So I’ve been googling to find out what to buy for a jellyfin/game server and the problem is almost all posts are about buying hardware in the US or EU. I checked the second hand market and it SUCKS around here, like 10 year old+ CPUs being sold as ‘intel i7’ for stupid prices.

I’ve decided to buy new stuff, at least I get warranty. When I searched around for info on that I also got a lot of useless (for me) advice like buying mini pcs that are either not available around here or very expensive. Basically I think I just need to build something myself using non server hardware, is that a bad idea?

What I have in mind right now, please tell me if there is anything that will cause issues later:

  • i5-12400 (mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin’s hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)

  • No idea what to get for MB, I usually buy AMD. H610 boards seem cheap enough but very limited on storage options (sometimes only a single pcie slot even), I do want to eventually add lots of storage to it.

  • Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying. Was think about getting some WD blue 2tb drives, but really not sure here either.

  • For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays but sadly I couldnt find any to buy in my country, will probably get whatever cheap one I can find.

  • PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand but its been hard to find 500W or lower here, usually shops only offer brand PSUs that are 650W+.

  • 16gb of any decent ram I suppose?

Btw I live in Brazil, if you feel like searching around even tho the websites are in portuguese:
www.kabum.com.br
www.pichau.com.br
www.terabyteshop.com.br

Any help is appreciated, its gonna be my first server so I have no idea what I’m doing

  • Dran@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Generally power supplies are the most electrically efficient at 20-60% utilization, so there’s no issue with over-provisioning power, other than the (generally minor) upfront extra cost, which might very well pay for itself in the first months/years of usage. I’ll take a look and see what I can find on those sites.

    Edit: okay, trying to shop through google translate / currency calculator is actually aids so I’m gonna teach a man to fish instead. This is what I should have done from the start anyway.

    Power supply: Anything from a decent brand, at basically anything >450W. a 650W or 850W is totally fine if it’s at a decent price. They only draw the power they need, they don’t just constantly pull 850W if the downstream components aren’t calling for it.

    CPU: 12400 is a fine cpu for what you’re doing. You’ll transcode at 720p no problem, 1080p maybe a single stream in real-time. I wouldn’t bank on more than that. Only downsides here are the relatively shallow core counts if you ever expanded into other workloads. Without access to used xeon boards/cpus, it might be a reasonable choice though. What I would say is look for something older but with more cores/threads if you can. For example, a 10900 or even 10700k would probably be a better server cpu than a 12400.

    Memory: DDR4 platforms are a great way to save money, as long as you aren’t planning on expanding to inferencing on cpu. Get as much as you can. 32-64gb of ddr4 should be dirt cheap, especially if you find a cheap motherboard with 4 memory sockets.

    Motherboard: If you want this thing to be versatile, you want 2x pci-e slots. Old gaming full-sized ATX boards are the way to go here. 1 slot for an HBA, 1 slot for a GPU, and that should be all you need. Bonus for as many open sata sockets as possible. 6-8 is pretty typical on 10th-12th gen gaming ATX boards.

    GPU: gpus will be much more efficient at transcoding than an igpu, especially from older intel CPUs. A 1050, 2060, 3050, basically anything from the 10-series onward has a decent nvenc encoder that would work well with plex/jellyfin. My goto is generally old workstation cards, I use a p620 myself and it handles a single 4k encode job no problem. I’m not sure if they’re viably purchasable anywhere in your area, but I’d definitely look out for a P620, P1000, or T400. Great value in those cards.

    Drives/HBA: there are inexpensive LSI HBA cards to expand how many drives you can attach to a system if you need them, all you need is a spare pci-e slot and a place to physically mount the drives. The cheapest way to start here is to look for a motherboard with 4-6 sata slots and use those. Hardware raid is functionally dead these days in the real world, just use zfs or mdadm under linux to create an array with your desired level of resiliency/capacity.

    Once you’ve priced out what it would cost to buy all of this new, look for prebuilt gaming PCs and office PCs that might be able to be expanded to fit these requirements. Prices look kind of steep on those markets you listed, but I’m sure something exists if you look hard enough.

    • prembil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 hours ago

      Let me expand on that.

      there is a really nice wiki article about intel hw encoding with color table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardware_decoding_and_encoding

      1.1. the color does not show in dark mode on mobile

      1.2. Your CPU is under the Alder Lake, so HEVC 12b encode/decode and AV1 decoding. This means you can encode big things into HEVC 12b to save space and also play back AV1 without issues in the future.

      my setup and experience

      2.1. I have an i5-8400 so I encode everything too big into HEVC 10b. I sometimes watch with 4 other people, so i had to tweak the config a lot to make it work fine when 5 people are watching at once. From my experience, the jelly sometimes just puts everything into decoding the first stream while others just wait. I recommend just setting only 1 core per stream and only like 300s transcoder buffer.

      2.2. playback devices do a lot, when using firefox, everything has to be transcoded except h264

      on chrome, it usually just remuxes (mkv container is converted into something more compatible) easy on resources

      when playing using a jellyfin client, it is played directly

      dedicated GPU

      3.1. I disagree with the dedicated GPU recommendation as long as you tweak the settings, you’ll be fine.

      Test iGPU first, play around with it, see how many streams at once you actually have to serve.

      The dedicated GPU is an extra investment for a start and a constant power consumer for later.

      • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 hours ago

        yeah, dont think the dedicated GPU will be necessary, most posts Ive seen clain that intel’s igpu can handle multiple 4k streams, tho I could try to find a cpu with the 770 instead of the 730? Not sure how much of a diff it would make tho

        • prembil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 hours ago

          My guess is the 770 would be a bit better. Could not find anything that could compare the two based on video performance and not strictly on gaming/rendering. So my opinion is not to care about it too much.

      • Dran@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        I’m with you that he doesn’t strictly need a gpu, but if the price is right (free from old gaming PC, cheap from a friend’s old gaming PC, cheap old workstation card, etc) I stand by that he probably wants one. A lot less fussy, a lot more capable, nad nvenc does better quality encoding at lower bitrates (and probably less power too if you take into account time spent encoding at full tilt.)