I’ve been running a headless Ubuntu server for about 10 years or so. At first, it was just a file/print server, so I bought a super low power motherboard/processor to cut down on the energy bill. It’s a passively cooled Intel Celeron J3455 “maxed out” with 16BG of RAM.

Since then it’s ballooned into a Plex/Shinobi/Photoprism/Samba/Frigate/MQTT/Matrix/Piwigo monster. It has six drives in RAID6 and a 7th for system storage (three of the drives are through a PCI card). I’m planning on moving my server closet, and I’ll be upgrading the case into a rack-mount style case. While I’m at it, I figured I could upgrade the hardware as well. I was curious what I should look for in hardware.

I’ve built a number of gaming PCs in the past, but I’ve never looked at server hardware. What features should I look for? Also, is there anything specific (besides a general purpose video card) that I can buy to speed up video encoding? It’d be nice to be able to real-time transcode video with Plex.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce
    4•3 months ago

    If you’re on a budget, check out X99 socket Xeons. You can pick up Mobos and chips for super cheap. 10+ core hyper-threaded Xeons with solid clocks and a motherboard for 120-180 bucks total. Support 64 GB of RAM, more if you have a proper server board.

    For transcoding, depending on the codec, dedicated GPU is best.

    I’m not sure about Plex, but I know on Jellyfin, the new Intel Arc GPUs are really great for encoding, not too expensive for the lower end cards either, and low profile options for smaller rack cases.

    • @ch00fOP
      4•3 months ago

      Thanks for the tips!

      To clarify, by “x99,” do you mean LGA2011-3? That’s the socket wikipedia associates with the hardware.

      And as for Arc, it looks like they’re a great option for video encoding. I’m actually using QuickSync already on my Celeron processor which has helped. From what I can understand, it looks like QuickSync is basically the same processor on all of the Arc cards, so I can just go with the cheapest card if I don’t plan to use much of the other features? Looking like an A380 can be had for $100 or so.

      • Lettuce eat lettuce
        2•3 months ago

        Sorry for the slow reply. Yes, I mixed the chipset up with the socket lol.

        The A380 is the same I’ve been looking at for my own home Media setup, should be plenty of encoding power for your use case.

        Good luck!