Budget (including currency): GB£300 for motherboard, CPU and RAM and PSU.
Country: UK
Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: TV Headend server with transcoding of video, plus streaming (DLNA) with transcoding
Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):
I'm about to build a new linux box for running TVHeadend, kitted with two TBS cards for DVB-S/S2 satellite reception (total of four tuners). Most of the time the box will be idle, and even when actively making a recording of radio or TV it won't be heavily loaded. However, if it starts streaming and simultaneously transcoding video, then the performance will spike, and a GPU will make a big difference - my existing * box has a 2nd gen core-i3 and intel quicksync reduced the transcode time to one third.
My first thought is to get the fairly new i3-10100 CPU which is much more powerful than the existing i3-2xxx, and should therefore be able to return to idle more quickly. But the base clock speed is still pretty fast, so I imagine it will still consume a decent amount of power when idling. Can I underclock? Would it be worth waiting for the forthcoming AMD 4300G or 4300GE to get a better GPU, the TDP on the GE is 35W, half that of the Intel.
Does the motherboard make much of a different for power efficiency? I would need to buy an ATX board to get sufficient PCIe slots to allow for future expansion, e.g. put in another DVB-S2 card and/or a DVB-T/T2 card for terrestrial TV.
If the machine idles at, say, 30W, that's GB£40 a year in electricity, and I intend to leave this running "forever", so it's worth spending extra for reliability and efficiency.
thanks for any ideas.
Paul
* existing frankenstein system was one built from bits my employer was throwing out: i3-2100, random RAM sticks that hadn't failed, a couple of HDDs in RAID1 because they'd been in use constantly for three years, a random case, and not particularly efficient PSU.