My Unraid is 7 years old,  i3 530,  i'm looking to upgrade and got about $600 budget.  I need just about everything except for harddrives.

 

really out of touch in the hardware trends,  is there any best bang of the buck build for $600

Hi - aside from newer hardware, is there anything you are looking to achieve or any limitations you are finding with your current setup?  Also, a little more information about your current setup would help. 

current setup

i3 530

4gb ram

8tb hdd

plex / sonarr / cp / pydio / couple other dockers

 

it just starting to feel slow.

 

Ideally i want to have this new setup as a ESXi host, run Unraid on VM,  then have maybe couple other VMs for labbing and other interesting stuff if the hardware is capable

Problem with ESXi is hardware compatibility, if you want to run 6 or 6.5 then you are really stuck with running name brand hardware such as Dell, HP, Lenovo etc. This can further complicate things because these servers are generally big, loud and parts can be expensive but its doable. I just picked up a Dell R710 (rack mount) with dual quad core Xeons, 48GB of ECC RAM with one power supply and a Dell Perc 6i raid controller for $400 in a private sale. The Perc 6i does not handle drives over 2TB or do JBOD, but I didn't buy it for unRAID I bought it for ESXi and it runs great after I added some drives. If you look around on eBay you may find something that fits your budget just be careful of RAID controllers if you want to use greater than 2TB drives.

4 hours ago, ashman70 said:

Problem with ESXi is hardware compatibility, if you want to run 6 or 6.5 then you are really stuck with running name brand hardware such as Dell, HP, Lenovo etc.

this is not true at all, many people, including myself, run ESXi on their white boxes without any problems. i have one really old system with i3-2100 with 8GB RAM that runs ESXi with 2VMs. and i have couple of more moderns systems with various Supermicro MBs and all running ESXi without any problems too.. look at my sig for example.. 

What I was getting at is that PC hardware generally can't run Esxi, Supermicro make server motherboards with server class components, but you tried an average Asus, Asrock, or Gigabyte motherboard you would likely end up being unable to install Esxi. So sure, if you pick the right server components you can build an Esxi white box but you do have be careful about the components you pick.

26 minutes ago, ashman70 said:

What I was getting at is that PC hardware generally can't run Esxi, Supermicro make server motherboards with server class components, but you tried an average Asus, Asrock, or Gigabyte motherboard you would likely end up being unable to install Esxi. So sure, if you pick the right server components you can build an Esxi white box but you do have be careful about the components you pick.

have you any personal experience with hardware not capable run ESXi? just remembered, i have my backup server with thread author's CPU i3 530 with 8GB RAM, Intel desktop board, and ESXi runs on it just fine..

i think any Intel Mobo/CPU combo that supports VT-x Tehnology can run ESXi..

 

but of-course - if you can, always go for server grade components for ESXi, if you can't buy new, got for used hardware. there are lot of threads about it on forums.. 

Yes, I have been building servers to run Esxi since version 3.5 I know from experience, there are always going to be exceptions, but the hardware compatibility list has been shrinking over the years. I recently tried to upgrade one of my white boxes running 5.1 to 5.5 and I couldn't because the  motherboard was no longer supported under 5.5 Intel was one of the few companies that you could run Esxi on for a white box, but it just wasn't possible with Asus, Gigabyte, Asrock etc. That was my point.

8 minutes ago, ashman70 said:

Intel was one of the few companies that you could run Esxi on for a white box, but it just wasn't possible with Asus, Gigabyte, Asrock

ahh, ok. i always choose Intel cpu/boards and started my experience with ESXi version 5. from that i was able to run ESXi on every white-box system i choose..  

Should I go with Ryzen or maybe couple E5-2670,  that seems to draw a lot of power usage right?

 

 

9 hours ago, femin said:

Should I go with Ryzen or maybe couple E5-2670,  that seems to draw a lot of power usage right?

Older systems will always use more power.. but no so much more(mine is using ~150W in average, see my sig) - just calculate a difference you pay for new hardware with more power needed and you get how many years you can run this older system..