two 990 Pros. Is it easy to accomplish with this board and a PCI-e m.2 card?

14

i do encoding for streaming devices on my first gen EPYC and i have never had a performance related issue that was caused by the EPYC CPU.

EPYC first or second gen stuff is low cost and makes an amazing home server, despite what the benchmarks (and people on this forum) tend to say.

the REG DDR4 support alone should be enough of a reason. but it also has a lot of PCIE available and several other benefits over forcing AM4 into a server role. it also tends to be a lot cheaper on the used market compared to ThreadRipper.

15

Sure does! I got me a Supermicro H11SSL-i mainboard, AMD 7551P CPU, 2U cooler+fan, all for (well) under 500€ earlier this year. Add another 300€ for 4x 32GB ECC RDIMM so for under 800€ a pretty capable EPYC system is not bad, not bad at all! :wink:

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With recent electricity cost rises there is a massive difference between an EPYC 7551P and Ryzen 7900 home server though. Over 200W at idle platform/platform.
At €0.42/kWh average that’s €700+ per year for 24/7/365 operation.

In my own case I like my home to run 9 months of the year from my solar so I optimise for efficiency… but it has a real financial impact which shouldn’t be ignored. €1400 vs €500 makes a lot of sense when the €500 server has already made up the price difference in cost of operation by year 2.

17

for the home server something like a 7252 is a good value and is only a 120w tdp part with a reasonable idle power usage. but yes, they are higher tdp than plain Ryzen. still, REG ECC and some of the onboard features may make it so that you are adding less add ons to the server, where you may be negating the CPU power savings.

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