Didn’t see it mentioned, but would recommend openmediavault. It runs on headless debian and is very stable.

Check out refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad TinyPCs. Small, quiet and durable.

my i7 3700k with 8gb of ddr3 handles multiple 4k streams just fine. it doesn’t transcode on the fly super well, I transcode everything to hevc before putting it on the server. it will happily transcode a single 4k stream in the rare case a client doesn’t want hevc.

point is, don’t target latest gen simply because it’s latest. 12th gen is definitely newer than I’d opt for, and while 16gb is cool, 32 is absolutely overkill for the use cases you listed (other than the llm, which others properly list as “don’t worry about it unless you have 3k in your back pocket to shell on gpus”)

The cheapest PCs are ones that didn’t make the cut for Windows 11, so I’d look for 6th or 7th Gen. RAM is cheaper as well. Then you can build something cheap, and iterate from there.

For a beginner, check out Unraid. It’ll do 99% of what you want without being a hassle.

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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

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Strongly recommend looking into Proxmox hypervisor as your base OS. Then install as many Linux VMs/LXCs as you like, with backups/snapshots all taken care for you. I’m on an Intel 8th gen CPU and have 3-4 VMs running, including Jellyfin, Home Assistant OS, an assortment of random docker images and a dedicated headless Debian VM for various AI projects. The CPU is more than enough, your 12th gen target will breeze through it. Get more RAM than you think you need - it will become the bottleneck for what you can do, not your CPU. I’m running 64GB and don’t regret it!

For video encoding/decoding like Jellyfin/Frigate, make sure you stick with Intel CPU for hardware codec support via QuickSync, otherwise you’ll need to add a GPU.

For distro I’d recommend God’s Chosen Stock Debian. You want prioritize smooth upgrade paths from one major version to another since the server should last a long ass time, and Debian is that. Debian has the eyes on it to make it chill and if there are things to do they’re caught and noted (and more often something is set up to just do it for you).

So no, distro doesn’t matter as long as you can get your software going. But you’re not going to beat the insane stability of Debian. Any OS based on it is just an echo, which may even involve custom kernels which add more work for the specific distro maintainers and may slow critical security updates.

I run no GUI but you can def have one. I just SSH in. I do everything in containers (Docker 1st and I’m moving to Podman - but Podman is too heavy a lift to start, Docker compose files are always right there, use em) and LXC containers run by Incus (it has a web gui as well!).

I’ve been looking at “games on whales” https://games-on-whales.github.io/ to stream games from a beefy server to weaker computers and tablets. Might be a good route for your games without having to directly game on the server.

I have a 4 core 7th gen Intel CPU and it seems fine with doing x265 transcoding on multiple streams, but I’ve never tried finding out how many 4K ones it can do at once. I have 32 GB of RAM (I bought cheapo laptop RAM before the true AI shitshow, praise be, stuck them in with a DIMM board cooked up by China). I had 16 before that, and it was fine. But I just kept adding services.

An LLM will eat your RAM, you’d want 32 GB to be able to run a 16 GB one. But a GPU will be much, much faster. LLMs are just matrix math - that’s why they’ll never be able to think for real - and GPUs are sicko good at that kinda math (cause screens are a matrix!). I don’t fuck with LLMs though, no ethics in that whole shitshow.

Good luck!

Anything slightly better than a potato will run all of that except the llm’s. To have a useful llm you need to spend circa £1k on a GPU and even then it won’t come close to Claude or chatgpt. Skip the llm’s for now. Just get yourself a solid little server to do everything else you need. Add dedicated hardware specifically for llm’s in future if you really want to. An old used gaming pc will be plenty for your server. I personally use Debian , but there are loads of suitable options available

I’d always recommend not spending any money until you know what you really want and even then use any spares/old stuff you already have. The first build should be a true “budget build” :D

12th Gen is definitively neat, but overkill for what you are doing. 8th or 9th gen is fine. 16gigs is fine, 8gig would also work

I really like the Lenovo m720q line of mini pcs (used/refurb) but they will not fit an hdd.

/edit: I mean an 3,5” HDD. They will fit one 2,5” HDD fine.

Just one thing that could be easy to forget. Power usage. Cost adds up as the hours and days pass :)

It isn’t nearly as much fun a building a dedicated server, (or what I like to do – repurpose old junk) but the services you mentioned will run just fine on a decent desktop or laptop, especially if you aren’t doing some hungry task while they are running. -1 for Plex. +1 for Jellyfin. You can run them all on your LAN and access them around the house by the machine’s LAN IP and the services’ port number. You can do the same thing if you have tailscale on your phone or other remote computer, just use the tailscale IP and the service’s port. You can use Nginx Proxy Manager to send your services through a cloudflared tunnel to a hostname you buy, and keep access limited to just yourself and a select few (FYI I hear Cloudflared doesn’t like a lot of video streaming, so don’t give access to too many folks).

Jellyfin will run on a windows machine without screwing with docker, and will host your music too, though the UI isn’t great.

You can use a simple fileserver on windows to host other stuff like pics.

Just start somewhere and you’ll be neck-deep before you know it. You can use

Wonder what this bot is farming for