Search for a Plex server build and you’ll find two extremes: $300 thin clients that choke the moment two people press play, and $3,000 rackmount monsters that sound like hair dryers. This build sits deliberately in the middle. For roughly $1,000 to $1,400 you get a modern Intel Core i5 whose UHD 770 iGPU handles the transcoding, proper CMR drives for the library, and a damped tower quiet enough to live in the same room as the TV. It runs Plex or Jellyfin equally well; the hardware doesn’t care which side of that debate you land on.
It’s aimed at the self-hoster who has outgrown the repurposed laptop: several TVs in the house, family streaming remotely, a photo library that belongs in Immich rather than someone else’s cloud, and a media pipeline that should mostly manage itself. Here’s the parts list and the reasoning behind every line of it.
The build at a glance
| Component | This build |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-13500 or i5-14500 (14 cores, UHD 770 iGPU) |
| RAM | 32 GB DDR5, 64 GB if you go ZFS or heavy on Immich |
| Storage | 1 TB NVMe (OS, apps, cache) + 2× 8 TB CMR HDD |
| Transcoding | Intel Quick Sync: H.264, HEVC 10-bit, AV1 decode |
| PSU | 550–650 W, 80 Plus Gold |
| Case | Fractal Design-class silent tower |
| Idle power | Roughly 30–60 W |
| Noise | Near-silent under normal load |
| Indicative budget | $1,000–1,400 as of mid-2026, prices vary |
The parts list
CPU: Intel Core i5-13500 or i5-14500, around $200–230. Both are 14-core chips (6 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores) with the UHD 770 integrated graphics, and the iGPU is the entire reason this class of processor owns the media-server niche. The 65 W base power keeps idle draw civil, and there’s no need for the K-series variants: nothing in a media server benefits from overclocking. If the 13500 is meaningfully cheaper the day you order, take it; the differences are marginal for this workload.
Motherboard: a B760 board with at least four SATA ports, around $120–140. The chipset doesn’t matter much here; the port count does. You want room for the two hard drives you’re buying now and the two you’ll inevitably add later, plus an M.2 slot for the NVMe. Onboard 2.5 GbE is a nice bonus that’s increasingly standard at this price.
Memory: 32 GB DDR5 to start, around $100–180 the way the memory market has been swinging. That’s comfortable for a full media stack with headroom to spare. Go straight to 64 GB if you’re planning TrueNAS SCALE with ZFS, which happily uses spare RAM as cache, or if Immich’s machine-learning jobs will chew through a six-figure photo library.
Storage: a 1 TB NVMe drive plus two 8 TB CMR hard drives. The NVMe (around $80) holds the OS, the app data, and the transcode cache, which keeps the interface snappy and lets the hard drives spin down. For the library itself, stick to CMR NAS drives like the WD Red Plus or Seagate IronWolf lines, around $180 each; SMR drives are cheaper and will punish you for it during rebuilds and sustained writes. Sixteen terabytes raw is a serious starting library, and the case has room to grow.
Power and enclosure: a 550–650 W Gold PSU (around $90), a silent tower (around $110–140), and a decent tower cooler (around $40). The PSU is oversized on purpose; quality units are near-silent at low load and the headroom covers future drives or a discrete GPU. A Fractal Design-class case with damped panels and slow-spinning 140 mm fans is what makes this machine disappear into a living room. As configured, the whole build lands around $1,150–1,250 as of mid-2026, prices vary: trimming to one data drive brings it near $1,000, while 64 GB of RAM and more disk pushes it toward $1,400.
Quick Sync is the whole point
The UHD 770’s Quick Sync engine encodes and decodes H.264 and HEVC, including 10-bit HDR material, and decodes AV1 in hardware. In practice that means the box can serve a 4K HDR remux untouched to the living room TV while simultaneously transcoding streams down for a phone on cellular or a relative’s aging smart TV, HDR-to-SDR tone mapping included, all without a discrete GPU. The CPU cores barely notice, because the media engine is doing the work. Skipping the graphics card is what keeps this build cheap, cool, and quiet: fewer parts, less idle draw, no fan whine.
