Ryzen 5600X for Home Server: Efficient Enough or Should I Sell?

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Hey everyone,

I’ve got a Ryzen 5600X laying around and am planning to build a home server for tasks like Nextcloud, Jellyfin, backups (with redundancy), occasional Minecraft hosting, Home Assistant, and some light Python scripts.

While I know the 5600X has the power I need, I’m concerned about idle power consumption—I’ve read the CPU itself draws around 15W at idle, but I’m unsure how RAM and other components affect this. Plus, the lack of an iGPU might be a downside for Jellyfin transcoding.

If I sell the 5600X, my budget would be around 400€ (I’m in Germany); otherwise, I’m looking at around 300€ to complete the build (excluding Storage). Would the 5600X be efficient for 24/7 use, or should I go for something more energy-efficient? Had many N100 recommendations, but feel like apart from the power efficiency, it’s pretty overrated. Any advice would be great! Thanks!

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I think the important question to ask is what that power savings is monetarily saving you. For example I pay $0.135/kwh, which can be converted into $1.18/ w yr. I think those units can help evaluate if the power savings are worth it in the long run.

From my experience finding idle power consumption numbers can be a challenge to find, but here is some more idle power consumption numbers: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Review - Power Consumption & Efficiency | TechPowerUp

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Well first off I don’t really know if I would need an additional GPU. Also I’m really new to home server builds, so can’t estimate how much an entire Ryzen 5600x system would take up, as I don’t know all the intricacies that might play a role. So I’m looking for general advice in that regard.

Also idk how much sense those values make that you provided, as a regular Windows 10 setup is probably way different from an optimized home server build, no?

But energy cost is pretty high in germany. I pay over 30cents/kwh, so going more efficient is probably the way to go.

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Consider the older Ryzen Pro CPU to enable proper ECC support for the DDR4 RAM? You will need a supported motherboard though.

I would recommend a TrueNAS Scale install as well.

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Also depending on where you live, i’m guessing you have some form of heating during the winter months. In that case, the waste heat isn’t ehh… wasted.

How about buying a kill-a-watt or some generic watt-meter to measure what the whole system actually pulls from the socket.

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Thx for the recommendations. Will take a look into it. Also the Ryzen Pro APUs?

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Don’t think spending electricity to heat my hallway is the way to go tbh. As mentioned I live in Germany so electricity is super expensive.

I already have a watt-meter I used for some previous builds, but I haven’t bought anything so far for the current build, so nothing to measure.

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I run my TrueNAS/Jellyfin/NextCloud server on a 4600G and it is fine. But here is the reality of self-hosting, it cost you money in the form of electricity. That is just the reality of things. If you are concerned about power bills then you really have to ask yourself if self-hosted services and hardware is really what you want.

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That can be fixed by getting a Raspberry Pi to send wake on lan packets to your servers. You do need to wait a bit though for it to kick in.