Upgrading my home server

[Kofurea]

Budget (including currency): Up to 700 euro's

Country: Netherlands

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Run (multiple) VM's, at least the home assistant one. Also want to use it for plex and maybe some light computational things (been interested in learning about machine learning, but that doesn't need to be optimized fast). I also might want to self-host a website, but mainly just for hobby not for traffic.

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): 

 

I currently have a home server I build from my ex's old home pc (I followed the LTT guide, but run ubuntu on it and use webmin to control it). I'm both looking for upgrade suggestions as well as potential pitfalls when swapping out a motherboard. I currently have an intel I5-3350P, but the motherboard and graphics card are like 15 years old so those I'll probably upgrade. With my workload I can also see upgrading the CPU but aside from plex (i don't stream above 1080p, dont have a device that can receive it) I'm not sure I need an upgrade. I'm not knowledgable enough to really know what matters for sustaining the workload.

 

I have 6 GB DDR3 ram (2 sticks), and another 2 4 GB DDR3 sticks I got from a friend. Is it possible to use them in the same system?

 

I won't need storage or a case, have gotten those the time I build it. Would love to hear suggestions!

[igormp]

8 hours ago, Kofurea said:

but the motherboard

If it's working I'd say to not touch/replace it, specially because you won't be finding anything new for this CPU.

8 hours ago, Kofurea said:

graphics card

Apart from the machine learning stuff (which you said you don't need to be that fast), I see no need for a GPU at all in this system. I'd should yeet it and save a couple bucks in your power bill.

8 hours ago, Kofurea said:

I have 6 GB DDR3 ram (2 sticks), and another 2 4 GB DDR3 sticks I got from a friend. Is it possible to use them in the same system?

Do you have 4 slots of ram in that mobo? If so, then yes, worst comes they'll run at the frequency of the slowest stick, but this shouldn't matter much.

[Kofurea]

Thanks for the resposne! I do have 4 ram slots so that upgrade is for sure possible. I would like to increase performance, so swapping out the MOBO and CPU is definitly an option. Does that give any problems with your OS that I need to take into account? Or could i just select the right boot drive in the BIOS and it just works?

 

Main reason is probably the option to have some VM's running, and I'm honestly in the dark about how computational power affects that. They won't be heavily used, but still.

[igormp]

2 minutes ago, Kofurea said:

so swapping out the MOBO and CPU is definitly an option.

I mean, if you don't need more performance then I don't really see why you'd upgrade it.

3 minutes ago, Kofurea said:

Does that give any problems with your OS that I need to take into account? Or could i just select the right boot drive in the BIOS and it just works?

Ubuntu shouldn't mind the system change, just keep in mind that the ordering of the disks inside the system may change with a different mobo, so you'd need to edit the /etc/fstab file through a live boot.

4 minutes ago, Kofurea said:

Main reason is probably the option to have some VM's running, and I'm honestly in the dark about how computational power affects that. They won't be heavily used, but still.

I'd say that having enough RAM is more important. If the VMs aren't that CPU intensive (which depends on what you're doing inside of each), then you won't need much CPU at all.

Also, why VMs instead of containers?

 

Anyway, it's pretty clear that you are not sure what you need or what you'll be doing. Just add those extra sticks of ram that you already have, and hold off on upgrading until you actually know what's the bottleneck for your workloads.

[Kofurea]

I think your last sentence sums up my points, thanks for the help. I havn't implemented a lot of my ideas into it and was already thinking about upgrades, but a see and wait approach is probably smarter. Thanks for the reality check!