Just came across this post on Reddit (yetch, I feel sullied and unusual) and am sharing it because…god damn…that’s the endgame right here -
If you’re on here CaptainRedsLab, that’s an amazing rig.
Nb: I am not the creator of this project, I have no affiliation with them and I cannot answer any questions based on their build. I just think it’s cool as a shit and am sharing. YMMV
100%.The strongest PC in my homelab right now is my old gaming PC featuring an i7-4790k, 16gb RAM, and sometimes it has a GTX 680 and others a 730 (neither right now though, for Reasons). 2nd place goes to a dual-core, 4-thread laptop from 2012 with hinges so broken I have to lean the screen back against the wall behind it. And before I retired that old gaming PC last year, that laptop ran my personal Jellyfin server for well over a year with no major issues!
I love the fact that your example of a “small-ish” homelab is way more overpowered than mine. Because my entire 40+ containers homelab runs off of a 13 yo NUC with a 10+ yo HDD and a (new!) SSD plugged into it. I regularly want to replace it by a more recent NUC but… there is not good reason, yet.
Here I am, with my Raspberry Pi 2B and a few Orange Pi Zeros. Plus one Intel Atom 230 (an obsolete thing from circa 2010s if not older, it has DDR2 memory) as a file server. Most of my servers are at Intel Atoms old motherboards with these integrated processors. They are decent for what I do.
That first rig is the exact specs I have for building my first self hosting set up (with a GTX 970 or radeon r9 290x if I need a GPU, but I have yet to learn of a reason I would), so that’s good to know I’m starting out at a good level.
Having a GPU is nice if you start letting other people access your Jellyfin server; transcoding for some video files can be tough on the CPU, and if it’s trying to do more than one at a time, stuff can get laggy. But unfortunately, trying to get my ancient GPUs to do anything has been a nightmare! Besides the architecture itself being old, it seemed as though Nvidia deprecated some of the features I needed on the official drivers, and the Nouveau docs have been a headache to sort through. I think, maybe, probably, it’s technically possible, but I’m burned out on messing with it at the moment.
That 970 might be recent enough to work with a little less hassle though!
Yep just use what you’ve got! I’m running my server off a little workstation I got for free from work. I’m working on setting up another server for my sister on one of her old laptops then we’ll use each other’s as off-site backups and for redundancy. Work with your friends and family to get them off big tech too! Pretty much everyone has some old system sitting around that could be brought back to life and act as a server.
For the rebellion!