Comment on Can anyone tell me what PC will draw more power?
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Question: does your home server Need to be powerful for what it does? Would a mini desktop PC or a single board computer be able to do the same job as your current setup? Of your main concern is truly power savings, consider those options. Most mini pcs maybe draw 60 watts, most laptops only draw around 15-20 watts, most SBCs only draw around 5 watts max.
The best way to increase energy savings on your currently owned server would be to upgrade your PSU and not motherboard. Get a gold rated PSU certified by energy star as it has at least 85% efficiency. Invest in a kill-a-watt measurement device that plugs into the outlet so you an see exactly how much wattage you are pulling and how much you manage to cut down.
spacemanspiffy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There are probably Mini PCs that would work for my load, but those would be higher end ones and I am not looking to spend money.
I run a lot on this machine. Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, TVHeadEnd, Mosquitto, Z2Mqtt, databases, file shares, pacman cache, a lot more that I am forgetting. Basically lots of IO going on at any point.
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I definitely understand not wanting to spend money, and dont have any more suggestions really hope the amd motherboard works out well for you if that’s what you decide on.
One thing I would like to say though, is that sometimes you need to spend money to make money. It cost maybe 80$ for a used mini PC on eBay (corporations literally throw them in the trash after every few years). Lets say your current setup consumes 10 dollars in energy per month to run, after a year its 120$ in energy in upkeep. Let’s say a mini PC cost 5$ in energy per month or 60$ per year. Meaning while you may have invested 80$ initially, its nearly made up for itself in power savings after only a year. And those numbers are probably even better in real life.
A raspberry pi 5 could almost certainly do most of the things you describe, and its also around 80$ (i think) its extremely fast and has great IO speed. Check out ExplainingComputers review of pi 5
Swarfega@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I run Plex, Jellyfin, nginx, nginx proxy manager, AdGuard, portainer, a flame startpage, nextcloud, unifi controller and Wireguard on a Pi4 4GB. I don’t really run into any CPU issues. Transcoding video on Jellyfin or Plex though is a no no though.
spacemanspiffy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I am skeptical that a Pi 5 could handle the load, especially for > 1 Jellyfin streams. Right now at idle my server is using a bit over 10gb or RAM.
That said, you raise some good points and I am reconsidering a bit. It may make sense to just move to something new rather than feel the need to upgrade again in 12 months.