Topic starter is also asking about idle power - which is understandable for home-server builds (although I kind on puzzled what's the point if investing $$$ and then trying to save $ on energy and not use system at full potential, normally the best way to extract max return on investment is by fully using it, but also some mission-critical scenarios actually do provide highest value via dealing with peak workload bottlenecks too {unleashing reserve capacity to ensure service reliability}, therefore it really depends..),
AsRock Rack has been quite interested in bringing Ryzen CPUs into low-end servers, and the introduction of EPYC 4004 proves their point.
I have got to say that, indeed, Intel's Xeon 6300-series launch yesterday left me very underwhelmed: 8 cores max, no AVX-512, in 2025, while Epyc 4004 exists. Those 4004 mainboards are not cheap though (I looked at Supermicro's H13SAE-F).
…exactly FOUR SATA ports in this case, which isn't much for storage. You can add a HBA, but this is a x8 device: In a x16 slot, it wastes 8 lanes. And if you have sizeable storage, you probably want faster than Gigabit networking to go with it. 100G is ridiculous in a home server, but 10G is not unreasonable: If not provided on-board, that's typically a second x8 device. (Aquantia NICs are not the most suitable choice for servers.)
If Quicksync is the only concern, adding a cheap, single slot, Arc dGPU to an AMD (or Atom, or Xeon-D) server is a solution.
Right; an Arc 310 is a beast of a transcoder even for 4k HDR AV1, and it will work fine in an x4 slot.
Especially considering that the X14SBI-F seems to be in the same area for new retail price ($550-650), and that has 3x PCIe 5.0 x16 and 3x PCIe 5.0 x8, plus 6x PCIe 5.0 x8 via MCIO, and 2x M.2 slots (PCIe 5.0 x2, so it's the only place this board cheaps out). With a Xeon 6511P 16 P-cores/32 threads (and 136 PCIe 5.0 lanes) processor selling for $850, the top-of-the-line Ultra 9 285 with 8 P-core/16 E-core/24 threads (and a measly 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes) selling for $550 doesn't look too good. That extra $300 lets you connect 28 NVMe drives at full PCIe 5.0 speed.
I wonder - 64 GB UDIMMs seem to work on Z890:
if it can 32GB single rank it can 64GB dual rank too. and 4 ranks per channel is not unusual.
Different performance league, but the costs of manufacturing to PCIe 5.0 make it that motherboards are in the same price league…
ATX server motherboards do run a bit more power than a mini-server board that is specifically targeted at low power. And historically Xeons seem to be much worse than their desktop counterparts. In particular, they don't seem to have the super low power C-states available. Add in the fact that most add-in cards designed for servers (like 100Gbit+ NICs) don't seem to care much about dropping to a lower power state, and you do end up with a lot more power used.