Home Server Hardware Round-Up

[@Nec89]

Can confirm that having a 42U rack in your home does increase those digits on the electric bill. But that's literally the price to pay for being a data hoarder.

[@idontwantachannelimjustcom7745]

But in winter that rack saves on your heating bill.

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

@@idontwantachannelimjustcom7745 Water cooled pcs are as efficient as gas or oil boilers which are considered the most efficient heating systems. the main loss is in the transition from line voltage to house voltage and then house voltage to 12v,3.3v and 5v. Agree

[@jlficken]

I have a 25U rack sitting next to my office desk with 2 Supermicro 846 systems and 2 Supermicro 836 systems in it currently. Only 1 of each is running though constantly with the others being for backup and/or tinkering. With the 2 systems and switch running it's using 550W 24/7/365 which is ~$45/mo where I live.

[@magfal]

@@tobiwonkanogy2975 water cooling does not add any efficiency when acting as a heater. Your computer's heating efficiency is equal to that of a resistive space heater. A lot less efficient than a heat pump which every single air conditioner in places that ever need heating should have been capable of working as. Oh and those losses you're talking about are lost as heat.....

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

@@magfal heat pumps are great for near freezing temps . below -7 its just spinning for the sake of it. electric heaters are 100% efficient provided all of that energy goes to heat . would being able to complete tasks simultaneously as producing usable heat not be above 100% efficiency then? also air will cool off at freezing within one hour ,water will take about 12 hours to cool to that same temperature. So maybe i mean to say btu content is higher with water-cooled systems.

[@questionablecommands9423]

1:08 Home-lab pro tip: 37U racks will roll through most standard doors, making moving a lot easier.

[@tw1tch09]

This comment shall serve as the official petition for Wendel to permanently wear a cowboy hat for an indefinite period going forward.

[@liamfoneill]

I run my old 6700k machine as a home server and couldn't be happier with it. I found that running all my services as Docker containers vs VMs was much less overhead and the machine is cool, quiet and fairly sippy on the wattage. It's running about 20 different services including Plex without breaking a sweat. I'll upgrade....eventually.

[@Chris_miller192]

The AMD 5600G and B550 motherboards will idle at around 15W. The G series processors don’t have the I/O die; it’s a monolithic chip. It runs with a lower power as a result.

[@timli1871]

Can the G series run ecc mode ?

[@Chris_miller192]

@@timli1871 Not the G. The “G pro” can. It’s an OEM product only though, so it’s not really obtainable.

[@ssu7653]

@@Chris_miller192 just buy a OEM machine as you base...

[@MultiKokonutz]

Pci-e bifurcation is a godsend. Suddenly a mini-itx motherboard is more flexible than a full-atx. On a server-type build, I'd much rather have many pci-e at 4x or 8x than a single 16x

[@sidichochase]

agreed. and with pcie 5 bandwidths it becomes even more useful. Here's hoping the W790 chipset arrives soon

[@sjukfan]

Luckily I have a strict "no rack mounted computers at home" policy, or I'd have a 10 core PowerPC server, and now a 8 core Sparc T4-1 server. It should be easier to put server motherboards in cases with fans that don't sound like a fighter jet.

[@morosis82]

You can, but only the atx style ones. I'd love to have some way to reuse blades without the crazy chassis, often the nodes themselves can be quite cheap and I want a test cluster that won't actually run all the time.

[@Noobish588]

I have to do the same, i started out with a janky little ATX home server which how now evolved into multiple 1U and 2U servers for little reason other than because I can

[@timmy7201]

I build my servers inside of an IKEA kitchen closet., that was a lot cheaper.. Drilled some holes int it for Noctua fans, the rattling of my harddisks make more noise than the fans... It's also very easy to remove a drawer from the closet, whenever maintenance or repairs are needed. My setup has the storage server (6 x 18TB mdadm raid 6) in the bottom drawer, the second drawer is still empty, the third drawer has my vbox Proxmox server, the top drawer is for networking...

[@mytech6779]

You can fix the fan issue by fabricating a duct to a larger fan diameter. Short form funnel shape or remote flex tube. Assuming you don't need to maximize rack density. Could even duct in outside air in the winter or dump hot air outside in the summer depending on actual temperatures involved.

