High-performance home workstation/server build

[hussaink]

High-performance home server/workstation build

 

Hi everyone,

 

I am new to the forum and the whole PC building stuff, therefore excuse my novicehood!

 

First of all, do you think it is even a good idea to build a two-in-one home server and a high-performance workstation or am I better-off building two separate machines?

 

Below are details about what I have in mind for this build, I appreciate your recommendation in the question marks area or anywhere else for that matter.

 

Uses:

1. Fast NAS
2. Photo editing
3. Powerful Media server – 4K movies, Dolby ATMOS and DTS: X audio encoding
4. Media streaming over the home network
5. Maybe occasional AutoCAD and 3d Max

 

OS and Software:

1. UnRaid
2. Virtual Machines (Win10, maybe MacOS or Linux just for fun!!)
3. Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop
4. PLEX server

 

Hardware:

• CPU: Intel Xeon? iCore? or AMD EPYC? RYZEN?
• Motherboard: Supermicro? or ASUS? Model?
• RAM: Min 32Gb Brand? Reg ECC?
• Cache Disk: Min 512Gb PCIe? M.2? NVMe? SSD
• Storage: Min 12Tb - 3x 4Tb WD Red?
• GPU: ??
• Network: 10Gbit and WiFi
• Case: ??
• Cooling: ??
• Power Supply: ??
• Others: ??

 

Budget:

 

I am not sure what is a reasonable budget for the above? Is $2,000-$2,500 sound reasonable? Anyhow, I am a bit flexible as far as the budget concern.

 

 

Thanks in advance, and looking forward to your suggestions.

 

 

 

 

[MadOver]

Its hard to build one under that budget, but you would be pretty happy with this specs.

 

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/k7qhVY
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/k7qhVY/by_merchant/

CPU: AMD - Threadripper 1950X 3.4GHz 16-Core Processor  ($959.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Motherboard: Asus - PRIME X399-A EATX TR4 Motherboard  ($331.49 @ SuperBiiz) 
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  ($277.40 @ Newegg Marketplace) 
Storage: Samsung - 960 EVO 1TB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive  ($435.99 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Seagate - Barracuda 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($72.00 @ Newegg Marketplace) 
Video Card: Asus - GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Video Card  ($439.88 @ OutletPC) 
Case: Corsair - Air 540 ATX Mid Tower Case  ($119.99 @ Amazon) 
Power Supply: EVGA - SuperNOVA G3 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($67.98 @ Newegg) 
Wired Network Adapter: Asus - XG-C100C PCI-Express x4 100 Mbps/1 Gbps/10 Gbps Network Adapter  ($99.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $2804.71
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-11-02 07:16 EDT-0400

[Salacious B Crum]

By the sounds of your use case why not pick up a used server grade server and put your money into the drives and have at it you will have server grade equipment i.e. redundant PSU's single/dual CPU's and a motherboard with copious amounts of sata/sas ports one or more NIC's and ECC memory only drawback maybe noise as I've read a lot about that but I'm sure there's a fix for that

[AncientNerd]

1 hour ago, MadOver said:

Its hard to build one under that budget, but you would be pretty happy with this specs.

 

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/k7qhVY
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/k7qhVY/by_merchant/

CPU: AMD - Threadripper 1950X 3.4GHz 16-Core Processor  ($959.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Motherboard: Asus - PRIME X399-A EATX TR4 Motherboard  ($331.49 @ SuperBiiz) 
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  ($277.40 @ Newegg Marketplace) 
Storage: Samsung - 960 EVO 1TB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive  ($435.99 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Seagate - Barracuda 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($72.00 @ Newegg Marketplace) 
Video Card: Asus - GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Video Card  ($439.88 @ OutletPC) 
Case: Corsair - Air 540 ATX Mid Tower Case  ($119.99 @ Amazon) 
Power Supply: EVGA - SuperNOVA G3 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($67.98 @ Newegg) 
Wired Network Adapter: Asus - XG-C100C PCI-Express x4 100 Mbps/1 Gbps/10 Gbps Network Adapter  ($99.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $2804.71
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-11-02 07:16 EDT-0400

Okay several comments:

1) If you are only going for 32GB get 4 sticks TR works faster/better with quad channel.

