Starter HomeLab + gaming server build

[ILove47]

Budget (including currency): Up to $3000 to start with. +$1000 for HDDs later.

Country: Ukraine

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 

I want to use this PC as my development server, where I'll connect from my laptops, so I have everything in one place. 

Plan is to have Proxmox. And Windows VM with GPU pass-through.

This will be mainly for Steam gaming. Also, occasionally I'm using Fusion360 for some easy CAD and DaVinci Resolve for video editing.

Other than few containers (Home Assistant, UniFi Controller, Traefik, Pi-hole) planning to have few VMs for development. Hosting test mirror of the web-site.

NAS. Plex or alternative (Jellyfin?). Self-hosting photos. 

Maybe some Machine Learning.

Usually, when not in active use - it will be running Home Assistant, and hosting few websites. So it would be great if it won't eat up all the available power.  

 

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

No parts at all. I'm upgrading from my Asus S510-UN laptop with MX150 GPU on board. I was thinking about new build for a while already, but seeing empty faces  in Hogwarts Legacy triggered me to start the upgrade ASAP.

System will be located in 60*60*60cm (23*23*23 in) cabinet near the working table. So there are already few concerns: system cooling and noise. I'm thinking about a rack. I'll have a switch (CRS326-24G-2S+RM) and patch panel on top, so there won't be much place for a high tower case. That's why I'm looking into rack cases.

I'm planning to play games on TV in another room. I have cat6 cables there, so I thought about using some laptop with Parsec between the TV and gaming server.

As for resolution/refresh rate - I don't have any experience on playing higher that 1080p yet. But for sure, I'd like to try 4k at at least 60FPS. (But not sure, whether this will work with Parsec. Maybe you have any suggestions on how to organize this?)

Also, I need an UPS (maybe later) for my network and Home Assistant activities. (I hope, it's possible to automatically reduce power consumption on VMs, so UPS can live longer while maintaining only few small containers and powering network.

 

Here's what I was looking at (Could be an overkill, but fits my budget yet  ).

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/ILove47/saved/Cktg3C : 

 

No HDDs for now, I plan to buy them later (I don't even know whether I need that much, but that's for the far-future). I Have enough storage for backups in externals HDDs now.

Also, planning to buy SFP+ extension (Asus XG-C100F) (maybe I'll buy 10Gig switch in future, as all cabling is cat6). But that's not for now.

 

CPU - At first I was thinking about some Xeon processors, but only saw new ones, checked prices and decided that $2500 per processor is too much for me. So just tried to find something in a part picker.

As for 13900 - I saw it has lower TDP and can give me enough performance when power is limited and it has better caches/cores that 13600K - so I decided it could be worth extra $200.

 

Memory - I looked at DDR5 and DDR4. Read few articles and thought that DDR5 isn't at it's fastest right now, so DDR4 should work for me and will be much more cheap for 128GiB. ($500 for DDR5 vs $300 for DDR4).

Also, 13900's specs say it works only with speeds <=3200MHz, but saw few builds where they use 4000+. How does this work?

 

Video Card - Have nothing to say here. Of course, I'd like 4090 or something, but 4070-ti is much more cheap and I'm not sure whether there is really much performance improvement worth the money.

Wanted it to be 40-series because of more efficient NVENC. Planned to re-encode all my videos to use less storage.

 

Storage - I think 1TB of fast SSD should be enough to start. Planning to expand it with 2 more TB of fast SSD, few (up to 8) HDDs for RAID and maybe some SSD drive for RAID caches. Does it work like this?

 

MB - Just found anything that matched my specs and had 8 SATA ports. Not sure, whether I need 8, but why not? Also, I saw that it has RAID support. Is it usable at all?

 

Case - Want it to be rack-mountable and with depth up to 60cm (23in).

 

Power Supply - I just randomly chose one that exceeds 1kWt. Not sure what to look at.

CPU Cooler - Not sure how to choose it.

Case coolers - I also have no idea at what should I look here.

 

I'm planning to buy parts either from Poland or Ukraine.

I searched those mainly on https://www.x-kom.pl/ and for US$ you could just divide them by 5. (It's actually 4.4, but I'm be able to get like 10% discount, so it's going to be near 5).

 

Do you have any suggestions? Any comments?

Maybe you need some extra details that I missed here?

Thanks!

 

[jaslion]

So this is A LOT

 

You want:

A nas

A productivity machine

A gaming machine

A remote workstation

A game server

A Proxmoxbox

A machine learning box

A ....

 

All is possible EXCEPT gaming machine as anti cheat blocks vms.

 

So basically remove the gaming machine here and just get like a johnsbo n1 and put it on a rack shelf  or rack nas case with a ryzen 5600g. Plenty for all those usecases part from gaming and machine learning

 

Or a used hp dell whatever micro server with hdd bay attachment case.

 

Then make yourself a nice gaming machine/workstation and steam in home stream to your tv or parsec or whatever you please.

 

The first step of a homelab is knowing when to split your hardware. In this case all the servery nassy bits go in the homelab and all the powercrunching bits become a normal computer at your desk and just get a 13600k there.

