I’m in the early stages of thinking about getting all the bits to set up a secondhand 13” motherboard in a Cooler Master case as a media player, file server (mostly RAW photos & video) and occasional web browsing. I’m planning on using linux and sending AV through HDMI to my Dennon home theatre receiver.
Would the earlier motherboards be OK for this?
What would be a good distro?
Have the HDMI audio issues that I’ve seen discussed here been fully resolved?
Does the WiFi antenna fit inside the Cooler Master case, or should I stick with wired Ethernet?
Would a lower power USB power supply (30 or 40W?) be OK, or should I stick with 60W?
I’m thinking of 8 or 16 of RAM, a modest SSD, and a large external disk. Would that work?
(I’ll still be a Linux newbie as I’m planning on moving my 16” Windows 11 laptop to either Zorin or Mint over Easter.)
Advice from folk with experience in this sort of setup would be appreciated!
I have an early 11th gen i5 (batch 5 or 6 IIRC) in home server duty. All of the internet traffic, a dozen plus docker containers, network drive access and backups, etc flow through it. I also play locally stored media to a TV sometimes from that same machine. No issues with hiccups or slowness, unless I’m also playing with local AI inference at the time. So yes, even the oldest mainboards make decent home / small office routers, servers, or both.
As to distro, I am an Arch user for life now, using the hyprland desktop. Arch’s package management, wiki, other aspects are second to none. If the raw / text install process freaks you out, check into EndeavourOS, which is Arch with just a few wrinkles taken out of the rug like graphical installer, options for several graphical desktops, office suites, etc. Fedora or its variants would be my second choice distro family. I’m so over Debian/Ubuntu family for anything that is not a raspberry pi.
No HDMI audio issues observed for me. But I am not using FW HDMI expansion card, rather external USB-C to multiple port dongles.
If you are going to operate this board batteryless, you want the highest power and most stable power supply you can find. If you hit full turbo, 40W mostly likely wont cut it, 60W will still be a gamble. 100W USB-C PD ones are $20 if you shop around.
8GB should be fine. 16 will be plenty for the workloads you are talking about.