Comment on When building a home server, could a used/cheap PC do the job?
hperrin@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Absolutely yes. It’s better to use an old PC for a home server, because upgrades are cheaper, parts are easier to find, troubleshooting is generally easier, they’re usually more energy efficient than an older dedicated server, and you’re saving an old pc from becoming e-waste.
That being said, what you want to run on it determines how old/cheap of a PC could work for you.
Jellyfin works best when you can do hardware encoding, and these days that means throwing an ARC A310 in there and calling it a day. If you have a new enough processor, you don’t even need the graphics card.
Mastodon is pretty disk heavy, but if you’ve got a nice hard disk to put the Minio server on and an SSD for the db, you’re golden. That’s how I run port87.social. It’s running on an old 6th gen Intel i7. The PC I built in 2015 (with a few upgrades).
Basically unless you’re trying to run AI models on it, cheap hardware is fantastic for personal servers.
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org 2 months ago
Wondering if you have and insight on power usage with the a310 in the system while idling. I built a sub 25w server and don’t want to mess that up.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Sorry, but I don’t know. I use an A380 in my system. I got it before the A310 was available.
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org 2 months ago
How does the a380 impact your power consumption? If you have ever measured it.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I’d imagine not very much. I don’t know how to measure just the GPU. It doesn’t have any desktop installed, so it’s only ever rendering a console. It can transcode tons of 1080p streams at once, so even a transcode probably doesn’t draw much power. The CPU is the hungriest part, and that’s mostly idling too.