February 25, 20242 yr There are some good deals on mini/sff pc's with Intel 7th/9th gen cpus, usually Core i5. Like the i5-7600, i5-8500 etc. Newer ones like 10th gen and newer are far more expensive. Are these good enough for general purpose use? Running a bunch of dockers for the usual purposes, and perhaps a few vm's. I'm guessing the main cpu use comes from VM since docker containers hardly use any cpu and will be idle most of the time, with disk bandwidth more of a limiting factor, correct? Also it seems like these cpu's will support hw 4k transcoding and encoding as well?
March 31, 20242 yr Yes they are fine. I've just downgraded to a HP prodesk with an i5 8500 in it and it runs VMs and docker like a champ
March 31, 20242 yr On 2/25/2024 at 9:09 AM, MrCrispy said: Are these good enough for general purpose use? Yes they are 👍
March 31, 20242 yr Author 1 hour ago, planetwilson said: Yes they are fine. I've just downgraded to a HP prodesk with an i5 8500 in it and it runs VMs and docker like a champ 53 minutes ago, Zonediver said: Yes they are 👍 Thank you. This cpu has 6 cores, 6 thread i.e no hyperthreading, does this affect vm's or how responsive it is? Will I be able to run a full Windows 11 desktop vm for general purpose use (no gaming)?
April 1, 20242 yr 2 hours ago, MrCrispy said: Thank you. This cpu has 6 cores, 6 thread i.e no hyperthreading, does this affect vm's or how responsive it is? Will I be able to run a full Windows 11 desktop vm for general purpose use (no gaming)? For VM's i would use an i7-9700 or better an i9-9900 👍
April 1, 20242 yr Author 10 hours ago, Zonediver said: For VM's i would use an i7-9700 or better an i9-9900 👍 those cost quite a bit more though.
April 1, 20242 yr I'm currently running an 8th gen i5-8400 (6 core, 6 thread) on an ITX motherboard. It's good for running 1-2 VM's (Home Assistant and AzuraCast) and ~15 containers. It's fine for now but I'm already looking to upgrade to this minisforum BD790i (16 core, 32 thread) in the future because adding more VM's uses too many resources.
April 1, 20242 yr This is a question that depends not on what you will be running, but how you are running the applications on the server. Running a Win11 VM? Will it just be used to open a few browser tabs and watch a YouTube video, or will you be playing games or doing CPU intensive activities like editing video, etc. Will the Plex be used occasionally to stream Direct Play video for one user on the LAN, or will there be several people watching different videos on devices out on the Internet, all of them transcoding at the same time? Will there be other dockers (such as the arrs) also be active at the time, downloading torrents or Usenet files, while these other activities are taking place? If what you plan to do would only be marginal running on bare metal with an 8th Generation Intel (released 7 years ago), it won't run any better on a server, with several layers of code to execute (Base Linux, Unraid server code, Docker/VM layer code). While it may be a cheaper option, is it really a value to save a few bucks only to decide you need to upgrade to reach the level of satisfaction you desire?
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