Glad I could help!

Double check the specific motherboard specs too, even though Z790 has more lanes, some boards may only have 1 x16 slot still.

The GTX 1650 I think is limited to 2 or 4 transcodes by nvidia, as far as I’ve heard the Intel iGPUs since 7th gen can handle up to 20 1080p transcodes, or around 5 4k transcodes.

I think you’re off by 8 on your PCIe bandwidth due to conversion between bytes and bits, PCIe 3.0 x1 can do 1GB/s or 8Gb/s half-duplex, 16Gbps full-duplex. PCIe 3.0 x4 is 32Gbps/64Gbps.

So the 10GbE card would be fine in the x4 slot (and pretty close to full speed in x1 even), and the SAS card in the x1 slot would get you 5 HDDs at full speed of 200MB/s each. Not sure how many HDDs you need to hook up though.

It also depends on the chipset, it looks like B760 maybe supports PCIe 4.0 on all the slots, so double the bandwidth for the x4 and x1 slots vs PCIe 3.0. The higher end Z790 chipsets have even more PCIe 4.0 lanes: https://www.gizmowind.com/b760-vs-z790/

Plus keep in mind the other reason the PCIe slots might seem limited is the onboard M.2 slots are using PCIe lanes as well, vs using an addon card in a PCIe x16 slot. Some of the Z790 boards have 4x onboard M.2 NVMe slots.

Fair enough haha

You could combine the scratch disk and OS drives into a pair of mirrored M.2 drives. That’s what I do on my setup!

The downside I see to the Epyc 7371 is poor single thread performance, only about 15% better than the E5-2687W v2. I have the E5-2667 v2 CPU in my server and it really struggles at running servers for Minecraft, Enshrouded, Arma 3, etc…

Also worth a look at the i7-14700k, it has 20 cores and 28 threads and absolutely blows the Epyc and Xeon out of the water.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5719vs5720vs3387/Intel-i7-14700K-vs-Intel-i5-14600K-vs-AMD-EPYC-7371

Personally I’m probably going to do a build with the i3-14100 to replace my Xeon v2, I want less power usage and more single thread performance.

Is there a reason you’re attached to 16 cores? A modern mid to high range CPU will have about 2x the single thread performance, so even with a downgrade in core count it would still be substantially faster overall.

For example an i5-14600K has 14 cores, with 3x the total performance and 2x the single thread performance, and it’s a $160 CPU that also has an iGPU that has really good transcoding ability, and can run openvino for stuff like object detection on Frigate or ML search on images in Immich, so no external GPU needed either.

A setup with a 14600k would also idle at probably 20W (with no PCIe cards or HDDs), so a huge power savings over any enterprise server gear.

Plus even cheaper motherboards will often have 2+ NVMe slots, so you probably won’t need an addon card for those, on top of no extra GPU, leaving you with only the 10GbE and SAS cards.

Personally I’d say since you’ll be transcoding and stuff I would not go with an AMD CPU.

Its a feature! If you’re on public WiFi or something it’s handy to be able to route your DNS securely somewhere else.

Make sure your devices/browsers don’t have “private DNS” or “secure DNS” or something like that enabled, it will bypass your DNS server.