Home Server build advice

[BetaTraps]

Budget (including currency): $1000-$1500

Country: United States

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Home server acting as media server / occasional game server / Windows VM for work (workload requires 32gb of ram on the VM) 

Other details : Hello everyone, My original dell r620 meet some unfortunate accident, so now I am wanting to build a server to replace it. Luckily all my main storage was on my synology nas so I didn't lose any data. The main functionality of the server will be primary a home media server running emby, a work Windows VM for software development, and the occasional game server (modded minecraft, valheim, ect.).  I am having problems picking out a cpu (should I go intel or amd and why), and what would be a good motherboard brand for servers.
 

Current Build Plan:
CPU: ?
GPU: NVIDIA Quadro P2000, or replaced with a 3070 ti when i replace my main card
RAM: 64gb+

Server Load:
Emby  (Content is primarly 1080p but would love if i can do some 4k some times)
Jellyfin (I run both as idk which I like but the one I am sticking with most is Emby)

Windows VM's (32 gb ram min)

Game Server (One at most at a time)
 - Minecraft (Vanilla or Modded)
 - Terraria
 - Velheim
 - Palworld
 - Space Engineers

Thanks for all the help and advice.

[johnt]

I've built a couple systems on the B660 and H770 motherboards with an i5 12400 cpu. There isn't a huge difference in the motherboard except how many full size PCIE slots you get, but they all run at x1 or x4, except for the first full size which runs at x16, of course. I went with ASUS boards and both of my servers have been rock solid. I've had no issues with anything I've thrown at it, except cpu transcoding AV1 media. And admittedly it can handle the transcoding, but it is pegged at 100% during the entire movie. I just avoid it.

 

Just my two cents. You can go with the newer processors, of course, but I don't know if you will see much improvement. Also, I strongly recommend the 12400 non-f version because it comes with an iGPU. The sku with an "f" at the end does not have integrated graphics.

[johnt]

Also, $1k is crazy money for a server using modern equipment. With that kind of a budget, you can easily get some extra hard drives if you wanted RAID in your server.

[BetaTraps]

31 minutes ago, johnt said:

I've built a couple systems on the B660 and H770 motherboards with an i5 12400 cpu. There isn't a huge difference in the motherboard except how many full size PCIE slots you get, but they all run at x1 or x4, except for the first full size which runs at x16, of course. I went with ASUS boards and both of my servers have been rock solid. I've had no issues with anything I've thrown at it, except cpu transcoding AV1 media. And admittedly it can handle the transcoding, but it is pegged at 100% during the entire movie. I just avoid it.

 

Just my two cents. You can go with the newer processors, of course, but I don't know if you will see much improvement. Also, I strongly recommend the 12400 non-f version because it comes with an iGPU. The sku with an "f" at the end does not have integrated graphics.

do I ever how to worry about the # of Performace and efficient cores when it comes to servers?

[manikyath]

with that budget you're sort of making a choice between newer desktop hardware, or older server hardware, that kind of depends on what your goals are.

6 minutes ago, BetaTraps said:

do I ever how to worry about the # of Performace and efficient cores when it comes to servers?

well, performance cores are what you'd want to use for the game servers, i've no idea on the windows VM's workload so that's up to you to figure out.

but i suppose the media server could sit on efficiency cores.

[johnt]

18 minutes ago, BetaTraps said:

do I ever how to worry about the # of Performace and efficient cores when it comes to servers?

The 12400 is very simple. All cores are "performance" cores with hyper threading; six cores, twelve threads. Just like the good old days lol

[BetaTraps]

1 hour ago, johnt said:

The 12400 is very simple. All cores are "performance" cores with hyper threading; six cores, twelve threads. Just like the good old days lol

how do the AMD chips fair compared to Intel?

[Bersella AI]

6 hours ago, BetaTraps said:

do I ever how to worry about the # of Performace and efficient cores when it comes to servers?

These would make little sense in vanilla Minecraft hosting. All you should care about is single-threaded performance: the faster one processor can boost, the smoother vanilla Minecraft will operate. Other games should also benefit from this.

Also, it would be ideal to grab a processor with an integrated GPU, so that it can make transcoding efficiently, allowing the Quadro be passed through to the Windows VM.

So my suggestions follow:

• Processor (budget): Core i5-12600K
• Processor (beefier): Core i5-13600K
• Motherboard: at least B760 with four DDR5 slots (supports up to 256 GB of RAM, compared to 128 GB with DDR4), or Z790 (supports overclocking)
• Storage: at least 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, for hypervisor, VMs, and games
• Storage: at least 8TB of hard drive(s), for media
• And adequate cooling for processor

[BetaTraps]

What OS do you guys recommend for a server? I used Unraid(I liked unraid on how easy it was to make Docker containers and manage them), and Proxmox(This one is interesting I like how minimal it is and Proxmox was my first introduction to LXC conainers), never tried truenas. What other options are there?

[Bersella AI]

On 6/30/2024 at 11:27 AM, BetaTraps said:

What OS do you guys recommend for a server? I used Unraid(I liked unraid on how easy it was to make Docker containers and manage them), and Proxmox(This one is interesting I like how minimal it is and Proxmox was my first introduction to LXC conainers), never tried truenas. What other options are there?

Technically, any generic Linux distribution should work well for a server, given that you were familiar with shell commands. In case of built-in web management, there are a few other options including Open Media Vault, Xpenology (NOT recommended for recent builds), as well as less-known CasaOS, Umbrel, etc. In this scenario, however, I would pick up Proxmox as the hypervisor, and virtualize Windows, media server and game server, to max out performance.