[PuffinBlue]

3 x HP t630 thin clients. Each with upgraded RAM and SSDs.

Each run proxmox, clustered together. Very cheap, low power and surprisingly not terrible. No fans so quiet too.

These aren't going to be good for Plex though. But the rest they'll do just fine.

For plex you probably want something like a NAS (bought or self made), with a good GPU for hardware transcoding. Note that doesn't necessarily mean separate GPU, I think you might be able to use quicksync on most Intel CPUs now.

I have a dedicated TrueNAS Scale box with something like 48TB of raw SSD storage running Emby in the official apps. And the stuff to populate said SSD storage with media. Bit overkill really, but fun.

Also have another big 32 thread AMD machine for 'work' home labbing - i.e. learning, tinkering and breaking stuff. It's separate from my personal cluster for security and for reasons of the personal stuff being a bit more important to me that it runs, hence the cluster and failover.