A used Mac Studio ran a busy home server on very little power
A planned self-built home server became much less attractive after parts prices rose sharply. The same parts cost €800 in November 2025, €1,200 in December, and about €1,800 now. That setup only had 16GB of memory, no graphics card, and was not strong enough for running .
In March 2026, a used Mac Studio M1 Max with 64GB of memory and 4TB of storage was bought for €1,700 and used as the home server instead. A power meter measured it for 16 days. It used about 8 watts when no inference work was running, and averaged 11.6 watts in real use.
During that period, 25 stayed on all the time, including Immich, Paperless-ngx, Matrix, Synapse, Caddy, AdGuard, Forgejo, Open WebUI, and Whisper. The same machine was also used as a workstation and for benchmark runs during the test period.
Key points
- A planned custom server build rose from €800 to about €1,800 for the same parts.
- A used Mac Studio M1 Max with 64GB memory and 4TB storage cost €1,700.
- Power use was about 8 watts at idle and 11.6 watts on average over 16 days.
- The machine kept 25 running for photo storage, documents, messaging, web services, ad blocking, code hosting, and AI tools.
- The setup was also meant to support and speech-to-text work.