Need help with unRAID hardware swap

I run unRAID with an old old FX-4100 CPU. I have about $700 for a hardware swap. Was planning on staging my upgrade by using that $700 to buy a CPU, Motherboard, and RAM for the first phase. A second phase will be adding a new power supply, then third phase would be to buy a GPU for a gaming VM. This was my original plan. However for my first phase I wanted to buy a Ryzen 9 3900X with an X570 board and 32GB of 3600 MHz RAM.

After listening to the Self-Hosted podcast this latest episode I got to thinking if I could find cheaper server grade hardware with comparable performance. I just don’t know what CPUs and what motherboard would make good options. Can anyone help?

My current uses for my unRAID server is running about 20 dockers or so including Plex but I can’t really use Plex as it can’t transcode. My machine is chugging along but is always high on load.

look at the master guide thread. There are several builds in that price point.

[Official] Master List of Guides and Resources

Snafu (aka Anniversary 2.0) might be right up your alley