Really appreciate everyone’s help. Just placed the order for the parts. Looking forward to the saved money in electricity.
What did you end up ordering?
What kind of power consumption is to be expected from the standard build? Both at idle and at load. 
The power consumption would be moderately low, but not Intel Atom/Avoton or Raspberry Pi low.
The i5-8500 (non-T model) uses approximately 50 watts at full load, and about 5-10 watts at idle.
Thank you for the quick answer. I assume that is without disks?
Correct, each type of drive consumes different amounts of power at idle and while busy.
You can spin the drives down while not in use, but if you do - I would highly recommend you read my primer on HDD caches in Unraid.
Supermicro X11SCA-F (~$100), 9500T (~$75), and Thermalright Assassin X120 ($18). Figured the slight boost of the 9500T versus the 8500T couldn’t hurt for the fairly minimal difference in cost. I already have G.Skill DDR4 Trident Z 3200Mhz from an old build I’ll use for the RAM. For ~$200, before selling the old parts to recoup cost, I’m thinking I can cut the electricity usage by more than 75%.
I know I said above, but really appreciate the knowledge and information you post on this website. Was a crucial resource when I initially got into homelabbing.
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Great to see the new guide! Thank you for putting this together!
This is similar to the upgrade I performed on my NK 5.0 earlier this summer.
Jumped forward 4 CPU generations from an LGA 1150 E3-1200 Xeon to a:
- E-2276G 6c/12t ($230)
- X11SCA-F ($100)
- 64GB DDR4 ECC ($130)
Everything else I was able to carry over from the previous build.
I was originally looking for a i3-9300, or maybe a i3-9320 with a plan to save a little money for now, keep ECC support, and upgrade to a Xeon later, but I couldn’t find an i3-9xxx for under $100 at the time and for twice the price the E-2276G felt like a more substantial upgrade over the previous 4c/8t E3 Xeon.
The E-2276G (Coffee Lake 8th/9th gen) iGPU seems to have good transcoding performance / quality so I moved Plex from a dedicated quick sync box to the NAS and that has been working well so far.
Even though It was a nominal increase in advertised TDP (65W to 80W) the generational improvements actually appear to have shaved 2 - 3 watts off the idle power draw. Went from about 18W to 15W (drives / cache not included) at idle even with the extra 2 cores. At full load it does draw quite a lot more power. It spikes to 100+ Watts under load and even hits as high as 150+ Watts running Prime 95.
That said it also has about double the passmark score. So it was a big upgrade in efficiency (passmark / watt) and in real world usage It shaves a few watts off the older system.
I’ve been happy with it so far, VMs seem snappy and responsive, It now has IPMI, and most importantly memory was expanded past the 32GB limit of LGA 1150 and even has room to expand further if necessary.
Not a necessary upgrade or justifiable at the price, but a satisfying upgrade none the less. I’m happy with it.
Looking to build one of these in Canada, any advice for local parts sources or is it best to source from the US?
I am curious what the CPU speed affects if I use the system purely as a NAS. I currently run Open Media Vault on a Pi4 with some external drives but want to upgrade to a larger, more cohesive, and reliable build.
I only have gigabit networking hardware and likely won’t change that for several years unless I encounter a compelling reason. My NAS is accessed by Seafile (which is primarily used for backing up 4k drone footage), Plex (at most 3 concurrent 1080p streams, I have an Optiplex 5050 that will be repurposed for transcoding), and general network storage via Samba and NFS for backing up my personal and work data and keeping large Steam games downloaded locally.
Thanks for the excellent info!
I personally would not trust my data to OMV on a RPi.
CPU speed affects how many docker containers and VMs you can run, as well as unpack speed, transfer speed, and more.
It seems that you wouldn’t benefit too much from what I can tell, but the NK 6.0 would be a large upgrade in what you could do.
I would source from the US or ship parts from China.
Cross border shipping services are also an option.
Yeah, it’s not the best setup right now. But I had to start somewhere!
So what it seems like to me is I have two options: 1) build a barebones dedicated NAS with cheap hardware and not run any other services on it other than Unraid or 2) build something quite a bit more substantial in order to run several home services (like the higher end OTiS builds).
In that case, I’ll probably save up a little more and go the route of option 2.
Thanks for your advice!
Good day, quick question would the Dell CD2VM dual 10 gig and dual 1 gig work in a nas killer 6 build running unraid with an i7 8700 or is that dedicated to enterprise servers only? Any pcie adapters to get it working?
Pretty sure that thing is for proprietary Dell server setups only. Plenty of ways to get 10 Gig and additional 1 Gig without trying to shoehorn in one of those
Okay, will go with the x540 t2 instead.
No, this is proprietary mezzanine style card for Dell servers only.
Alright noted. How come you didn’t include the 8700 on your list of processors? Also, x540 with the fan any info on how well they perform?
I didn’t include the i7-8700 in this guide because it’s outrageously priced for what it is. If you find a reasonably priced one, feel free to use it.
There’s a more comprehensive list of hardware in the OTiS guide as I said earlier in this guide.
The lowest I see for any of the i7-8700 series is about $105 right now.