I’m looking to upgrade/replace my current home server, I’m running an old Dell precision T7500 with dual Xeon X5550’s that I picked up for free and it’s been doing everything I’ve needed so far but also eating a lot of power even at idle. I would really like to get the power draw down more than anything else but don’t want to sacrifice performance while doing so. I mainly use it as my Plex server and Adguard server on Unraid, but would like to start running a few more containers and maybe a couple of VM’s as well. Also all of my drives are 3.5” drives and I can’t afford to replace them as well. Looking to spend around $400 at most. Any suggestions?
Cheap second hand gaming set up/workstation will be more than powerful enough for your use case and shave off a lot of power at idle, aim for the newest CPU you can afford without investing too much into the GPU ideally
Pickup the cheapest HP Z440 you can find (~$120 for a barebones) grab a 12 core e5 2650 v4 for $5 and as many 16gb ddr4 ecc dimms as you wish for $12 each (all current eBay prices) it’ll idle under $100w running a few VM’s
I have 2 hp g800 sff i5 4th gen @3.4ghz a qnap nas for storage, 2 rpi 4 and an odroid m1 as a docker swarm for all my services a modem a router and my switch and I’m having around 100 watt usage for the whole cluster.
So i think an SFF pc will do the job fine and meet your power and computing requirements.