They come and go. Refresh the Amazon and ebay links multiple times daily.
@JDM_WAAAT
I’m looking at a p043w with an Intel Core i3-7100 – is that a worthy substitute for the p0043w?
It appears to have an older version of the socket on the MB, so I don’t know if it would be compatible with the same processors. It does have Quick Sync though.
It does have QS, and it’s decent if you can get it for a good price. Keep in mind it’s 7th-gen, not 8th like the other model. It will also be limited to 6th/7th gen processors only, not 8th/9th gen like the HP 290.
This thread is awesome. Thank you!
I’m in for one of these for a QS box, but I’m considering a 2nd for PFSense. My current PFSense box is running a Core i5-650 @ 3.20GHz with 4GB of RAM.
This seems like it may be a good backup solution (my box is pretty ancient), but am I wrong in thinking it may not be a significant upgrade to my current setup? I have 1GB up/down and 90% of traffic is over VPN. Looking at single thread performance it seems I could see an increase in OpenVPN (until PFSense has wireguard) performance over my Core i5-650 but I’m not sure how significant this would be.
I used one as a pfsense box to replace my dell r220 e3-1275 v3 box. It runs pfsense perfectly for us. We have a 500/50 connection and I open vpn and load balance three open vpn gateways for certain devices while others use regular isp gateway. I can’t really give performance delta data but Have noticed no degradation in performance compared to the r220 it replaced.
You can test theoretical maximum VPN throughput on each machine by installing OpenSSL on your Ubuntu machine and following the steps outlined in this thread to determine how exactly how significant a difference it would be. The G4900 will be probably 20-30% better, and the difference in power draw may still make the switch worthwhile, as those first Westmere chips are not particularly efficient at low load.
Why 500GB minimum? I know nothing about Ubuntu but on my Mac I’m only using 40GBs, including metadata.
I have 4 x 3.5" drives that need a home and had the idea that maybe I could build a tiny 4 bay DAS using a 5.25 HDD cage and run power from this HP? Can the PSU handle that (plus 1 internal 3.5" HDD, NVme, SAS HBA)?
So some updates. I added a MSI Low Profile GTX 1650 OC 4G video card to my hp 290. It barely fits but you can install it without taking anything else out.
Here are my specs so far with a i5-9400 CPU 16 gigs ram and the MSI GTX1659 OC 4G
https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V10/display.php?id=122547423487
So far the video card has been running fine for me.
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After 2 days of checking eBay all day, finally managed to snag one! I set up an auto refresh chrome extension to refresh the page every 10s. For those less patient, I found a new one on Offerup for $160 shipped: https://offerup.com/item/detail/675981629/
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Very cool!
What is the idle power draw now?
I ordered a power meter but still wait for it to arrive. I am curious how the idle looks also. I am guessing the processor powers down the on board video silicon, but I am guessing the power usage still goes up slightly.
Do you have any experience with just moving the metadata/media folders from plex to a different drive? I like having the Video Preview Thumbnails enabled, which can take a decent chunk of space with a big library. If that were to be on a regular HDD, would plex suffer?
Plex metadata on a spinning drive a bad idea. Plex has to read hundreds if not thousands of tiny files trying to be read when you’re browsing your media. You’ll page down, and wait…and wait…and wait some more before the posters and titles are displayed for every video. With a little bit of effort, you can put your metadata on a separate drive, but don’t put it on a spinner unless you hate yourself.
Hi, I have a plex server set up on one of these with the recommended additional 8GB ram, a 256GB NMVe and hardware encoding enabled. Im on ubuntu server 20.04 LTS and can confirm that vaapi is being used for transcodes but Im seeing like 25% cpu usage per stream when transcoding 1080p 10-bit HEVC content to 8MB H264 1080p.
Whats the usage look like per those 21 streams? Or were those less involved H264 1080p → 720p 2MB or something? I did get my hp 290 “refurbished” so Im wondering if that may be part of this. Basically, any input on what “normal” usage per stream will be appreciated.
I have put together my 290 and have installed linux for the first time. I’m having permission issues with my new hdd. Its a 8tb sata plugged into a LSI 9207-8E. drive shows up fine dev/sda1. I mounted it to mnt/sda1 and copied my media from windows to it. I even got PMS server to finally see the drive and folders. I thought I had the permissions thing set. But … now qbittorrent can’t see the folder. I tried a command and totally screw up sudo and still qbittorrent can’t see the folder.
I’ll be reinstalling Ubuntu when I get home to fix what I have done at this point. But what are the recommendations for where I mount my media drive? and give permissions so that every app installed by me automatically has permission to use the drive?
I am a very novice Linux user as well but something that always works but isn’t the technically best way to do things (lol) is do:
sudo chmod ugo+rwx /your/file/path/here
This gives all users/groups/owners read/write/execution access to the folder. Do this for each media folder.
@Dan_King
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OK. My question now is do all apps, plex, qbittorrent, lidarr, radarr, filebot, have access as well at that point?
Are apps viewed as groups??
I’m having a really slow upload on this new machine. I upgraded the RAM and everything has been working fine. All of the other computers in the house have a faster upload. This one is only getting about 2Mbs up. Downloads are fine. I deleted all of the McAfee stuff, but it didn’t seem to help. Any ideas? Plex uploads at that data rate obviously aren’t cutting it 
What are you using it for? Are you still using the stock HDD? That’s 100% a bad idea.