Workplace retiring some PC's - thinking of grabbing one to do my first self hosting on - which one of these should I take? (specs inside)

Hey all, been wanting to get into self hosting for a while. I won't be doing a whole lot - probably just a Plex server and photo/video archives.

Maybe a personal assistant if I get really bored, lol.

At work, I've got a selected of taking either:

HP Prodesk 400 G4 - i5 7th Gen

Dell Optiplex 7020
Dell Optiplex 3010
Dell Optiplex 3040 All Intel i5

Let me know if they're all shit too, lol.

Many thanks

13 comments

I’m not familiar with HP. But with dell optiplex 3xxx, 5xxx, 7xxx tell you the class. Bigger number means more features, more premium build. The second to last digit tells you the generation. It’s 0-9 and then repeats. So 7020 is 1 year newer than 3010. 3040 is going to be the newest.
if you have the service tags just look them up on dell and you can see the detailed specs
- Wow, very interesting. Thanks, that could affect my decision. Will defo check the tags.
Take all of them and build a cluster.
Or whichever one is newest/has the best CPU, you didn't really give the specs. And then take the drives and RAM from the others and max it out.
- Thanks. Yeah, didn't give the full specs - my bad. I'm gonna take the 7020 and maybe the G4. Another question though -
  Am I right in thinking if I self host, storing a bunch of movies locally, I can then connect to my self hosted server from another location/computer and stream my personal library?
  Thanks
  
  On the same network yes. If you want to do it from elsewhere, you should use a VPN, don't expose stuff like Jellyfin to the Internet.
Whatever has the most RAM.
- This is the way.
  I will say, Jellyfin's aggressive transcoding has brought even my relatively modern, 12-core AMD to its knees, but for everything else, more RAM has been more important than CPU or GPU specs for self-hosting. Before Jellyfin, I hosted the entire house on an ARM-based micro.
  That said, the game changes if OP wants to do any LLM stuff. Memory is still important, but the GPU starts to play a bigger role.
  If I could know only one stat for making a decision, though, it'd be RAM.
This seems like asking someone to do your google homework for you. :P Just google that shit and get the specs yourself.
- Well sort of, but it's more that sometimes there's nuances to the tech that makes things better or worse, like people will say oh well Linux hosting works best on a post-(year) intel chip or whatever.
  Youre right though, I should've added the full specs and asked questions based off that. I was just hastily posting from inside the cellar at work.
  I have now googled regardless and I'm gonna take the Optiplex 7020
  
  Fair enough.

13 comments