Hi, could you help me and recommend a good upgrade for my (dated) home server?
I’m currently running Unraid on an ASRock H97 Pro4 and an Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3, together with 24GB DDR3 RAM, a NVIDIA GTX 960 (for hardware transcoding) and a few old, mismatched HDDs. I chose this hardware mostly, because it was cheap/easy to get or I had it laying around. The server is primarily running Plex and the *arr-Stack, as well as smaller, less demanding applications and is showing it’s age. I also want to add a VM for my wife or occasional guests to game on. Because of this, I think it’s time for an upgrade, but I’m not really sure, what hardware to choose.
My current requirements would be the following:
- Should be able to run the following applications easily
- Plex (2-3x 1080p should be enough, but a little bit of overhead can’t hurt)
- Sonarr/Radarr/SABnzbd
- Tdarr Server + Node to transcode new media in the background; this is mostly for space savings. I’m currently running the node on my gaming PC, but want the server to do this in the background 24/7
- overhead to do a little bit of tinkering and running smaller applications; I think, most of the load will be from Plex, Tdarr and the other *Arrs
- At least 6 SATA connections OR extra space for an adequate HBA card
- I want to connect 3-4 Drives and have the possibility of adding some later; Querstion: What drives would you recommend? At least 10GB per drive. Im currently looking at 3x WD Red Plus 10 TB (one as parity).
- 2 M.2 slots
- a dedicated cache drive (for IO) as well as a drive to put the VMs/Appdata onto; Question: Is this even needed, or would one (bigger) SSD be enough?
- dedicated GPUs for Plex/Tdarr hardware transcoding as well as gaming so I can assign each to the relevant VM (one will probably be windows)
- be future-proof so I don’t have to upgrade again in a few years
- adequate power consumption (assuming an idle state without active gaming or transcoding); I also want to reuse the 500W be quiet! Pure Power 11 CM I already got.
- fit in the Fractal Design Define R5
- 1GB ethernet
- be as quiet as possible
- I already got noctua case fans and will probably throw an NH-D15 on the CPU
I’m especially unsure regarding the choice of Motherboard, CPU and GPU(s). I looked at the X570 FTW WIFI ATX Motherboard with a Ryzen 5800X to get good, future proof processing power and all the features I need, but am absolutely unsure if thats overkill or not. As GPUs I chose two GTX 1660 Super (for now), because I found recommendations for this card for transcoding as well as playing current titles on medium to high settings. Here I’m unsure if it is overkill for transcoding and maybe a bit dated for current gen gaming.
If possible, the parts should be buyable new, as thats way easier for me, than hunting on the used market.
I would go with an intel cpu for the integrated gpu that can easily handle all the transcodes. 12th gen or greater i7 should be more than enough. GPU passthrough for gaming will be trickier. I’m guessing modern games at 1080p which will probably require something with >12gb for some light future-proofing. 6800/4070 class card would be my bet.
The Level1 forums are a great resource for just this kind of thing. https://forum.level1techs.com/c/hardware/build-a-pc/7
Do you think the gaming part will be difficult because of the VM and passthrough, or was that simply a comment on the hardware choice? I don’t really care about anti cheat or anything and thought GPU passthrough and some assigned cores won’t be a problem. But I also don’t have any experience with this kind of setup.
I don’t run it myself so most of my knowledge on the subject comes from videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO_8liPirns
Since you’ve had it running already with a 960, I don’t think you’ll have any issues. And if you’re running the igpu for the host processes/transcodes with the dedicated gpu for gaming, that eliminates any possible issues from having to use a single gpu for everything. Also, I wonder if using the dedicated card for the vm avoids the issues that could pop up from running nvidia in linux.
One thing I forgot to mention, you’re going to need a new psu especially to power the higher class card. 500W might be enough for the lower tier and a much more power efficient processor but you’ll be trading some flexibility which isn’t worth it imho.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=HO_8liPirns
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Running gaming in a vm isn’t so much a problem either pass through as it is cheat detection may notice and flag you.
GPU passthrough using Nvidia cards might be a bit tricky. With older cards they would error out when being passed, although this may be different these days.
