ah. my wife enjoys complaining about my computer crap. I have to do periodic purges.
Actually I had a thing where a cousin moved into my basement aka former computer room, and so I had to save space. I tried really hard to virtualize one box and use it as both a local workstation/gaming PC but also have a server running 24/7. It came really close, but I hit unsolvable problems with GPU and also optical drives.
So the existing B450 board could work. get like a fractal define case, they can hold a lot of drives and are failry quiet. but are large. Another thing is that even if you get an AMD CPU (like a “G” series) the transcoding is just not nearly as good as intel. i don’t think it’s supported on plex at all. You can configure it on emby and jellyfin but when I last tried a few years ago it was barely faster than CPU. So in other words you’d need to add a transcode GPU. a new option for that might be a little intel Arc A310 or A380 which can be bought new under $100. (I realize you may get a separate QSV machine, which would make that redundant… although girlfriend acceptance factor might be higher if you can combine in one box).
if you want a little cute low power system this other new user has something that definitely seems to meet the cute and low power needs in a mini itx case.
New user in site to built NAS - General / Introductions - serverbuilds.net Forums