I’m currently running Unraid on an old Supermicro X9DRi-LN4+ with dual Intel Xeon E5-2670 v2 CPUs. It’s served me well for years but this old Supermicro is loud, hot, and power-hungry. I’m ready for an upgrade, and I’m looking for something that would be both faster & use less power.
The heaviest load on my server is usually Plex transcodes, and from what I read AMDs hardware transcoding isn’t 100% reliable with Plex/Jellyfin, so I guess I’m sticking with Intel. I also run 20+ other docker containers including Immich, Nextcloud, Matrix, Home Assistant, Mealie, Stash, etc.
I’ve been eyeing something like an i5-14500 because it looks like that would be more powerful than my current CPUs for less power - but I’m wary of the issues with Intel’s 13th/14th gen. I’m also considering waiting for the non-K SKUs from Intel’s 15th gen (Arrow Lake), since it seems like they’re going to be very power efficient.
What do you guys recommend? If you were building an all purpose home server soon (and assuming long-term power efficiency & performance are more important to you than upfront cost) what would you recommend?
That’s some ancient gas guzzlers you got there I had one of them myself…pulling power and run at 100% for not really much stuff I threw at it. Today things are very different.
Pretty much any 8 core CPU will be fine. Each E-core is so much faster than those Ivy Bridge dinosaurs.
If you want to go Intel, look at the E-core count. 14500 has 8 which is the best you can get unless you pay for 14900. Really the sweet spot and cheap on top of that. The -T series SKUs have default low power settings and lower base clocks. But you can set 14500 down to approx. 14500T standards. I doubt you get any more power efficiency unless you go N305 or N100 platform.
And core count is plenty for your average homelab stuff. You don’t run transcoding on CPU and haven’t mentioned any performance hungry stuff otherwise.
I think 14500 is a great choice with way lower power and enough performance headroom for the coming years. And if not, you probably can get a 14900 for cheap in a couple of years and just double the core count and retain a low power profile.
You may look at the new generation as they have better power efficiency. It’s still brand new and you probably pay the early adopter tax to some degree, but might be worth looking into.
I’d either wait for the lower-end SKUs from arrow lake, or go AMD with something like a 7500f. An alternative would be a 12400f or an 11400 if you want to avoid the big. LITTLE architecture from Intel. They’re plenty powerful for your use case and will sip power, especially compared to your xeons.
I’d be willing to spend the $ for the 14900s extra performance if it wasn’t for the recent microcode issues. Supposedly the 14500 (non-K) is unaffected by all of that, which is why it’s been my top contender.
or go AMD with something like a 7500f
I’d love to go with AMD if I could be confident the hardware transcoding would work well for Plex/Jellyfin. I see some people saying it works fine for them on recent AMD CPUs, and I see others saying they’ve had problems or the encoding quality isn’t as good.
wait for the lower-end SKUs from arrow lake
This is what I’m currently leaning towards; waiting for the Arrow Lake equivalent of the 14900. But I’m open to persuasion.
Didn’t know this. I was assuming that all 13th and 14th gen are/were affected to some degree.
Oh and you can just mark the text and the forum software does a popup and you just click “quote”. Way faster to respond to other comments. And the quoted person gets a notification about the quote (same as @TwistedTurtle ) Took me a while to find it myself.
Yes. 13500 and 14500 are both rebadged Alder Lake. Hard to tell how good the currently available Arrow power data is but it looks like ~3x Alder, Raptor, and AMD APUs’ idle draw. Also pretty mixed results for Arrow’s active efficiency versus Zen 5 and PPT limited Zen 4. It’s unclear how much DLVR tuning might help.
You don’t mention ECC, so I’d probably use 8500G, 8600G, or 8700G for TSMC 4 nm rather than Intel ~10 nm. If waiting for lower Arrow SKUs and more complete data then Kraken Point might also be an option. If Plex and Jellyfin support doesn’t lag too much.
See link above for the rest of the rebadged SKUs. In some cases it depends which part fell into the bin.