2) For the OP use case 64GB is a better minimum target, VM and media server both eat memory like crazy, and trying to VM and media server at the same time on a machine that may also be running AutoCad or 3dMax sometimes? You want all the memory you can afford.

3) 4GB of drive space is probably not enough. Again VM and media server both eat drive space, heck I have 4GB on my desktop with no media server and I am almost half full just with video editing, writing, software development and database development, I moved my VM storage to backup because I don't have a machine to run VM on right now if I hadn't I would be full up.

4) unless the OP actually has a 10Gbps home network the network adapter can be an addon later, spend that $100 on more storage or more RAM.

5) I would go with a larger PSU, and maybe a larger case. You are going to be wanting lots of space for drive expansion in this thing, I would plan for multiple HDD and SSDs eventually. I would probably start with ~10GB of spinning storage and the 1GB of SSD that this suggests.

 

1 hour ago, mrbilky said:

By the sounds of your use case why not pick up a used server grade server and put your money into the drives and have at it you will have server grade equipment i.e. redundant PSU's single/dual CPU's and a motherboard with copious amounts of sata/sas ports one or more NIC's and ECC memory only drawback maybe noise as I've read a lot about that but I'm sure there's a fix for that

This is a possibility, it really depends on where/how the OP is going to use it. I have had used servers in the past and the real issue I have with them in a home environment is noise, I had my server in a closed off, insulated room in the basement away from everything else and I could still hear it in the living space of the house. In the basement it sounded like a heavy duty fan running all the time - because it was. It was nice to have the storage and processing speed (for the time), but the noise eventually became not worth it and I moved everything expect the VM usage off to other machines that were less noise/power intensive (and dropped my electric bill by a measurable amount - it was eating power as well as being loud). Servers are great for what they do - but they are not home machines.  

[brob]

@hussaink

 

I would suggest two separate machines if there is any chance that 4k transcoding will occur at the same time as photo editing and the like.

 

Twelve TB of usable storage requires more than 12TB of hdd if any sort of error protection is desired.

 

The budget is on the low side. Transcoding 4K media is pretty cpu intensive and large capacity hdd add up (~350/10TB).

 

The media server requires more data before a decent build can be developed. In particular, how many concurrent streams are likely, at what resolution, how many will likely need transcoding.

 

The workstation side of things is pretty straight forward, see the build list below for an example.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel - Core i7-8700 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor  ($339.99 @ B&H) 
CPU Cooler: CRYORIG - H7 49.0 CFM CPU Cooler  ($34.89 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: Asus - ROG Strix Z370-I Gaming Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($184.89 @ OutletPC) 
Memory: G.Skill - Trident Z 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory  ($349.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Samsung - 850 EVO-Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($298.89 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: EVGA - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB SC GAMING Video Card  ($269.49 @ OutletPC) 
Case: Fractal Design - Define Nano S Mini ITX Desktop Case  ($54.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic - FOCUS Plus Gold 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($79.59 @ SuperBiiz) 
Total: $1612.72
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-11-02 10:27 EDT-0400

[Tom Cat]

I would recommend threadripper it's a great workstation chip  

[brob]

3 minutes ago, Douglas The Duck said:

I would recommend threadripper it's a great workstation chip  

Doesn't do so well in Photoshop. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2017-1-1-CPU-Comparison-Skylake-X-vs-Threadripper-1016/

 

It would be good serving 4k transcoded media.

[Tom Cat]

1 minute ago, brob said:

Doesn't do so well in Photoshop. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2017-1-1-CPU-Comparison-Skylake-X-vs-Threadripper-1016/

 

It would be good serving 4k transcoded media.

Never knew that the more you know I guess 

[hussaink]

 

@MadOver @mrbilky @AncientNerd @brob @Douglas The Duck

 

Thank you all for the feedback and recommendations, gotta do some serious thinking, meanwhile more options and recommendations are welcome.

 

Thanks again.

[AncientNerd]

On 11/2/2017 at 8:49 AM, AncientNerd said:

You are going to be wanting lots of space for drive expansion in this thing, I would plan for multiple HDD and SSDs eventually. I would probably start with ~10GB of spinning storage and the 1GB of SSD that this suggests.

Right I just noticed that I somehow transported myself far far into the past, I meant to say 1TB of SSD and 10TB of spinning storage minimum...but somehow my fingers were stuck in the 1990's.