Hardware upgrade recommendations

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨twinnie@feddit.uk⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

Hi. Sorry if this is a really generic question but I’m looking to upgrade my server and wondering if there’s some standout solution. I’m currently running an old Dell Poweredge T20 which has been fine but I’m running into issues with driver support because it’s all considered legacy now being nearly 10 years old. I wouldn’t mind upgrading the mobo, CPU and RAM but I really don’t need it to be too powerful. I’m just running Plex, Frigate, Home Assistant, and a few other small things. I need GPU for Frigate and I can’t get the onboard HD4600 on mine to work with Debian. I have a TPU for the AI stuff but I need support for videos rendering.

Are there any cheap mATX combos that are good and cheap, something like £100 and low power?

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

Bronzie@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’d probably go for a small N100 mini-PC.
Should be plenty powerful for what you need, very low wattage and relatively trivial to get GPU pass through in Proxmox. Alternatively one of the more powerful versions.

This depends on how many cameras, resolution and frequency of course, but you should be able to see if others with similar setups have it running smoothly. You’d be limited on storage, but can set up NFS to your NAS or existing server.

source
adarza@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
if you can’t get your haswell qsv to work (it does here, btw) and need to make a move…

at that budget (100gbp ~ 120eur ~ 125usd), your best play might be the cheapest, lowest wattage video card you can find that works with your software and supports at least the encoding you need (if not also newer formats).

you might find something like an alder lake n-series barebones mini pc or itx/matx board/cpu (might not be a ‘drop in’ swap in your t20) for something at least close what you’re looking to spend. anything else for 100 quid is probably gonna be surplus or used stuff you can find locally.

source
- twinnie@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  How’d you get Haswell working? I run vainfo and it complains that it can’t recognise the chip but I’ve followed everything on the Debian wiki. When I google the error all I get is people complaining about it being the result of a bug and the responses are usually from developers promising to look into it.
  
  source
- ms_lane@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Intel A310 would be pretty decent for this- ~$100usd and can encode h264/h265/AV1
  
  source
SuperZorro@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I recently bought a 32gb orange pi and a google coral. Not tried plex on it, but don’t think plex would support hw transcode if you need that. But it’s a really cool device.

source