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I seriously recommend the i3-8100 and the i3-8350 on the used market. They go for very little, "used" is not a scary word when it comes to a CPU. They are super easy to cool, there are tons of inexpensive systemboards you can get for litttle as well. The idle power usage is the same among nearly every model in a given series, so the power costs will be the same as the pentiums you mention. They have exceptional hardware transcoding with no driver fuss if you want to use that (it's amazing if you use it). And they have 4 honest to goodness fast intel cores for muscle when you want to do anthing locally. They also do not rely on turbo mode. Turbo mode may/may not function in xpenology, only base clocks and power saving modes. "Turbo boost is managed by intel_pstate scaling driver, which is not available with the 918+ kernel" The high base clock on the i3 models means they really kick ass compared to the lower end models and frankly some of the higher end models. I ran xpenology servers with i3-8100, i3-8350K, i5-8600k, i5-9600k, and even i9-9900k. The j5040 is not anywhere near as powerful as the others below as it is a pentium "silver" based on the atom core, not the skylake core. Also although it is 4 core, ignoring turbo mode it is only a 2.0GHz CPU consider these CPUs (What you will see without turbo) pentium 6400t 2 cores w HT 4MB cache 2.3/3.4GHz pentium 6400 2cores w HT 4MB cache 4.0GHz i3-8100t 4 cores 6MB cache 2.4/3.1GHz (bios set) i3-8100 4 cores 6MB cache 3.6GHz i3-8300t 4 cores 8MB cache 2.5/3.2GHz (bios set) i3-8300 4 cores 8MB cache 3.7GHz i3-8350K 4 cores 8MB cache 4.0GHz i5-8400t 6 cores 9MB cache 1.2/1.7GHz i5-8400 6 cores 9MB cache 2.8GHz i5-8500t 6 cores 9MB cache 2.1GHz i5-8500 6 cores 9MB cache 3.0GHz i5-8600t 6 cores 9MB cache 2.3GHz i5-8600 6 cores 9MB cache 3.1GHz i5-8600k 6 cores 9MB cache 3.6GHz Then consider that both single thread and multithread are important. In my mind the 8100 is a rock star because you can get them so cheap, say 40$ more that the 6400 used at times. The 8350K is also a standout becasue of the comparitive excellent single core and multi-core performance. The 8600K is the next model I like because the mulithreaded performance is enough over the i3-8350K to finally more than make up for the drop in single core performance. Don't make the mistake of thinking the low end models will save you appreciable money in power, they will not. Neither will the low power models. They don't burn less power to speak of. When you are looking at a nas from a power cost perspective, the most important thing to look at is the idle power usage. Once you add in the power saving script to shedule power savings, every single one of these CPU run at the same 800 MHz, have the same power gate tech, support the same power saving modes etc etc. They idle at the same power usage (or close enough that it doesnt matter) then you look at the relatively rare (for a nas) power burn when the CPU is busy. This is where the lower freq of the T models will burn less power over time. The important thing to remember is that in a NAS your CPU work is fixed, and your T models, being slower, spend a greater amount of time in the high burn mode. The regular CPUs are already back in idle mode while the low power CPU's are still in their high burn mode. So, while its not exactly the same, even when you need to do work, the over all power used is pretty darn closer than you would think when looking at TDP numbers. So, why chose the low power models? Because they are easier to cool. Use can use them in all sorts of places where the heat generated by a high power CPU would overheat or damage near by caps etc. In my opinion, T models are never worth looking at unless you can't use even a small heatsync and fan with at least some airflow. If Turbo mode works ( and the fact I see CPU rates at 36,000,001 means it might) things change a bit.