I am several months into the self-hosting journey and I feel I have outgrown my Pi 4 B 8GB. I’m only running around 3 dozen containerized services and it seems to struggle to keep up. But I’m not sure of the best bang for my buck. I’d like good, long-term performance, but I don’t really have a grand lying around for a Lenovo Tiny or Dell Optiplex or ASUS NUC. I’m thinking of buying an SSD to boot from, but will this even help much? For $350-500, could I make a more cost effective homeserver upgrade?
Second hand Intel 6/7 gen is probably the best bang for the buck right now. Relatively power efficient too if you turn off the turbo-boost in the bios.
Debatable. Boost through a task and be done quickly, with some more power usage, or chunk along longer with probably more power usage. Would have to be tested, but I’d bet on the boost.
Yes, it depends a bit, but you can use a smaller ATX PSU if you don’t have to account for power spikes due to turbo boost, and these PSUs are somewhat more efficient when they don’t run at 10% utilization only most of the time. Also allows using smaller DC/DC Pico PSUs that would struggle providing peak power.