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.

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.

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

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.