Comment on Home server
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
For anybody not doing generative AI with it and not running massive loads on it, if you’re going to use an old gaming PC as a home server, at least replace the graphics card with a cheap one with no fans or use the integrated graphics on your CPU (something I believe pretty much all consumer CPUs of the last two decades have) and underclock the CPU if you don’t need full power since even small reductions in clock speed can significantly reduce the maximum temperature.
or use the integrated graphics on your CPU (something I believe pretty much all consumer CPUs of the last two decades have)
many ryzen CPUs don’t have integrated graphics. I think it might have become baseline from just ryzen 6000? but plenty of very still good chips were released before that. I wouldn’t trade them for an intel.
underclock and undervolt
If I’m not mistake only hobbyist level motherboards let you control the voltages and if one knows enough to get one of those they probably don’t need the advice I gave.
Also it’s hard to end up with a non-working or unstable configuration with underclocking, whilst it’s pretty easy to do so with undervoltage.
That said, for those who know what they’re doing, your suggestion definitely delivers lowers temperatures than underclocking alone.
I posted specs and temps if you were curious 😊
The CPU usage looks high, mines usually around 3% per core. 🤔
Yea it’s mobile. Away from home for a bit 😅
It’s in the middle of rencoding my library, should finish at some point and return to low usage
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago I want to point out that for a media server, OP’s GPU is excellent.
Sparkle ARC cards are the way to go for sure. The fans are a pain in the ass on Linux, though. They like to start and stop a lot.
I actually have a Mini-PC with an N100 CPU as media server and it uses very little CPU (less than 20%) whilst playing 1080p video even with a torrent server over a wireguard VPN running on the background.
You don’t really need much CPU or GPU for playing or streaming videos from compress video files as long as you have hardware decoding on either of them (just make sure it implements all the way up to the AV1 coded).
You only need lots of CPU or GPU power if the codec you’re decoding from or encoding to is not implemented in hardware since in that case it will use software decoding or encoding so it’s down to raw CPU or GPU power.
In fact if all you want is a media server that solution I have is probably one of the best ones, mainly because it uses very little power (tops at 25W, usually much less) and runs silent, which is why I can have it in my living room using it as a media player connected to my TV, and with a wireless remote people can’t really tell it’s a PC since it just looks and works like a store bought media player rather than one I put together myself.
However that option means buying new stuff, and I can see the value in using old hardware if you have it around, plus the old hardware will still likely be more powerful so you can also use it for more demanding stuff or just more stuff at the same time, which is why I didn’t suggest it and instead just suggested some tweaks to make that old hardware consume less and make less noise.
I thought so too, but turns out not all of the CPUs have onboard graphics and the HDMI port on my motherboard was a lie. Although the graphics card does help with transcoding.