harrisonbc Posted July 9, 2014 Share #1 Posted July 9, 2014 Hi, So I have a HP Microserver N54L with 6x3TB HDDs (4 internal, one in ODD bay and one external) running DSM 5.0 and have been very happy, except for one factor and that is the time taken to transcode my movies on Plex (which I use extensively), this is due to the CPU Maxing at 100%. I would therefore like to upgrade my hardware and was looking for suggestions for a platform with a significantly more powerful CPU. Do I go for a HP Microserver Gen 8, and upgrade the CPU, how many Drives can I have in this config? Or Do I go full custom and look for a small NAS box with ~6 3.5" Drives and a ITX Motherboard? Suggestions please The box will be in the living room so will have to be sufficiently quiet to gain SAF certification (Spousal Approval Factor) Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schnapps Posted July 9, 2014 Share #2 Posted July 9, 2014 Look at my signature. That mobo is pretty silent and has a low power (10W TDP) quad core CPU and passive cooling. The PSU and the rest of vents added to the case should be sikent I have now 3 coolers in my case. In total 30ish decibels. Pretty silent for a living room. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
berwhale Posted July 9, 2014 Share #3 Posted July 9, 2014 I considered building something with a similar specs to the Gen8 - I have an N36L G7 and I know just how slow transcoding can be! I found the following parts... Nice B85 mATX board with 6 SATA ports http://www.dabs.com/products/gigabyte-b ... -93LC.html Low power Haswell Celeron (35W TDP): http://www.watercoolinguk.co.uk/p/Intel ... 46058.html In the end, I decided that I have no real need to transcode, so why pay for the horsepower and electricity to power it? So, I decided to upgrade one of my HTPCs with a Gigabyte J1800 mobo and move the existing board into a new NAS (see sig.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dtran Posted July 10, 2014 Share #4 Posted July 10, 2014 Schnapps and berwhale, what are your idle power numbers? I'm patiently waiting for the new AMD Beema cpu (A8-6410) to come out to the market to replace my XPE rig with A8-3800 which is consuming 29W idle (HDD hibernated) and >50W full load (w/ plex and 2 HDD) in XPE. I don't think the idle power is optimized in XPE without proper driver to take advantage of the idle states. But the new Beema CPU looks to be really power efficient while having impressive benchmark (passmark=2367). The idle power is around 6W and 23W with full load (wow!): http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost ... stcount=36 http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... PU&id=2266 It's currently only in notebooks and mobile platforms but I'm hoping that it'll come to the traditional desktop platforms (AM1 ITX?). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schnapps Posted July 10, 2014 Share #5 Posted July 10, 2014 38w in full load with 4 HDDs I dont know for idle Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
berwhale Posted July 10, 2014 Share #6 Posted July 10, 2014 Sorry dtran, I've lost my power meter. I might buy another one soon as I'm interested to know the numbers as well! P.S. I looked into the Kabini APU/AM1 motherboard combo as an option for Xpenology. It didn't appear to offer anywhere like the power efficiency/peformance of the latest Intel CPUs. The fact that the AMD APU has a half decent GPU on-board is of no benefit here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schnapps Posted July 10, 2014 Share #7 Posted July 10, 2014 Unless you're doing GPU *coin mining ^^ )) Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
berwhale Posted July 10, 2014 Share #8 Posted July 10, 2014 Unless you're doing GPU *coin mining ^^ )) Surely everyone has moved to custom silicon by now? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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