Hardware for Channels (& other things...)

[JMN]

My QNAP TS-253A went down over the holidays when I was out-of-town (&country) . Came back up when I returned after I pressed the power switch... Long story but it got me to consider new hardware and relegate the QNAP to backup duty and as a data pond.

I got a cheap N95 mini pc to create a tailscale exit node at a second home. I brought it to my main home in case the QNAP was fried and plugged it in to see how it would work. The N95 runs rings around the n3150 but I'm going to take it back to my NY apartment to do its original mission.

I rearranged my server room and upgraded my UPS and now am torn between getting a 7840hs box, an N100 or a N305. Clearly, the 7840hs can run rings around the others but it's power consumption is much greater. Initially, I'll run Channels & Roon but if I get ambitious I may convert everything to Proxmox.

What would you do? Is there another processor I should consider?

[Morris_Altman]

My concern with the 7840hs box is AMD iGPU may not do transcoding if you need that. You will get faster commercial skipping with a faster CPU. If you will run channels directly on the box then the N100 seems the best choice. If you virtualize, then the N305 extra cores is the best choice if you need encoding. If that's not an issue then the 7840hs box would be my choice of those lower end CPUs for virtualization

[JMN]

Thanks for your input. I pulled the trigger on a Beelink SER7 (7840HS with 32GB RAM/1TB NVME SSD) as Amazon had a deal going and I got it for $476 (tax inc). Just too good a price.

I did some more research and it looks like the iGPU on the 7850hs (Radeon 780M) is supported by Channels DVR and provides the following Codecs:

GPU AMD Radeon 780M
h265/HEVC (8 bit) Decode/Encode
h265/HEVC (10 bit) Decode/Encode
h264 Decode/Encode
VP9 Decode
VP8 Decode
AV1 Decode/Encode
AVC Decode
VC-1 Decode
JPEG Decode/Encode