Define best.

I like the Wyse 5070 extended for a router. Has a x4 PCIe slot for a network card. Not the cheapest, but very low power.

Any HP, Dell or Lenovo SFF desktop with 4th gen or higher CPU. Probably $50.

If you only need two interfaces you can go with the micro boxes and put wired networking in the wifi slot.

Buy a 5600g CPU and you might drop a good chunk of those watts. The first gen Ryzen ate a lot of watts at idle.

I think the LLM need about half the parameters in vram so a 30b model needs a video card with 16gb of vram. The 13b models need 8gb of vram.

Those aren’t cheap.

USB will work for media. Speed isn’t much of an issue when you are watching a movie.

USB 3.0 is faster than a spinning drive reads data.

I’m running a lot more on a J4125 and it’s been working great. I don’t have 4 users playing in parallel.

You should be able to get this to support hardware quicksync. However, if not you can try:

• Load Jellyfin on the root system bypassing all the permissions setup issues
• Load Proxmox and then the Jellyfin LXC from https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ as it has the needed settings

First Proxmox is Debian with addons. What Proxmox gives is real easy flexibility to spin up a VM or a LXC with little effort. The backup functionality is also very easy. It’s a lot more work to do it with a stock Debian.

Consider what it will cost to power. The payback for getting a R730 may be under a year.

I wouldn’t get the K cpu as overclocking usually isn’t a thing for server usage. That also saves the cost of a cpu cooler as the non K come with a good enough cpu cooler.

Dell T20, 2x Wyse 5070, Optiplex 3000 thin client. HP 600 g3 that total about 85 watts. A couple gigabit switches for about ten watts.

Trying to keep it under a hundred watts, but I go well over the T20 and/or the HP have heavy load. Luckily none of my workloads use that much CPU so it’s under a hundred watts.

I have crazy expensive California power so with A/C each watt costs about $4 a year.

Wyse 5070. Mine idles just under 4 watts. Way faster than a j1900.

Try and run what you can in LXC instead of a VM. That said run the router as a VM.

I’m not sure how the p cores and e cores are handled, but don’t give any p cores to the router unless you find that you need to. The e cores should be enough.

I chose just to use the turnkey file server. Truenas wants to be run bare metal or have disk controllers passed through to it. You can’t really do either with your system. You can use truenas if you want. I just didn’t see the point.

I have all that and a bunch more on a Wyse 5070. I loaded it all up to see if it would work. An i7 8700 has 4x the CPU power. It will work great.

The price is a bit on the high side.

Get a different version of the card. I have one of those cards and one of my computers refuses to boot when it is installed. A different one works fine.

The problem card also works in a different system.

I doubt you will get a cheaper solution that actual power supplies. Here is an example at $65 for 10. https://www.ebay.com/itm/165149435995 There are many listings like this. This is the first I found in ten seconds of searching.

Manufacturers like to put signaling between the power supply and the laptop to lock you in. Get the wrong power supply and it will not work at all or if it does it will throttle the CPU and/or nag you constantly. You need to find out if your ithems do that or not. If they do you need the proper power supplies.

By the time you find a power supply and source the connectors, it will likely exceed the price of just getting the actual units.

These boxes have limitations. Disk bays are one of those limitations. You get one and maybe two 3.5 bays tops. You can add a HBA and external drives, but then no 10Gb networking. What is your use case that needs 10Gb? Could you live with 2.5G?

TDP is a measure of power usage when all the CPU cores are at 100 % usage. Most homeland sit idle almost all the time. Basically TDP is mostly meaningless.

You will find that your 9th gen Celeron idles pretty close to the same as a i3, i5 or i7 of the same generation.

The cheap upgrade would be an i5-9500 in your existing system with perhaps some more ram. Unplug the other system as it’s really slow. Upgrade your drives.

The problem with a newer low power CPUs like a n5105 or N100 is a lack of pci-e lines and SATA. If you want multiple high speed m.2 and non multiplexed SATA, you need a more standard CPU. Consider a 12th or 13th gen i3.

I’m not against n5105 or other low power systems. I run several. They just are not the best for a NAS.