 

 

 

[Blqckqut]

get a 6950xt instead of 4070ti, seriously, why does everyone keep going to nvidea, do people forget AMD exists? whatever, 6950xt is BETTER than 4070 ti, (if u dont care about ray tracing) idc if you want dlss, 6950xt with FSR is STILL better than 4070ti WITH DLSS, and its like 300 bucks cheaper, u can upgrade your nas or other parts with that

[IkeaGnome]

8 minutes ago, Blqckout said:

get a 6950xt instead of 4070ti, seriously, why does everyone keep going to nvidea, do people forget AMD exists? whatever, 6950xt is BETTER than 4070 ti, (if u dont care about ray tracing) idc if you want dlss, 6950xt with FSR is STILL better than 4070ti WITH DLSS, and its like 300 bucks cheaper, u can upgrade your nas or other parts with that

You’re missing that this OP has a legitimate use for Nvidia over AMD. 
Fusion 360, Davinci Resolve, VMs, and ML will all work a whole hell of a lot better on Nvidia. 
If someone is trying to just game then AMD can make a lot of sense. Start getting into more workstation uses and AMD just doesn’t compete from a cost to performance point. 

[Blqckqut]

5 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

You’re missing that this OP has a legitimate use for Nvidia over AMD. 
Fusion 360, Davinci Resolve, VMs, and ML will all work a whole hell of a lot better on Nvidia. 
 

davinci runs better on nvidea? i didnt know that, my bad, i use vms and davinci and see a huge upgrade from my 3050 to 6750xt

[IkeaGnome]

38 minutes ago, Blqckout said:

davinci runs better on nvidea? i didnt know that, my bad, i use vms and davinci and see a huge upgrade from my 3050 to 6750xt

That's the fault of the 3050. Blender is where you're going to get the bigger boost from going to Nvidia.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/nvidia-geforce-40-series-vs-amd-radeon-7000-for-content-creation/

[ILove47]

2 hours ago, Blqckout said:

get a 6950xt instead of 4070ti, seriously, why does everyone keep going to nvidea, do people forget AMD exists? whatever, 6950xt is BETTER than 4070 ti, (if u dont care about ray tracing) idc if you want dlss, 6950xt with FSR is STILL better than 4070ti WITH DLSS, and its like 300 bucks cheaper, u can upgrade your nas or other parts with that

Hi!

Thanks for the suggestion!

I thought that Nvidia is a bit better match for my needs because more software is optimized for them. However, I don't think that the performance difference will be really huge.

But I just checked pricing and I can see that I can buy 4070ti $40 cheaper ($840 for 4070ti vs $880 for RX 6950 XT). Is it worth switching GPUs then? Because it's 12G for 4070 ang 16G for 6950. Would I see a difference?

 

[ILove47]

2 hours ago, jaslion said:

So basically remove the gaming machine here and just get like a johnsbo n1 and put it on a rack shelf  or rack nas case with a ryzen 5600g. Plenty for all those usecases part from gaming and machine learning

...

Then make yourself a nice gaming machine/workstation and steam in home stream to your tv or parsec or whatever you please.

I was actually thinking about this, but thought it will be much more expensive, because then I'll be building two PCs, not one.

However, I think, I'll go with this approach because the power draw of a powerful PC will be huge even when not full power (at least I think so).

 

Saying, I'd like to start with a PC for gaming (+DaVinci Resolve +Fusion360) and 4070Ti (or 6950) fits my budget - what CPU should I look at?

Is it still 13900? Or 13600K will be enough? Maybe any AMD alternative in case I choose 6950?

And for the RAM - I think, I'll stick to 2*16GB sticks with ability to add two extra to be a bit futureproof? Or that will be an overkill?

 

Thanks!

[jaslion]

1 hour ago, ILove47 said:

I was actually thinking about this, but thought it will be much more expensive, because then I'll be building two PCs, not one.

However, I think, I'll go with this approach because the power draw of a powerful PC will be huge even when not full power (at least I think so).

 

Saying, I'd like to start with a PC for gaming (+DaVinci Resolve +Fusion360) and 4070Ti (or 6950) fits my budget - what CPU should I look at?

Is it still 13900? Or 13600K will be enough? Maybe any AMD alternative in case I choose 6950?

And for the RAM - I think, I'll stick to 2*16GB sticks with ability to add two extra to be a bit futureproof? Or that will be an overkill?

 

Thanks!

13600k and the 4070ti for gpu acceleration 32gb is a good starting point too

 

 

 

 

[ILove47]

So, I've tried to gather few future-proof components for the gaming part:

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i5-13600K 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor  ($300.00) 
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15S 82.52 CFM CPU Cooler  ($90.00) 
Motherboard: ASRock B760 Pro RS ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  ($160.00) 
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-4800 CL38 Memory  ($120.00) 
Storage: Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  ($180.00) 
Video Card: PNY VERTO GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 12 GB Video Card  ($950.00) 
Case: Fractal Design Meshify 2 Compact ATX Mid Tower Case  ($130.00) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic VERTEX GX-1000 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  ($280.00) 
Total: $2210.00

 

 

Do you think, it will work well?

BTW, how do I check whether everything will fit? I mean, GPU covers some slots, Cooler takes a lot of place and could interfere with RAM.