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?
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?
You can find used Thinkcenters pretty cheap with AMD CPUs. I recently got an M75s Gen2 with a Ryzen 3 4350G for around $100.