So I’ve been googling to find out what to buy for a jellyfin/game server and the problem is almost all posts are about buying hardware in the US or EU. I checked the second hand market and it SUCKS around here, like 10 year old+ CPUs being sold as ‘intel i7’ for stupid prices.
I’ve decided to buy new stuff, at least I get warranty. When I searched around for info on that I also got a lot of useless (for me) advice like buying mini pcs that are either not available around here or very expensive. Basically I think I just need to build something myself using non server hardware, is that a bad idea?
What I have in mind right now, please tell me if there is anything that will cause issues later:
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i5-12400 (mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin’s hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)
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No idea what to get for MB, I usually buy AMD. H610 boards seem cheap enough but very limited on storage options (sometimes only a single pcie slot even), I do want to eventually add lots of storage to it.
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Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying. Was think about getting some WD blue 2tb drives, but really not sure here either.
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For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays but sadly I couldnt find any to buy in my country, will probably get whatever cheap one I can find.
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PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand but its been hard to find 500W or lower here, usually shops only offer brand PSUs that are 650W+.
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16gb of any decent ram I suppose?
Btw I live in Brazil, if you feel like searching around even tho the websites are in portuguese:
www.kabum.com.br
www.pichau.com.br
www.terabyteshop.com.br
Any help is appreciated, its gonna be my first server so I have no idea what I’m doing
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Hi fellow Brazilian!
Yeah, second-hand here sucks. You can get x-99 mb + cpu combos on alliexpress for 400 reais though, old xeons are good for server/jellyfin, just not very efficient. For Jellyfin, my biggest money sink is in HDDs. 4tb drives are 700 reais each, and there’s no second-hand refurbished stuff in the market, so you have to buy brand-new. For a GPU I have an ancient 750ti, but I’m looking to buy an intel A310 card if they drop lower than 800 reais. At the very least you’re looking at 3000 reais in pc parts for a server though. Mb + cpu + ram is somewhat cheap if you buy from china through alliexpress, but GPUs are a no go there. Keep in mind that when buying from China you have to avoid products above 60 dollars (around 350 reais) because of the super high taxes. If you want to buy domestically, I’d recommend a b450 AM4 board + a 3200g or something around that. You can avoid buying a dedicated GPU with a 3200g or similar, and get a nice modern platform, but the cpu will be quite weak for game servers, with inadequate support for pcie lanes, memory channels and sata ports though.
Also, for a game server, it’s very likely that you’ll have to work around being behind CGNat. I currently only self host Jellyfin inside my own house because of that, it’s just a huge pain in the ass to deal with it. There are solutions though, I just haven’t bothered. I’m still in the process of buying hard drives, so right now it’s not a huge priority.
Edit 1: wording Edit 2: forgot to talk about psus… Just don’t buy anything chinese. The MSI Mag 650w is the king of cost x benefit here in Brazil, nothing comes close, it’s usually around 300 and rock solid.
Even products bellow 50 USD are getting the 50% tax now, and xeons dont have igpu, I prefer to buy an intel with igpu to do hardware encoding/decoding, more efficient and I heard it gets the job done really well (jellyfin says to absolutely not buy AMD APUs for hardware decoding btw). For hosting I actually have pots 80 and 443 open on my router so Ive been using caddy and duckdns with no issues.
Which hard drives have you bought btw?
Below 50usd the taxes are considerably lower, and just above 50 usd they get a 20 dollars rebate on taxes, so it’s okayish to buy.
I bought a seagate 4tb drive, cheapest 4tb at the time, on Amazon if I’m not mistaken.
Oh, you’re lucky then. NET/Claro locks down all their modens for consumers, and I know that most other ISPs around here do the same.
Nah, that was a few years ago, its 50% on every thing now, literally looking at the price on aliexpress as I write this, R$29 earphone with R$14 tax
You do know that above 50 USD taxes are 92% right? Check it out, a product for 1000 reais will have 900 reais in taxes. It’s bonkers. But technically, it has always been like this, but it wasn’t truly enforced/audited. Now that they are collecting the taxes at the point of sale, you pretty much pay for two products to buy one.
You may be overestimating your requirements a bit. For video, all you need is something with a transcoder and it could handle at least one stream. If this is just for you, it’ll be idle most of the time. As long as the hard drives have good reviews, it’ll be fine.
What you listed sounds good. I have my entire family’s files and photos (with some duplicates that i never removed) and it comes out to less than 1TB.
I think your idea sounds fine. An old PC will do fine.
I spent a few years living in a developing country in Africa so I have some appreciation of what you’re going through. I used to find lots of technology shops on Google Maps, etc, then when I got there they just sold phone covers and SIM cards and knock-off iPhones.
I can’t really offer much advice but have you considered just making something based on a second hand laptop? A lot of them are still pretty powerful just with old batteries and they’re designed to run efficiently.
a laptop would extremely limiting as far as storage goes, I prefer not having to add a NAS later. Thanks for the info tho
mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin’s hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)
My 4th gen Intel i5 can do that
No idea what to get for MB
You get the cheapest thing available with your socket that has at least 4 sata slots for migration
Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying.
Just get 2 WD blues
For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays
Or, you know, if you are making a whole post crying about your financial situation, maybe you can just move your ass and manually swap the HDDs.
PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand
If you want something energy efficient, why in gods name do you want to buy a desktop CPU?
16gb of any decent ram I suppose?
If you want to be fancy I guess, but my 25€ half dead optiplex that dosent even pass its own self test is currently running on 8 gigs of DDR 3 storage from different brands I got out of dumpsterdiving in a junkyard right before they threataned to call the police on me, and I live in goddamn Germany, so maybe make up your mind if you want to be crying about being poor or actively going out of your way to buy fancy Server Equipment I can only dream about in my setup.
Here in Panama a lot of people buy things online in the US and use freight forwarders, I don’t know how they do it but I never pay taxes on that stuff
Not an option, a friend sent me a box with a few snacks and even that got taxed
Bruh