For Plex specifically it is a pass. This will have Xeons and Xeons don’t support quick sync. You are going to be much better off buying one of those micro desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo.

That thing is going to be chugging power. Also note that it uses SAS drives, so you can’t just use consumer SATA drives in it. ALSO 410s are from the 2009-2011 era. Do you really want to depend on a 10+ year old PSU? What’s the cost going to be for you to find replacement parts?

I would look at the list of CPUs that support hardware encoding and see if this Xeon is on the list. If it’s not, I would pass on it for a Plex server. It might be good for a NAS, though. It’s a pretty old CPU, but would be perfectly adequate for a NAS/NFS server.

I ran a T610 for a bit, it is not worth the noise and power draw

It’s a $50 door stop. Westmere is now 13 years old.

No don’t do it

Definitely not. You’d have to pay me money to take this trash off your hands.

Definitely not. You’d have to pay me money to take this trash off your hands.

I think the power draw is going to make this not worth it.

I’ll say it again and again, 7th Gen Intel because the Quicksync does 10bit HEVC decode and encode on the hardware. If you can get better for cheaper sure but i5 7500 or i7 7700 work great. I run that with several hard disks using unRAID and then load Plex Media server as a docker container. Power draw on a setup like that is way less than what you’re looking at, op.

No….

I mean, it would definitely run it. But so would a raspberry pi 4 as long as your just direct streaming 1080p videos.

Allegedly if I had a homelab, and allegedly had 8x10tb for storage. I would have allegedly used a dell tower server similar to this with 32gb ram and have allegedly had no problems.

Also allegedly I ended up with a second one for the times allegedly I’ve upgraded hard drive size.

No, just no

I’m using this exact tower still. I inherited it for free from work. I swapped the CPUs to some lower TDP L5640s and put an H710 in to allow a 6x4TB array and a Quadro P400 for transcode.

It has no problems pushing 4K HDR streams in my house, or several 1080p streams remotely to family and friends.

You can definitely find lower power solutions, but probably not at this price point with the 6 Bay storage included. All things considered it really doesn’t draw that much power, but I might be biased with my inexpensive solar electricity.