Building a new server for my home; using it for Plex video serving, general service, and occasional heavy compute jobs. Here’s the parts list (PCPartPicker)
| Intel Core i5-12600K 3.7 GHz 10-Core Processor | $280 |
| Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition 42 CFM CPU Cooler | $50 |
| Asus PRIME B660M-A D4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard | $130 |
| G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory | $200 |
| Thermaltake Core V21 MicroATX Mini Tower Case | $70 |
| SeaSonic FOCUS Plus Platinum 750 W 80+ Modular Power Supply | $160 |
| SAMSUNG 980 PRO SSD with Heatsink 2TB | $260 |
| Assembly labor | $275 |
| Total (without tax and shipping) | $1400 |
The big choices here are the Alder Lake (12gen) i5-12600K with a B660 motherboard and the MicroATX form factor. I trusted Logical Increments for this. The Z690 is the other obvious consumer chipset but the main feature that offers is overclocking the CPU which I have no interest in doing. (The RAM is overclocked; DDR4’s official speeds are weirdly low.) It uses about 25W when idle (ie, almost all the time) and 160W under heavy CPU load. May push 200W if I stress the integrated GPU too. (Update Jan 2024: with Proxmox installed but still mostly idle it’s using about 48W. Not sure what it was using with the same workload before Proxmox intervened.)
Ended up being pricier than expected but this may literally be the last home server like this I ever build. I was holding out for an ARM system now but it’s just not quite there yet. (Also 25W idle is pretty impressive from Intel!) Could have saved $550 by screwing it together myself and reusing an old drive. I cratered and bought a new drive mostly because I realized I wanted to start with a fresh Linux install and hey, why not the new hotness.
I’m impressed with most of the components. The CPU, motherboard, and RAM all seem to do the job just fine. The power supply is very nice and quiet, although I did buy a bigger one than I really needed. mATX is a nice compromise between being slightly smaller and yet not weird or fiddly. The case I bought is the only disappointment. It’s too cheaply made, whole panels are replaced with mesh and there’s a lot of plastic. But it gets the job done.
The one thing I don’t have is some fancy GPU for machine learning work. I just don’t do enough of that now to make it make sense. Intel’s integrated UHD Graphics 770 GPU is pretty nice now; it’d certainly be fine for basic desktop work and seems to accelerate video transcoding pretty well. Not clear if it can be used with common machine learning packages, particularly not under Linux. Part of why I got the big power supply is I could add an NVidia GPU if I need it.
This server replaces the Linux server I built 10 years ago. That served me well, with small upgrades over time, but a few years ago it developed a failure where it’d lock up under load. I used a hardware watchdog for awhile but it was failing so often I couldn’t finish things.
The new system is about 4x faster on CPU jobs (ffmpeg without GPU) and theoretically 10x faster for disk I/O. 64 gigs of RAM is a bit silly but perfect for running today’s fashion of bloated containers and VMs.
Nelson's log 