Ugh, well I'm feeling a bit better now.. crosses fingers.

But also just discovered that I now have no idea where my AM4 mounting has gone for my ML240lite (the one not in use already). So, now have to either crawl about in the attic, or use the stock AM4 cooler for the ESXi build. Which is OK I guess as I'll be running at stock or under-volting (if it's even worth it), I just wanna make sure it's as quiet as possible as I'll be running it 24/7 once set up most likely... depending on what I end up running though.

ATM my 1700 is still in my main system(and have set it back to stock), and with the tower+monitor I'm pulling 91W from the wall is all according to my UPS, and that's including the GTX1060 and peripherals etc on idle too. So not bad at all for 16 logical cores that I'll have use of if I need them.

I'm definitely gonna try pfsense, and run a VPN server on it for home access... I have an intel NIC on the mobo, + a quad port AIC too, so plenty for my needs. I will either use an old GT710 or similar just for booting the build, unless I can make use of a 1060 I have spare anyway for something, and that leaves me 1 x16 slot spare on the mobo, possibly for a LSI 9211-8i or similar, depending on need. ATM I probably don't need it, will mostly be running VMs just for testing purposes and maybe for a freenas/ubuntu/unraid file server just for away from home usage, unless it makes more sense to swap everything to the ESXi build for file serving needs... will do some testing to see if it's worth it.

Will probably do the build tomorrow when I have a bit more time, and hopefully still feel OK health wise. I'll try to remember to document the build, but it's nothing special really, so not really any point IMO, it's just standard hardware and the software is doing the heavy lifting. I might add another 16GB DDR4 as it's like £59 ATM for the same 3000Mhz RAM as I will currently be putting in there. I'll see what my RAM requirements are, but for that price it might be worth it to not have to juggle VMs needs.