I can’t speak about AMD but here is a rundown for Intel CPUs.

• 6th gen - Widely available, cheap, supports the bare minimum. It transcodes the most widely available codes - h.264, h.265.
• 8th gen - Same video capabilities as 7th gen but has more cores. Relatively cheap and widely available. I bit more rounded codec support.
• 11th gen - Previous generations 9th and 10th are incremental and meaningless. 11th introduces AV1 transcoding (Decode only) but it’s still a very meaningful impact because AV1 is both size efficient and very high quality (in most cases, doesn’t play well with noise).

These are the 3 tiers that I look at. Metor Lake is about to be released with native encode and decode support for AV1 but it’s too early to matter.

More info in the chart here.

I built my first thing from scratch. I say “thing” because it was neither a NAS, nor a server, or a hypervisor. It had storage, standalone services, containers and VMs.

If you are unclear on what you need, DIY is probably the best approach.

I’ve invested a lot in my DIY machine. It’s a node in a proxmox cluster. The other two nodes are mini PCs. If I was starting from scratch now, I would probably go with a prebuilt NAS and a bunch of mini office PCs for running VMs and other things.

DIY gives a lot of flexibility but you are managing every aspect of it. Borking the storage, borks your whole setup. It’s a lot of fun but you need to know what you are getting yourself into.

Getting only a NAS will be insufficient once you start experimenting. Which means you will need to get another machine for hosting services/VMs. It can get expensive quickly.

If you go the DIY way, start witha hypervisor and virtualize everything else. That way you will have a more stable setup.

If you own the hardware, sure, use it. It will suffice.

If you plan on buying this ancient hardware, do not do it!

There is some really anecdotal evidence from the other comments.

Check out Haswell capabilities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video

It decodes h.264 and that’s about it. Yes, plex does not transcode for free but hardware is hardware. Spending money on obsolete, lacking hardware is not wise.

If you are buying, go for 6th gen, 8th gen or 11th gen. These are the sweetspots that are either cheap, widely available or very capable.

Kudos to you sir. I’m first to jump against RPi in homelab posts but this is on a whole other level. I think everyone would love a detailed explanation on it.

The Compute blade comes to mind and I’m drawing parallels between them. AFAIR, the compute blade does power and management over the front ethernet port. Which requires the PoE stuff to be there too. Does your backplane simplify the boards (and make it the project cheaper)?