Aceticon

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.

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.

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.

The more services you have depending on a 3rd party which can do whatever the fuck they want, either directly or by changing the rules when the feel like it (i.e. not bound by rules they cannot change, such as root DNS providers are) and then doing it, the less your system is actually self-hosted, IMHO.

For me the whole point of self-hosting is exactly being as independent as possible of 3rd parties that can just fuck you up, be it on purpose (generally for $$$) or because they go bankrupt and close their services.

This is why I’ve actually chose to run Kodi on my home server that doubles down as TV Box even though I can’t easilly use it from anywhere else (it’s possible but it involves using a standalone database that is then shared, which can only be safelly down with custom ssh pipes) rather than something like Plex.

It’s kinda funny to see people into self-hosting still doing the kind of mistake I did almost 3 decades ago (fortunatelly in a professional environment) of trusting a 3rd party to the point of becoming dependent on them and later getting burned when they abused that trust, and which led me to avoid such situations like the plague ever since.

Mind you, I can understand if people for whom self-hosting is not driven by a desire to reduce vulnerability to the whims of 3rd parties (which includes reducing the risk of enshittification) and is instead driven by “waste not” (for example, bringing new life to old hardware rather than throwing it out) or by it being a fun challenge, don’t really care to be as independent as possible from such 3rd parties.