PC Build for Unraid Server

niggyg said:
I've been looking for a similar setup. The CPU you've gone for is the same as I'd arrived at. I'd read it consumes less at idle than the newer Core Ultra CPUs.
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Back when I looked into it a lot (around 10th gen), idle power is an enormous rabbit hole. The motherboard makes a huge difference with Intel CPUs, like 12th-14th gen was regarded as worse than previous gens (especially 8th-9th), except when paired with a low-power board like most ITX or Kontron K3843-B, then the idle power can be very low on these.

Reviews tend to distort things, because they inevitably use high-end boards with loads of ICs (TPU use a Z890 Hero for the 250K review, for example).

Overall, I'd say that unless you're going to specifically optimise for low-power and choose all the components (including board, PSU, drives, etc), it isn't worth picking a CPU based on their idle or lightly threaded power consumption, because any advantages will be redundant. E.g. just enabling EXPO/XMP alone with a Ryzen CPU, can often increase power consumption by some 15-25 watts, which would wipe out most of the savings on a low power CPU or motherboard.
 
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Thanks tetras, I naively thought this would be a straightforward task - seems like it isn’t going to be.

The other things I’ve stumbled across is current gen sometimes doesn’t play well with unraid until they have updated their drivers etc. assuming I’m buying new there is £100- £150 between cpu/ram and mobo combinations.
 
I would also add that depending on work loads, its sometimes better to have a higher clocking cpu that spools up and is able to do that task fast and then idles again compared to a cpu that is lower clocking taking more time at a higher state to do the job that is requested for it.

On things like Plex and some stuff that needs hardware accelearation its also worth looknig at IGPUs and what they can do as it might save on a GPU that will also use power just being attached. If your hosting your own pics and wanting to use something like immich and its hardware machine learning its worth looking into speeds and such for what you need/want in a GPU/IGPU

This also gos with other cards, eg having onboard nic that dos the speed you need might a better option then getting a NIC card that uses more power and takes a slot on the motherboard compared to whats native on the board.

It can become a deep rabbit hole of whats and ifs and costs to see what is best for you.
 
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Sorry. :)

I just did this for an ongoing server build, went AM4 with a 5650 g pro and some ECC 32gb ram as i got it all cheap (relatively) before 2nd hand prices went to pot, knowing what i do now i would have done it differently. I went this way as AM4 motherboards support ECC ram and the CPU has onbaord igpu for plex and immich fast enough for what i need.
 
Ha ha no problem, I think Intel is the way forward with DDR4 ram, it just which CPU to choose. I'll get there just need to think it through.
 
niggyg said:
I'm no further along than you.

Looking at second hand 13500 i5's and a Jonsbo case.

You could also save some and go with a lesser CPU that would still be good enough for Unraid. The 12/13/14100 or 12/13/14400.
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For completeness in case it helps you I settled the following got a couple of decent deals on 'as new products'
CPU: Intel Core i5-12500 3 GHz 6-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler
Motherboard: MSI PRO B760M-P DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory
Storage: Acer Predator GM7 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
Case: Fractal Design Node 804 MicroATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: be quiet! Power Zone 2 750 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

Thanks for all your help.
 
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jigger said:
Well it should run Unriad with 4 2tb drives and provide gigabit networking at least.
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I get the feeling you don’t approve. Appreciated your advice trying to source those older parts you suggested was turning into a nightmare.

I have 7 drives in total and the rest of network is only gigabit switches. If or when I change them I’ll look at network speed then.

Again I do appreciate the time you took on giving me some advice.
 
Jimbeam3678 said:
For completeness in case it helps you I settled the following got a couple of decent deals on 'as new products'
CPU: Intel Core i5-12500 3 GHz 6-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler
Motherboard: MSI PRO B760M-P DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory
Storage: Acer Predator GM7 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
Case: Fractal Design Node 804 MicroATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: be quiet! Power Zone 2 750 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

Thanks for all your help.
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Good choices I think. I'll be buying 2nd hand parts, and probably going for DDR4 too.

The motherboard is another minefield!
 
niggyg said:
Good choices I think. I'll be buying 2nd hand parts, and probably going for DDR4 too.

The motherboard is another minefield!
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Yes DDR4 motherboards aren't easy to find. Either massively overpriced, sold out of existing stock etc.

The CPU is overkill, however I managed to get it at just over £100 'used as new' so seemed daft not to get it.
 
Jimbeam3678 said:
I get the feeling you don’t approve. Appreciated your advice trying to source those older parts you suggested was turning into a nightmare.

I have 7 drives in total and the rest of network is only gigabit switches. If or when I change them I’ll look at network speed then.

Again I do appreciate the time you took on giving me some advice.
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It’s just such a strange configuration. Over spaced in some areas and lacking in important bits.
 
Jimbeam3678 said:
Go on.... Always happy to hear opinions, its a discussion forum after all :)
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The case isn’t great for keeping drives cool and lacks pull out drive bays.The case is decent in terms of capacity but not very well laid out but, the drive capacity of the case is made moot by motherboards lack of SATA expansion anyway. The motherboard isn’t well suited for your use case, or possibly uses. Aside from SATA, there is the single gigabit nic which even middle of the road single HDD could saturate anyway. Which brings us to the Gen 4 SSD. Again, this SSD is an odd selection. The capacity is either here nor there and it’s a pslc drive, so setup for busty transfers which means it’s endurance isn’t going to be great as you’re hitting same NAND repeatedly. The bursty capabilities of the SSD are moot anyway being limited to around 100mbs transfers over the network. The CPU will pull more power than needed and ultimately be sat doing very little unless you have other use cases. There are better CPU options for your described use cases, that are easily as fast for a quarter of the power. The CPU could be half decent for data creation/editing large databases if you wanted to use the system as more than just a NAS, but as the CPU and motherboard both lack error correction, any created/edited data is limited in uses and the lack ECC support also locks you out of Unraids biggest plus point, which is the ability of running a Z file system with RAID.
 
Hey thanks for replying. To add a bit more context to, I'll using it for Plex, Arr's, Home Assistant, Paperless.
  • The case reviews well in the Unraid forums, keep in mind my space is limited in my little office, so a proper rack is out of the question which would be utopia
  • Motherboard network port is fine as all my network switches and internal cables are 1 gigabit - although I have changed the mobo based on your feedback for better cooling. Ideally I would like a more feature rich one but wanting to stick to DDR4 limits my options as most are out of stock/EOL.
  • The SSD is going to be used for my Appdata, with an existing 2TB Kingston as my cache
  • CPU reviews well on Unraid forums and suggests overall will it use less power than my existing N100 CPU
  • I read up some more about ECC and decided against it as a conscious decision, I've used a physical backup and off premises backup.
 
Are you likly to need more hard drive space (as in number of drive spaces) or is it going to swap out to bigger drives if needed?
 
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