Help building a low budget home server.

geobasinas · May 14, 2023

Hello I am George Basinas,

I want to get into the space of home servers.

My uses for home server would be streaming some 1080p media, coding, programming, some proxmox/virtualization and also some Minecraft gaming with two other friends.

Also note that I am from Greece and also my budget is around 600 euros.

I am open to mini PCs or old hardware but not used.

Any advice would be really helpful.

Levent · May 14, 2023

AM4 stuff makes a great home server because most (if not all) b450 and newer boards are able to post without a graphics card and you can get cheap boards and pair it up with something like R5 3600 or R7 2700X for tasks like yours.

In fact, that is what I am doing. B450M S2H V2, R5 3600(4G, 1.1v), 64G RAM (3600C16), 256G NVME and 4x4TB HDDs. Other than disks, all the parts were used or retired from my own PC. Total power draw of around 90w when I am scrubbing disks and stress-ng -c 12 on proxmox.

THAT BEING SAID, you really dont need much to do these. Check your used market, try to score a decent PC with nice CPU (Anything past 6th gen intel and first gen ryzen) and aim to get around 32G of RAM. Be mindful of your parts before you buy them, especially if you are getting early AM4 boards and intel boards. AFAIK, Intel boards wont post without a graphics card/iGPU present.

Domrockt · May 14, 2023

Threads 16 (12+4) i5 13400 200€ish
Asrock b760 pro rs 160€ ish
it has a slot for an 10Gbit Card for the future, who knows right?
32 Gb DDR5 crucial 80€ ish for the start get only one Stick you can upgrade later if needed.
Innovation IT Performance+ 2TB, M.2, Retail 80€ ish
get any cheap case you can find with a Powersupply that comes with it, even a 300-400 Watt one will do.

You can do anything with it.

Proxmox, igpu sriov(that means use it in up to 7 VMs AND dockers simultanious), transcode, gamehosting, coding.

give the gameservers/dockers your 4 E Cores and use the 6+6 P Cores for your VM's if you feel daring give some of your "Threaded cores" to the dockers aswell.