One licensing detail before you buy: Plex locks hardware transcoding behind a paid Plex Pass, while Jellyfin ships it free. On identical hardware, that single line item changes the running cost of this build. Our Jellyfin vs Plex comparison walks through the full trade-off.
What this build actually runs
The media server itself, Jellyfin or Plex, is the headline act, but it’s rarely alone for long. Immich turns the same box into a self-hosted Google Photos replacement, and its face and object recognition jobs are exactly the kind of bursty background load those eight efficiency cores absorb without disturbing playback. The *arr suite, Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr, keeps the library organized and automated, with qBittorrent handling downloads of legally distributed content. Round it out with a backup tool like Duplicati or Kopia pushing your irreplaceable data, the photos and the app configs, to offsite storage. The media files themselves are usually re-acquirable; your photo library is not.
The point of 14 cores in a media server isn’t raw speed, it’s separation: library scans, scheduled backups, and Immich’s machine learning all run in the background while the foreground job, someone watching a movie, never stutters.
Power draw and noise
Expect roughly 30–60 W at idle depending on how many drives are spinning and how aggressively the OS lets them sleep, which is the difference between a machine you forget is on and a repurposed gaming rig that shows up on the electricity bill. Under a transcoding load the draw rises modestly; Quick Sync is far more efficient than software transcoding on CPU cores. Acoustically, a 65 W-class chip under a decent tower cooler inside a damped case is effectively inaudible from the couch. The loudest components in this build are the hard drives, and drive spin-down handles that most of the day.
Unraid or TrueNAS SCALE?
Both are purpose-built for exactly this machine. Unraid is paid software with tiered licensing, and its superpower is flexibility: mix drive sizes freely, expand the array one disk at a time, and lean on a huge community app catalog. It’s the natural fit for a media box that grows organically. TrueNAS SCALE is free and built on ZFS, which brings checksummed data integrity and snapshots at the cost of wanting matched drives and more RAM. If your priority is the photo library’s safety, ZFS makes a strong argument; if it’s painless expansion of a movie collection, Unraid does. Either way you get Docker-based apps, so the software stack above runs identically on both.
Upgrade paths
- More storage: the case and PSU are already sized for four or more drives, so growing the library is a purchase, not a rebuild.
- 64 GB of RAM if ZFS caching or Immich’s ML workload starts feeling tight.
- An Intel Arc GPU if you eventually need AV1 encoding for bandwidth-starved remote streams; the UHD 770 decodes AV1 but doesn’t encode it.
- A second NVMe drive to mirror app data, cheap insurance for the config you’ll spend months refining.
- 2.5 GbE networking end to end, which matters once multiple devices pull high-bitrate 4K at the same time.
This media server build: pros and cons
- 4K transcoding with HDR tone mapping and no discrete GPU, thanks to Quick Sync
- Near-silent and frugal at idle, so it can run 24/7 in a living space
- CMR drives and a roomy tower make storage expansion boring, in the best way
- Enough cores to run Immich, the *arr stack, and backups alongside streaming
- Costs more than repurposing an old office PC, which is genuinely fine for smaller setups
- Unraid adds a license cost, and ZFS on TrueNAS prefers matched drives and more RAM
- No ECC memory support in this consumer platform class
- No AV1 hardware encoding; that still takes a discrete Arc card
Who is this build for
Build this if a media library is the center of your homelab: multiple concurrent streams, remote family members, a photo collection worth protecting, and automation doing the housekeeping. Skip it if you’re serving one TV on your local network, where a mini PC or an old desktop will do, or if you’re chasing enterprise features like ECC and IPMI, which push you into server-grade boards and a different budget. If you’re starting from zero, our homelab setup guide for beginners covers the fundamentals this build assumes, and the machine described here is a realistic second step that won’t need replacing for years.