[Swlug] Dual system case or......

[David Maydew]

Hi Matt,
My budget is about £300 for CPU, Mono and RAM. Yeah tell me about it, my
mate of 42 years back in Walsall sent it over to me about 4 years ago!
I've just reinstalled the main server with Ubuntu 24.04LTS and setup Ubuntu
Pro so it's covered for 10 years or till the OS drive gives up!
I decided not to go down the Docker route with Plex, I think I must be
getting old.
It's only going to be used for Plex and Tautulli, the latter gives me
better view of what everyone is watching and it sends an email out once a
week to everyone using Plex to show them what's on etc.
So my second machine, I'll use what the current Plex machine is using once
I've upgraded that, recycle and cut costs (Dad of 2 youngsters at 50, I
started late in life!) that one I'm thinking of setting up some form of
self hosting especially for photos etc. Plus set up a Minecraft server,
then my kids can invite friends in to build whatever they wish. I did try
Minecraft server on my late Dad's PC an old i3 Acer affair, of which my 6
year old daughter has half lynched and got me to install a fresh copy of
Ubuntu and create a retro gaming PC for her, kids eh?
So, is £300 an ok budget for updating this i7 3770 to stone form of machine
that'll still have the Quadro k2200 as fall back for some not all
transcoding and it seems I can set Plex up to auto decide which device to
transcode with, if it works? I don't have any 4k stuff, all mainly 720p and
1080p and my internet is full Gigabit like my network, the only devices
that are WiFi are Roku devices and 2 Xbox One consoles.

I'm upgrading the server for the kids mainly, and the motherboard will have
to have 6 SATA ports, and I can then add extra drives when needed (sooner
the way the family keep asking for new stuff added to the server!)

Cheers

Dave

"Message sent using a Honor 90 Lite Powered by Android"

On Fri, 9 May 2025, 20:52 Matt Moore via Swlug, <swlug at mailman.lug.org.uk>
wrote:

>
> On 06/05/2025 22:31, Dave via Swlug wrote:
> > Hi all!
> > I'm going to be on the market soon for new/used gear for my Plex
> > Server, and was wondering if any other members could throw some input?
> > I was originally looking at downsizing the case it is currently in
> > which is a MozartTx beast, and it currently houses 2 servers in the
> > case, the main Plex server is am ageing i7 3770 with 16Gb RAM and a
> > Quadro k2200 GPU, and the second (currently not used server) i3 3240T,
> > 8Gb RAM and 1Tb Drive.
> > My original idea was to get a new case which can house a 5 bay Icy Box,
> > and havw spacw to add more drives as I fill the current 5 up.
> >
> > The other idea is to just upgrade what I currently have with a later i7
> > say the 7700 or 8800 with 16 or 32Gb DDR4 RAM, especially as eBay is
> > getting an influx of older parts as users rush to attempt to upgrade
> > their perfectly good CPU etc for Windows 11.
> > So what are others thoughts on which direction to take.
> >
> > Cheers in advance.....
>
>
> Hi Dave,
>
> Here's a few random thoughts based my experience.  You've not really
> given a budget or anything like that, so I'm just going to throw out
> some idea.
>
> I did look into your current case, which I'd never heard of. It's a
> pretty cool and pretty bonkers beast.  Upgrading that, assuming you're
> happy with it taking up a lot of space, would be a sensible way
> forward.  Less hassle.  No massive case to get rid of.  As you rightly
> note, there's often cheap stuff up on ebay or similar.
>
> My current home server is a mini-ITX based system with a reasonable
> amount of fancy bits, eg IPMI, 10gb network and some other bits.  I
> actually got a new case to replace my current mini-ITX case.  Turns out
> that cases haven't changed much (whoda thunk?) and my previous case was
> actually perfect for my needs.  I really like using a mini-ITX server as
> it doesn't take up much space and they're generally pretty low power.
> mATX might also be fine, but is a chunk bigger.
>
> Final option, which is a bit left field, but I really like would be to
> put together a k8s cluster with some kind of sbc.  The obvious and easy
> one would probably be to use raspberry pis. There's lots of guides and
> lots of cases and the like for it. I've done one with rpis and it's a
> great home server.  It's fairly cheap, low power and you can easily add
> more power by just buying a new node.
>
> Hope that's some food for thought
>
> Cheers,
>
> Matt
>
>
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