Thanks for confirming, I’ve had trouble pinning that down as a fact.
My current system has ECC - but I’m not sure how necessary it is for my needs. Since Intel has removed ECC support from consumer chipsets I guess I’d either have to go full on Xeon with iGPU or AMD with Nvidia dGPU, which would balloon the price and power consumption of the system.
If Plex/Jellyfin had hardware transcoding working properly on AMD then this would be a slam dunk… but since they apparently don’t I’m kinda lost. The consensus seems to be that ECC isn’t needed for a media server, but I wish I could have it just in case.
Since it seems like I have to compromise somewhere though, I think I’ll have to do without the ECC in order to have a more power efficient processor that has good hardware transcoding support in Plex.
Wait, Arrow Lake is using almost 3x as much power as previous generations? How can that be? I thought improved power efficiency was the main leap forward with 15th gen? I must be misunderstanding something.
He’s talking about idle draw. Which is fairly important on a home server. I guess the “chiplet” design and its drawbacks finally hits Intel as well. When talking “less power”, usually it’s a performance/watt figure.
e.g. EPYC has some fantastic perf/watt but rather high idle because of the IO die. But you get a lot of compute for every watt regardless.
My first Plex server was based on Intel 12500T and was great. I only moved on to AMD EPYC Milan from there for ECC, greater I/O, and more PCIe Lanes. You could also get a used AM4 mobo/CPU combo and just install a really boring GPU like a GTX 1060 or Intel Arc for transcoding if you wanted.
I see. I suppose idle power draw would be much more relevant to me than perf/watt - since most of the time my server isn’t doing much. Guess that means I don’t need to wait around for Arrow Lake.
It occurred to me that I could go with an AMD CPU + a GPU for my hardware transcoding in Plex. Then I could have ECC RAM. But then the question becomes: is it worth the increased power draw and $ to add a GPU just so that I can have ECC?
• The easiest option seems to be the i5-14500 (with the con of no ECC.)
• The no-compromise option would be something like a Ryzen 9 7900 + GPU + ECC (with the con of higher cost and presumably higher idle power draw because of the GPU.)
I guess it comes down to which option would have the lower idle power draw, and how big of a difference would it be? If power draw is similar I guess I’d pay more for the ECC. If idle power draw was going to be drastically higher with the AMD then i think I’d go with the 14500 and make do without ECC.
Yeah that’s a good idea, I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner. But now I’m wondering how much power a GPU like that draws when idle. Assuming its not too bad I think I’ll explore this further so that I can keep my ECC. Looks like the Ryzen 9 7900 might be a good contender?
A380 seems to be rather popular and I was considering that card myself. 20W idle power is a bit much for this fairly low-powered card. But with EPYC, you need “something” to accomodate for GPU stuff.
If you haven’t priced DDR5 ECC UDIMM yet, brace yourself. I got 256GB of DDR4 3200 RDIMMs for the cost of 64GB of DDR5 ECC UDIMM. That shit is horse racing prices.
I’d recommend either going with an older 11th or 12th gen i5 (maybe i7 if you can find them cheap enough), or just wait for arrow lake. To be honest Intel’s igpus are better for transcoding stuff like in Plex, even though AMD has got better.
14500 supports ECC. As do the Pro 8500G, Pro 8600G, and Pro 8700G. Issues there are Intel’s arbitrary restriction of ECC to W chipset boards and AMD’s pretty much equally arbitrary selling Pros only in tray. Given DDR5’s read and write CRC and EC2 scrubbing the value proposition for bus EC4’s fairly niche.
For idle (and active) power it’ll probably be most effective to estimate the operating cost difference based on your direct power and carbon pricing. Radeon 6400 and 6500 XT idle at 2-3 W and 1650s 3-4 W. Some of the 7600s are also 4 W but a 4060’s more like 9 W, so current gen Nvidia’s likely close to Arrow.
