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If you are planning to use it as a jellyfin or other media server, look for 8th Gen or later Intel. They have Intel quicksync that provide hardware decoding.

I was worried about the power usage when I first started using my old gaming CPU for a home server (i7-4770k). I bought a kill-a-watt, ran it plugged into that for a month, saw that it was using pennies worth of energy per month and never worried about it again.

Unless you're pegging the CPU at 100%, it's not going to be pulling the full 65W. As far as maintenance fees go, the cost of replacing a single hard drive will likely overshadow your energy costs.

Pro tip: keep an eye out for hard drive deals on black fri. And I recommend doing a burn-in run on any new drives when you get them to push them past the initial failure window of the bathtub curve (I used badblocks. Took nearly a week for the initial run, but I found one bad drive and was able to RMA it immediately instead of finding out the hard way).

I built the server I’m using now over a decade ago, with much worse specs, for way more money.

This will last you a long while depending on your requirements.

What are the use cases? More RAM is nice but could be overkill if you're bottlenecked by CPU, and if this is for running a few simple VMs or as storage then you may not need much of this.

RAID is generally a good thing but don't get complacent, follow the 3-2-1 method. I.e. you might be better off saving the cash and using a backup script to push stuff you really care about to the cloud, and pay for cloud fees vice hw.

A more modern processor probably has better power efficiency. But this one should support features like turning off some of the cores or throttling down when not needed.

You could also see if you can get one with lower power consumption, like even the 6700T.

TDP doesn't have much to do with idle power draw, that's more based on the age of the CPU and specific type (standard, U, or T skus)

I'd buy a Dell Optiplex 5060 for about $200 off eBay and you'll get an i7-8700 with a 630 iGPU and the NVME taken care of. Then you just need the hard drives and more RAM. My home server is just fine with 16GB of RAM, though. There's no DE and I don't game on it.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

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Get a 10th/12th Gen processor so that you can transcode powerfully if you're intending to use jellyfin.

Depends on what you'll be using it for. If your use case is a simple NAS with shares , torrents and whatnot it is probably overkill and will waste way more power than required. If you plan to transcode video then it might not be .

Seems decent but depends on your usage. Memory could be a bit excessive unless you'll actually have a lot of simultaneous users. I'd also look into the features of the integrated graphics card. If you're doing some streaming a low cost GPU might give you better options for hardware decoding/encoding.

If RAID is what you're after, don't mind the premium for SSD storage and have available 5.25" bays, I highly recommend 5.25" mobile racks. The one I'm using is a a cheap 4 drive one, but if you want something more premium there is always ICY DOCK.

I didn't see anyone else say this, but 7200 rpm disks are way louder than 5400. Where my server is it would be annoying, but if it's in a closed room somewhere you'll be fine.

Also, these drives are probably not made to run 24/7/365. First 1 or 2 years or so it will probably be fine, but after you can expect some sudden dead drives.