AMD Phenom II X4 965BE

[Goofyman23]

I'm thinking about dusting off my old 965 to try my first ever FreeNAS build however a few questions/ramblings. I'd need a new mobo as the current one is shot. The TDP of this thing is also high. Would it worth undervolting this and looking for an ECC capable mobo or better to look for an old Xein E3 setup?

This will be mainly used for Plex and a small backup site for personal data. Edit: the transcoding can happen on an Nvidia Shield if that changes anything.

Thanks!

 

[Chris Moore]

You might want to take a look at this parts list I put together. Total is about $550 without drives:

https://www.ixsystems.com/community...anges-to-upgrade-as-high-as-512gb-of-ram.110/

 

[Goofyman23]

You might want to take a look at this parts list I put together. Total is about $550 without drives:

https://www.ixsystems.com/community...anges-to-upgrade-as-high-as-512gb-of-ram.110/

Thanks for the parts list - I'll certainly entertain this however I'd like to leverage the parts I have now if possible. Do you think the 965 is not worth the energy (pun) to get it working?

 

[Chris Moore]

Do you think the 965 is not worth the energy (pun) to get it working?

Possibly, can you give greater detail on the hardware you have? I know that I moved off of older platforms because of the higher power consumption and greater heat, and the latest version of FreeNAS is more demanding than ever. Some folks are having a hard time getting it to run on older gear.

 

[file_haver]

My vote is set it up anyway and see what kind of power consumption you are getting during idle and minimal use since that will be the majority of what the server does. Plex transcoding to a single device isn't exactly prime95 so there is hope of acceptable power consumption. I am getting about 70 watts pulled from my NAS during Plex transcoding 1 video at 720 or 1080p from a pool of 2 mirrored disks which you can see the specs of in my signature.

I have previously run an ECC capable Freenas build and will do it again but as my server is mainly just a glorified plex server that i also dump all my old files onto and rarely ever touch again I was not worried about making use of the CPU I had pulled from a Dell I had swapped a Celeron into and non -ECC RAM i had. The motherboard i got very cheap so it all worked out well.


So i would say if you are seeing well above 70-80 watts during plex to one client then i would think about parting out the machine to get money towards something more energy efficient and ECC capable.