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Ryzen 5950x cpu, 64 gb ecc ram, dual 16 tb drives for zfs, Nvidia 5070 gpu.

Way way overspeced for what I listed, but I use it for lots of video processing, numerical simulations, and some local AI too.

I have a similar subset of this stuff running at my mom's house on a 16 GB ram Beelink minicomputer. With openvino frigate can still do fully local object detection on the security case, whish is sweet.

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I run similar (gitea, scrypted+ffmpeg instead of frigate, plex instead of jellyfin) plus some Minecraft servers, *arr stack, notes, dns, and my VM for development.

It's an i7-4790k from 12 years ago, it barely breaks a sweat most hours of the day.

It's not really that impressive, or (not to be a jerk) you've overestimated how expensive these services are to run.

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Video is usually offloaded too to the igpu on these. I have like 13 vms running on a AMD 3400g with 32gb
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Fair enough. How much RAM though?
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16GB would be plenty. I've got like a dozen services running on an 8GB i7-4970 and it's only using 5GB of RAM right now.
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If you're running ZFS, it's advisable to use more RAM. ZFS is a RAM hog. I'm using 32GB on my home server.
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32gb for me because half of that is given to the development VM
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Not impressive at all. I run just about as many services, plus several game servers, on a Ryzen 5, and most of the time CPU usage is in the low single digits. Most stuff is idle most of the time. Something like a Home Assistant instance used by a single household is basically costless to run in terms of CPU.
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Not costless in terms of RAM though, surely?
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Web apps like Home Assistant are very light, things like game servers are heavier since they have to load maps etc.
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You could easily run all of that on a rpi…
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No, you definitely can’t. Or at least, not 3B+. I wound up buying https://www.amazon.com/ACEMAGICIAN-M1-Computers-Computer-3-2... which was $50 less a month ago (!!) because so many things don’t fit well. Immich is amazing, but you wouldn’t get a lot of the coolness of it if you can’t run the ai bits, which are quite heavy.
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> Impressive that all that can run on one machine. Mind sharing the specs?

Not GP but I have lots of fun running VMs and lots of containers on an old HP Z440 workstation from 2014 or so. This thing has 64 GB of ECC RAM and costs next to nothing (a bit more now with RAM that went up). Thing is: it doesn't need to be on 24/7. I only power it up when I first need it during the day. 14 cores Xeon for lots of fun.

Only thing I haven't moved to it yet is Plex, which still runs on a very old HP Elitedesk NUC. Dunno if Plex (and/or Jellyfin) would work fine on an old Xeon: but I'll be trying soon.

Before that I had my VMs and containers on a core i7-6700K from 2015 IIRC. But at some point I just wanted ECC RAM so I bought a used Xeon workstation.

As someone commented: most services simply do not need that beefy of a machine. Especially not when you're strangled by a 1 Gbit/s Internet connection to the outside world anyway.

For compilation and overall raw power, my daily workstation is a more powerful machine. But for a homelab: old hardware is totally fine (especially if it's not on 24/7 and I really don't need access to my stuff when I sleep).

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Cheap to buy old hardware, but electricity to run those old rigs isn't really cheap in many areas now. My server is costing me about $100/month in electricity costs.

It does have 16 spinning disks in it, so I accept that I pay for the energy to keep them spinning 24/7, but I like the redundancy of RAID10, and I have two 8-disk arrays in the machine. And a Ryzen-7 5700G, 10gbit NIC, 16 port RAID card, and 96GB of RAM.

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It depends on the type of hardware that you use for your server. If it's really server grade you're totally right. For example cheap memory+CPU+MB x99 off AliExpress are cheap but they're not very efficient.

In my case I fell in love with the tiny/mini/micros and have a refurbish Lenovo m710q running 24/7 and only using 5W when idling. I know it doesn't support ECC memory or more than 8 threads, but for my use case is more than enough

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