Budget home ESXI build

[DanQYou]

Good Afternoon LTT,

 

I'm currently looking at building an ESXI host with a vmware hypervisor for a home fileserver / some testing VM's. I don't need a hugely powerful machine as this will be purely for playing around with so i'm thinking minimum 16 GB RAM & 8 or more threads with 500GB of storage . I need to somehow keep the power consumption low which is very difficult with server hardware which is making me consider standard desktop components, the device will be kept in my bedroom so a 1U rack server might wear thin quickly.

 

I have looked at just buying old server hardware from ebay e.g:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-T3600-Precision-Workstation-Octa-Core-E5-2660-Ram-16GB-HDD-1TB-NVS300-W10-/263091299204?hash=item3d4176a384:g:T8AAAOSweIlZanJy

 

Would you recommend going for used hardware or working on a fresh build myself (looked at using a RYZEN 5 just for the fun but I know this would be a waste.)

Cheers in advance!  

[Crunchy Dragon]

I personally have a harder time trusting used components(read a story on Reddit the other day where a guy bought a used PS2 full of cockroaches), and also because new components are less likely to fail. So I would say go for new(if possible)

[DanQYou]

Yeah, I saw that on the front page in the last few days.... Gross! 

[paddy-stone]

I see no problem with going for ryzen 5, BUT there is a 16 core Atom coming out soon SOC. That's what I am waiting for ATM to upgrade my server/NAS again even though I only just changed it to desktop components I had spare (i7 6700k). No price has been released yet, but the amount of hardware on the mobos is excellent.

MA10-ST0 (rev. 1.1) | Server Motherboard - GIGABYTE

[DanQYou]

##UPDATE##

 

Hey Guys! - Potential change of plan.

 

I bought a dual Xeon X5650 Dell poweredge T410 tower server with 32 GB of 1333mhz RAM. Loads of power to play with! However after a bit of a look on youtube you can overclock these chips to run at 4Ghz stable, this makes them potentially pretty damn decent for gaming! 

 

Howerver... my Motherboard will only supply up to 25 watts to the (terribly placed in the T410) PCI-E slot. Would it be worth getting a large gaming case (t410 has virtually no opportunities to improve on cooling) and an aftermarket PSU to add a GTX 1070?

 

Kind Regards,

 

Danny