Convert the Mainboard Into a Plex Server?

Here are my specs:

|Processor|11th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-1165G7 @ 2.80GHz|
|Installed RAM|16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable)|

I know that there are enclosures out there for mainboards, and I’ve been curious if my configuration is beefy enough to run an always on Plex server. I have no clue how I’d get started, and I’m really just wondering if it can even be done. I was thinking of putting the board in an enclosure, maybe adding an eGPU for hardware transcoding, and some HDDs to hold all the media. Google hasn’t yielded a lot of results yet, so I’m hoping to learn a bit from the community.

Thank you!

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I use an Intel NUC11PAHi5, with an i5-1135G7 and it works great running my plex server (and all the associated containers I have for fun). Intel’s quicksync is also more than adequate on Blu-ray transcodes (and probably even most 4k transcodes but I block those).
Obviously the NUC has pretty good cooling/fan, so not sure how the case approach will handle loads. But I hardly use half the cores/threads in the thing.

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That’s good to know! I do have a some 4K/HDR content on my current server, but I’m running it off of my desktop with an i7-8700k and a 1080ti, so certainly overkill. I wouldn’t be heartbroken over losing the 4K content since I don’t dive into it too much, but it’s just a nice to have kind of thing.

With your NUC, do you connect any HDDs to it in any specific way, or do you use some other method? Mine is very simple, I just have an 18TB HDD in one of the bays in my PC, and I’m inexperienced in any other methods for storage. If I had to guess, with what I’m envisioning, I’d have to have a NAS type HDD bay that runs to the framework enclosure to provide the necessary storage.

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I have a NAS for my media library.
And just to be clear, the iGPU in my lower-spec CPU is more than enough to handle at least one or two transcodes of 4K content (if not more), I just force Direct Play for those to avoid the hassle. Plex forums would have more and better info on that side of things as well as example setups you could reference.