Consolidated "supercomputer" serving weak tiny-PC's for Residential Use

[Ducman69]

My sister has just purchase a beautiful new home, and as always I fly out and hook them up with wired CAT6, home theater PCs, audio setup, latest WAP tech, and so forth since they aren't good about that sort of thing.

For this new build, since it has been many years and they are due for upgrades all around, I am considering device consolidation.

I want to setup one vented central closet in their home as a "media closet", that will house one or two multi-zone receivers, the router, modem, switch, and a powerful always no "supercomputer" that will serve streaming media, games, recording security cameras, and so forth with a few bigass UPS's.

I have already done a "light" version of this for my parents, except the closet only served the upstairs living room TV to which it was attached through the wall, and TV/movie services to Intel NUC's attached to TVs elsewhere around the house. I've done no game streaming, nor attempted to have for example the "supercomputer" perhaps also drive LCDs directly using IR/USB connected wallpanels in the rooms, perhaps with something like HDBaseT 2.0 or something similar.

Also for game streaming, I'm thinking I should really go GREEN this time and hook them up with high-end NVidia GPUs in the central "supercomputer", especially since idle-power draw and heat will be concerns for an always-on computer, and just use NVidia's streaming capability to the NUC's if I go that route.

Has anyone tried something similar to this for themselves or for a client to list the pros and cons?

Pro-tips? I'm leaning towards one central "supercomputer" and using cheap lower-end Intel NUC's, with Harmony Home Control remotes and Logitech K400R keyboards right now, just because its what I know. And I may not even consolidate receivers if I go that route, as otherwise I'd have to route the audio from the NUC all the way to the closet and back which is dumb. Hmmm...

 

[Henri108]

NUCs aren't cheap. You could get older pc's at auctions for 20$ a piece if you buy a big lot. These are 5-year old models and you can easily find some powerful ones. They will consume more, but you will never pay the difference with electricity bills.
Really interested in what you will do, I will do something similar when I renovate my house.

 

[Ducman69]

Maybe we have a different definition of cheap, but they have some low-end NUCs available now for $130 that are 4K capable. Just need some laptop ram and SSDs, of which I have old stock sitting around from other upgraded systems that I can toss in there.

The thing is, the TVs are wall-mounted with the AC power plugs sunk into the wall, for a completely wire-free clean look. Its not acceptable to me to have cabling showing, so something like the NUC is tiny enough to mount discretely.

CHANGE OF PLANS THOUGH!

I've been talked into forgoing the NUCs and CAT6 wiring entirely, and just going with Amazon Fire TV 4K units for $85 each connected wirelessly via a Netgear Nighthawk X6.

I'm still researching, but it looks like instead of cable service and using a cablecard, we can go with Playstation Vue TV service, PLEX for content stored on the home server, Youtube of course, they already have Amazon Prime service, and for the sake of a clean look and wiring they are happy ditching a receiver all together which eliminates that centralized wiring concern and just going with a wall mounted soundbar with wireless subwoofer.

This interface should prove idiot-proof, and the remote even has voice search which is a nice feature.

The media-closet was also shot down.

Instead, the "super-computer" will be traditionally mounted in a computer desk with multiple monitors, and simply always-on, along with the modem, router, VOIP base station, and UPS. I believe you can stream from that system to other TVs in the house for gaming, but they are fine with just gaming from the desk old-school style, while having it serve via plex.

 

[rhansen5_99]

If you are needing some gaming in locations you might also look at steam links . I do think that a hard line is a nice to have here for those. If you do it right on the tv's you can get the smart apps built in. I know that Plex is built in to most Vizio, Samsung, and LG smart tv's, which would also give you Netflix and Prime. You might look into sling TV as an alternative to the PlayStation service. Also I have not tried the Fire TV's, but the Roku 3/4's are pretty easy to use and fairly peppy and have a few more channel offerings.


Of note for the Plex server, you need about 2000 passmarks of cpu for each 1080p transcode you are trying to push out. Also if you are trying to run all wireless at the same time you need to make sure the router can handle the throughput.

 

[Ducman69]

Thanks! That's a lot to digest, but it looks like one common theme here is that the PC is taking less and less of centerstage, and being replaced by cheap android boxes, heh. And my media-closet core concept is BTFO.