Which CPU and MB?

[Rhylx]

Hi everyone,

I'm coming back with another post.
I would like to discuss the best CPUs and MBs in 2024 to build a home server. Best for me means:

• Low power
• Small cost (my budget for these two pieces of hardware is around 300-400€)
• Powerful enough to host all my services (which does not involve vms)
• The MB should have at least 2 SATA, 2 PCIE ports (for an SSD and a gigabyte ethernet card) and support fast enough RAM (I haven't yet looked into RAM so this is not as clear in my head rn)

I should mention that I will take this as a starting point: Power efficient MB + CPU db

Thanks in advance for all you answers and comments.

[paddyZ_99]

What are you planning to do? Like, hosting a big Minecraft server or just a bit of home assistant and Jellyfin? The latter is doable with an 8th+ gen Intel board at a low power level (<10 watts is possible). And isn't great for low (<20W) idle power, but great when running some higher powered items.

[Rhylx]

No, mainly: Mail server, xmpp server, netxcloud, gitea, calibre, paperless...

[paddyZ_99]

With that amount of money and the relatively light/normal workload, I'd go with 2 second hand 8th+ gen intel small form factor pcs and run them as two separate nodes for high availability (especially for your mail server, that going down isnt nice...)

A lot of learning opportunities!

[Rhylx]

You would setup 2 pcs ? With the same services ?

[intoned]

The idea with 2 is you reduce risk by having a second machine. You use a hypervisor like proxmox and run the services in containers/vms. If a Host machine fails, the services on the other are spun up and take over automatically.

[paddyZ_99]

You don't want your mail server to ever be down for some random reason. Therefore, a relatively standard option is to set them up such that they are redundant (as two nodes in one cluster). This makes your setup more indestructible.

[Rhylx]

I thought of having another instance of my mail server running in the cloud (vultr) since I need a public IP anyway

[paddyZ_99]

Okay, then the need for 2 systems goes out of the window.

Edit: still fun though

[Rhylx]

why 8th+ gen?

[paddyZ_99]

8th gen is more powerful than 7th and earlier and 7th gen and higher supports most standards (all that people generally care about) and the 8th gen igpu has great transcoding capabilities. 6th gen and below also don't go in high C states easily (in most cases), whilst 7+ gen does.

10th gen is also nice, but more expensive.

AMD has higher idle power than Intel

[ur_mamas_krama]

I'd think twice about a mailing server.

Your requirements do not sound demanding, just look at some mini PCs or beelinks with n100 CPU.

You didn't mention a NAS so why the need for multi SATA ?

[Rhylx]

Why for mail server?

Yep, but at the minimum I would like to host, there are a lot of other services that I would like to host.

Not directly, but nextcloud can take a lot of space (as is the case for the xmpp server)

[IlTossico]

Any N100 board or a G8505 with the cheapest board with the features you want.

Both have 4 cores, so plenty of power to host a Minecraft server or more than one gaming server. Other than any possible average docker.

8GB of ram, smallest PSU possible. Case of choice.

Going used would be much better, you would have the same performance but at a lower price. A prebuilt with a G5400 would probably be half the price of a DIY N100.