As @Exard3k pointed out, Intel Arc idles like a 3090. If waiting until Q1 2025 there’s a chance Battlemage might be lower. RDNA4 might also bring other options.
If you don’t mind 20-30+ W idle then any Zen 3, 4, or 5 chiplet part’s admissible. Presumably the server’ll be asleep, if not powered down, much of the time.
I suspect Arrow’d idle like Zen 3, 4, and 5 if it wasn’t on Foveros. Remains to be seen if Zen 6 moves to CoWoS. [Wrong pronoun, but thanks.]
In contrast it doesn’t look like Intel Arc GPUs are anywhere near as good about idle power. They seem to regularly idle between 15W-40W depending on the details.
Wew! Just looked it up and that is pricey. Not a dealbreaker though, I’m willing to invest the $$$ for that .001% chance that ECC might save my ass. I have my whole family’s life on this server (chats, home automations, family recipes, password managers, wedding photos, baby videos, etc, etc). I’m willing to spare no expense to do this right.
If I don’t get a GPU then my CPU will definitely be Intel for that reason. It looks like even expensive flagship Nvidia GPUs aren’t quite as good at hardware transcoding Plex streams as Intel iGPUs are.
Yeah ECC is my main sticking point with Intel. PCpartpicker shows 0 motherboards that support ECC on LGA 1700 - so I don’t see any way to get ECC with something like an i5-14500 even though the CPU says it supports it. Really frustrating because that would make this a slam-dunk for me if I could get ECC with LGA 1700.
That seems pretty damn good to my uneducated eye. I feel like anything under 10W idle would be acceptable.
I never shut it down or let it sleep, it’s always running. But most of the time it’s not doing much. I’m looking for something that sips power on idle, but can unleash the beast when it needs to. I’m only really familiar with the mainstream CPUs so if there’s something out there with performance in the range of an i5-14900 or Ryzen 7900 that has better idle power consumption please let me know.
Thank you for all of your input. Although I’m still conflicted on whether to get an AMD CPU + Nvidia GPU, or something equivalent to an i5-14500 and trying to track down a Mobo that supports ECC. A part of me likes the idea of having a good GPU in case I ever want to self-host a LLM or something - but the other part of me thinks its stupid to spend that much extra for something I only might use someday. However it looks like it might actually be cheaper to get an AMD CPU + NVidia GPU than it would be to get an ECC-capable mobo on Intel. I’m not sold on either path yet.
Look for W680 motherboards. PCpartpicker can be lacking with non-gaming components in my experience. Not sure what your location is but they are out there. Kind of pricey in most cases but cheaper than Xeon/Epyc gear. E.g.
Intel iGPUs are quite capable. I can transcode 4k UHD HDR content at 80+ fps on my lowly i3 12100 in jellyfin (I guess plex would be the same). In principle enough for 3 concurrent users. On 1080p H.264 I can transcode at 360 fps. So unless you have a lot of users that should do.
For power efficiency I’d really go with this over amd+nvidia gpu.
W880 has been announced but it will probably take a while before price-performance overtakes the older platform.
I’m considering that, my main concern is the idle power draw. I see reports that Intel Arc GPUs idle at 15-40W. Nvidia GPUs seem to be better about idle power.
Thank you! I guess I’ve been overestimating the comprehensiveness of PCpartpicker’s database. I see the Asus W680-ACE IPME on Amazon for $434.06 - which is expensive as hell but would still be cheaper/easier than adding a good GPU to an AMD build. Knowing such a board exists really changes everything for me.
I’ll keep marinating on it, but now my top contender is an Intel i5-14500 (rebadged Alder Lake so no microcode issues), with an ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE IPMI motherboard (and ECC RAM!). This should give me significantly better performance than my current Xeon E5-2670 v2s, at a fraction of the power usage, with killer hardware transcoding in Plex, and without needing to give up ECC.
My current Suprmicro server idles at 200W, so I imagine I’d notice quite a difference on my power bill.
I had one of them myself…pulling power and run at 100% for not really much stuff I threw at it. Today things are very different.