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.

I think it is slightly high on price, but not too bad. Enough RAM/storage to get started, but expect to add more of both. Virtual machines eat more RAM so using containers (LXC or docker) will allow you to run more in 8GB.

Since you mentioned NAS, a micro system isn’t the best as there is no room for a high capacity 3.5 inch drive.

I have a HP 600 G2 with a i5-6500 in a small form factor (SFF). It cost a whole $55 and has room for one 2.5 drive and 2 3.5 drives.

Get a Nvidia GPU or for less power get a n100 mini PC and run the media server there. A n100 can do a few transcodes in parallel and only use five watts while doing it.

Consider getting a P40 instead. Newer gen chip compared to the M40 and it should be supported for longer. It’s worth the extra cost.

Make sure to source the needed power cables.

I’ve been thinking of getting one of these because a 3090 is too much $$$. It varies depending on exactly what the task is, but it’s about half a 3090.

There are threads here on this. Here is one that I bookmarked when I was considering buying a p40. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/sjJ84nsppG

You might want to ask over there.

I’m thinking that the LED is part of the switch and might not be easily replaced. Take a look and see if it’s replaceable.

You can rig another led in the case or something USB with a led. https://www.ebay.com/itm/403893218638

The 5070 I’m looking at right now has a red LED on the SSD.

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.