I’ve been planning out a proxmox server for when I eventually have money. (Shut up. It can happen. Shut up!) but I saw something today that got me thinking. Minisforums makes some pretty nice shit at a reasonable price. The entire minis market has actually become pretty great while I wasn’t looking.
I need proxmox hosting opnsense, frigate, jellyfin, homeassistant, BitTorrent, immich, sunshine, steam, and i2pd.
So there are obvious advantages to building my own shit with a trip to microcenter. But maybe these micro machines could actually handle this shit anymore. Opinions?
For Frigate you can just add a Coral TPU to offload the heavy lifting but with Jellyfin you’ll likely need a GPU/iGPU (Intel) that can handle transcoding. I don’t know what specific models you’re looking at but you might try to determine their passmark score. I think it’s recommended at least 2000 score for a single 1080p transcode. Alternatively you can stick to specific file formats that won’t need transcoding but this might be some work.
You could get a used Dell Optiplex micro. They have i3/i5 processors and can be found for around $100. This will at least get you going and you can always build something later.
I want to avoid Intel CPUs. I also don’t generally need transcoding for my setup but want the option and aside from Apple, Intel has the best encoders out there right now. AMD has better rendering GPUs but they have historically had absolutely terrible encoders. Nvidia is not getting my business. They can fuck right off.
That might really limit your options as Quicksync is pretty much the gold standard for efficiency and performance. A discrete GPU works too but you might have trouble finding them in a Chinese mini PC.
I used AMD for years (RX580) but it wasn’t always the best quality and having a separate GPU really sapped a lot more power. I don’t believe ARM processors are really optimized for transcoding either. Under the hood, Jellyfin, Emby, and Plex all use ffmpeg to do their transcoding so maybe you can research more about its performance with each platform.
Again, used is always an option. You’re not giving money to any of these companies by buying used parts and it sounds like this would get you more ‘horsepower’ from your budget than buying a bunch of new stuff.
I am thinking a Ryzen with lots of cores I just pin shit to and an Intel GPU for most things. Supposedly there is work going into SR-IOV support on battlemage but it’s not out yet. The 9000X Ryzen chips supposedly have iGPUs on them too so I wonder if I could throw them at frigate. The encoder just can’t be done on the CPU because AMD has by far the worst encoders, though I’ve heard the new AV1 encoders aren’t terrible.
I’m sorry but you’ll need the Intel cpu if you want jellyfin. You can’t control what devices your users will play the media from, and eventually transcoding will be needed. I think the amd field isn’t doing great just yet on this regard. Any old Intel cpu past the 8xxx series will have enough transcoding ooomph to handle a bunch of simultaneous transcodes, once set. But yeah you need to make sure you have acceleration for the transcodes.
Why do I need an Intel CPU if they sell Intel GPUs separately that have their own encode/decode engines?
Have a look at Patrick Kennedy’s reviews on yoochoob under ServeTheHome - there’s some fantastic hardware available now
I ended up buying something from AliExpress, which I was initially reluctant to do - but Patrick’s reviews convinced me
For detailed reviews his site’s got the details from the videos: https://www.servethehome.com/
just a heads up - with that many services running you might want to consider a backup power solution, especially for critical stuff like home assistant. i’ve found some great deals on portable power stations on gearscouts.com that can keep a mini pc running for hours during an outage (look for LFP batteries for best longevity).
I’m probably just going to do a UPS in the rack.
I run a beelink mini, not the weakest one, not the most powerful one, and it handles docker containers and VMs fine. I don’t have a tkn of integrated storage, but rather this machine handles apps while a separate NAS does all the file storage. Most I ever had running was 2 VMs and a handful of negligible docker containers but I still had plenty of ram and CPU to spare. I also think the minisforum stuff looks good. Their n5 pro nas just came out and would have made a good server with room to grow. I decided against it because I have parts and I want to use them :-) so the beelink is holding down the fort while I Frankenstein together a rig from my old gaming PC in a huge case that will host all my apps and less critical media. Home assistant which will stay on the beelink because it needs high availability. I’ve been curious how the lowest priced minisforum models would fare.
