My new media server powered by AMD Ryzen 7

For the last few years, I have been using an iMac 2011 as my media (movies, tv shows and music) server running Plex software. It has worked well so far – in the recent months, it was becoming slower and slower due to its age, after much thought, I went for a new machine, a custom-built desktop.

Disclosure: I write reviews about products that I have bought for my usage and paid in full. There were no sponsorship or advertisement or commission of any sort involved in this post. 

I choose to run Windows Server 2019 Standard as I had a license for it, otherwise, I would’ve opted for Windows 10, which would’ve met my needs. I had thought of Linux, but I didn’t go with it, as I was not sure I will be able to set it up correctly and manage it due to my lack of expertise with the OS. I didn’t go for Mac OS, due to the high cost of the hardware. So, Windows it was, as I am super comfortable with. Regarding the specification, I opted for the latest AMD Ryzen family with a good amount of RAM, SSD storage and a good-enough GPU Card. The actual media files I was storing in same two external hard drives (4TB and 2TB) that I have been using in the earlier machine – iMac. The machine cost was about Rs.90,000 (USD 1200) and I am loving it.

The configuration was:

• AMD Ryzen 7 3800X 8-Core Processor
• ASUS TUF B450M-Pro Gaming Motherboard
• Corsair DDR4 1 x 32 GB RAM
• Crucial BX500 960GB SSD
• ASUS NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1050Ti GPU with 4GB DDR5
• Cooler MasterBox E500 cabinet cases

I have setup autologin and running Plex Media Server and Calibre E-Book App – with these I can access my collection of movies, tv shows, home videos, music and books from any device from within the house.

Since the machine is a powerhouse, I have configured Hyper-V and installed Ubuntu Linux and Windows 10 as Guest OS to do development and experimentation safely without affecting the Host OS.