I have been running a little home server for a long time. It currently has an Intel celeron G1610, and a case that fits a Mini-ITX motherboard. It also has 3 big disks for data (NAS style), and one SATA SSD for the OS (Debian).
But lately I’ve been asking a lot from it and it’s not really keeping up so I’m thinking to upgrade. A relatively low power consumption is important to me.
What CPU would you recommend?
Yeah, it sounds like you’re hitting both compute and memory limits. If you’re transcoding with plex it might make sense to push into the hardware acceleration side of things (either via an igpu or even a small dedicated gpu), but naturally power consumption goes up with the latter.
I’d recommend using something like netdata to check out what parts of your server are getting most utilized to focus your efforts there. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to throw a ton of CPU into a server if the performance issues stem from a lack of memory, and vise versa.
Judging by the fact that your current processor can’t do ECC I am guessing it’s not a priority for you, so I’d be taking a very good look at modern ryzen systems. Even the slowest ryzens would kick the shit out of the G1610, both in performance and power utilization.