You may have seen my post trying to troubleshoot my server. It seems either the motherboard or CPU is dead, so hey, why not do an upgrade?
I use this server for a lot. It’s used for a Jellyfin server, sometimes multiple streams at once. I think I’d like hardware transcoding, I want it to be really good at streaming Jellyfin, and preferably multiple streams at once without issue.
It’s also going to be used for hosting Zusam, a kind of private forum for friends/family - a key thing is that this will also be transcoding videos and photos to downscale them (uses FFmpeg).
I also host Photoprism, which will be generating thumbnails and indexing photos.
In addition to this, I also host a bunch of other stuff, I think the key ones are Nextcloud AIO and PaperlessNGX (which does OCR) as these would be more demanding. Also the *arr stack. Then another 10 or so services that aren’t too demanding and have low usage so are unlikely to be an issue outside of making sure I have enough RAM.
I use it as a backup server as well. It receives borg backups from other devices and backs up itself to a backup HDD, and does cloud backups, but has a fast LAN connection and decent internet speed (300Mbps) and this is scheduled overnight so probably doesn’t affect anything.
I also use it for playing games with the kids! Normally Stardew Valley but sometimes more demanding games.
Many of the hosted services have family members also using them. I want to make sure I can do things like the Photoprism indexing and Zusam video downscaling while not affecting the experience using Jellyfin or other services. It’s all good if this happens by limiting cores for transcoding. It would be nice to be able to use it for more demanding gaming as well, but I understand if it’s a bit hard to keep everything going nicely with a demanding game running that doesn’t limit its multithreading.
Possibly related for compatibility purposes:
- all my hard drives are 3.5" HDD or 2.5" SSD SATA connections. I have 2 SSDs and 2 HDDs.
- I also have a Radeon rx5700xt graphics card. Would be nice to be able to keep using this.
- I’m currently running a full desktop environment (Linux Mint - Cinnamon) on it, for the purposes of playing the games. So needs to work well with Linux and also play nicely with wireless Xbone controllers.
- Case is Mid sized. Specifically this one.
And the current CPU is an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, in case you want to tell me what I have is fine and I don’t need an upgrade 🥲
What are some good options for an upgrade?
If you’re planning on upgrading the CPU, GPU and RAM, have you considered keeping the old stuff and running 2 systems, splitting the load so to say? Could do those random services and Nextcloud, photoprism (unsolicited suggestion - try Immich too!), the OCR thing, etc on the old one and keep the new one for gaming, your forum that needs transcoding, and Jellyfin?
Edit - Afterthought: your old system could then be headless too
The problem is either my mobo or CPU is dead, so I can’t run the old system haha.
It sounds like my old system could handle transcoding better if I had enabled the right options, so now I have to decide whether to buy a new motherboard and risk it being the CPU, or just upgrade everything.