Upgrade suggestions
Upgrade suggestions
I’m looking to upgrade/replace my current home server, I’m running an old Dell precision T7500 with dual Xeon X5550’s that I picked up for free and it’s been doing everything I’ve needed so far but also eating a lot of power even at idle. I would really like to get the power draw down more than anything else but don’t want to sacrifice performance while doing so. I mainly use it as my Plex server and Adguard server on Unraid, but would like to start running a few more containers and maybe a couple of VM’s as well. Also all of my drives are 3.5” drives and I can’t afford to replace them as well. Looking to spend around $400 at most. Any suggestions?
G9 hps or 13th gen poweredges are a nice sweet spot in hl pricing. G10s and 14s and up are going to be around 1K starting because of the cpus and they are still pretty new. Xeon E5 v4s are in a nice sweet spot for cpus and you can get a lot more use than what you have now.
1Pickup the cheapest HP Z440 you can find (~$120 for a barebones) grab a 12 core e5 2650 v4 for $5 and as many 16gb ddr4 ecc dimms as you wish for $12 each (all current eBay prices) it’ll idle under $100w running a few VM’s
1I have 2 hp g800 sff i5 4th gen @3.4ghz a qnap nas for storage, 2 rpi 4 and an odroid m1 as a docker swarm for all my services a modem a router and my switch and I’m having around 100 watt usage for the whole cluster.
So i think an SFF pc will do the job fine and meet your power and computing requirements.
1Cheap second hand gaming set up/workstation will be more than powerful enough for your use case and shave off a lot of power at idle, aim for the newest CPU you can afford without investing too much into the GPU ideally
1I would look into something of HP G9 or Dell R730/R630 range. These will be more power-efficient and you should find something within that price.
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