About two weeks ago I decided to use parts from a suddenly unused desktop to upgrade the living room media server. The initial plan was to keep the disks, power supply and case of the media server, and use the motherboard, CPU, RAM and video card from the desktop.

Things did not go to plan, of course…

Rather than a chronological narrative, let’s just enumerate issues:

• the media server’s power supply would not handle the new video card.
• the desktop’s motherboard would not supply enough SATA ports
• the media server’s case power button apparently broke
• the desktop’s case did not have sufficient cooling
• the desktop’s power supply fried itself a little later

The solution, in the end, involves a new power supply ($45), a PCI-e SATA3 card and cables (in inventory), extra fans (also in inventory), and a little fussing with configuration to get sound working again.

The old media server had 8GB RAM and an Intel Pentium G4560 (3.5GHz, 2c/4t, 3MB cache).

The new media server has 48GB, an AMD 3600 (4.2 GHz, 6c/12t, 3MB L2 + 32MB L3 cache) and an AMD 5700xt video card.

Storage: 1TB SATA SSD, 2x 3TB mdadm RAID1, 2x 8TB ZFS mirror.

Hopefully that will do for some time.