[@MichaelSmith-fg8xh]

There's an IKEA TV unit that is mesh sided and holds 6 ATX sized cases (eg Silverstone HTPC)

[@chainsaw2010]

Oh boy that M.2 to 2.5G nic is perfect for turning my old Thinclient into a Pfsense router. Thankyou L1Techs

[@BobHannent]

Watch out, you're playing with Realtek drivers if you're not careful, and if you get an Intel 225 you need to make sure you're getting a V3 edition.

[@chainsaw2010]

@@BobHannent Thankyou for the heads up.

[@Duncan_Campbell]

If you spot the right thin client some have pcie 4x slots in them.

[@andycrz3960]

where is the link to it ?

[@jeremylindemann5117]

@@BobHannent Is the revision number marked on the card? I've seen v3 mentioned twice today or better still, get the i226.

[@linkdude64]

Thanks for being you, Wendell. Everyone really likes you, and you're just great.

[@VRLunatic]

This was like a superior version of QVC for computer hardware nerds. Awesome work as always!

[@BikingWIthPanda]

i'm off grid on solar and the low-power Celeron J4125 system uses about 3 watts at idle. systems like this are invaluable and I would love more insight from your beautiful mind on the subject.

[@BikingWIthPanda]

currently battling storage power efficiency, having a 4-device (2-hdd, 2-ssd) external storage array that uses 30-40 watts is actually a lot more power than you'd expect. any ideas on having 16tb of mirrored storage without spending that much on power consumption?

[@hamzashaikh9310]

I assume you have a budget. But if you have lots of money check out the recently released asus zenbook laptop having amd 6800u chip running at 15w sustained under load. Ridiculous power efficiency both in idle and in load. Those 6800u based laptops are looking real good as servers due to their power efficiency.

[@hamzashaikh9310]

As for storage power efficiency, i believe sk hynix p41 platinum 2tb ssds are the current most efficient ones. But i prefer teamgroup mp34q 8tb ssd due to its bigger size per ssd.

[@BikingWIthPanda]

@@hamzashaikh9310 it would work best if it has wake-on-lan but i'm currently using a 2500u that runs at less than 20 watts under load too

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

I'm not sure if I have a thin and light as it was given broken . I believe I use a ryzen 3500u laptop configured to either 10 or 15 watts all in . A low end brand new mini ryzen pc configured to the same tdp would presumably blow the Celeron out of the water.

[@BobBobson]

The power savings of Ryzen is fantastic. I upgraded from a T7500 with dual X5687s to a 5600x and it's been incredible. No more max system draw of 500W.

[@morosis82]

It's not just Ryzen. I run an Epyc machine and even with a lot of stuff connected it's just over 100W fairly idle for 32 cores, 256GB 3200, 8 HDD, a video card, 4x nvme SSDs and a couple of SATA SSDs.

[@Timichaud]

Hey! I have a dual X5690 (2x 6c/12t) and I plan to switch it for a 5950X AMD. I run on my dual x5690 proxmox and trueNas and vms and dockers so I worrying about switching from dual xeon to a 5950 amd but I think it will handle nicely and put it in a rack case and put graphic cards for gaming too. What do you think? Because my IBM with dual x5690 cant have gaming GPU x16 slots and its so loud and cost electricity badly

[@morosis82]

@@Timichaud the 5950 will run literal rings around the dual Xeon. The main reason not to go consumer these days is lots of memory, and lots of PCIe. If your needs can be met within what that platform gives you then I'd suggest you don't even need a 5950 to easily exceed the power of dual Nehalem xeons.

[@caseyhefner1966]

I have that same model of Supermicro server that I saved from EWaste. 4cores. 16gb ram, 16tb usable storage. 500gb Cache. Been running great for over a year.

[@amessman]

When do we get to see the Wendell HomeLab Tour?

[@jacobnoori]

More server content please! Maybe you can advance into homelab level hardware next video?

[@chromerims]

3:52 -- Yes, dual NICs to ease the glidepath to virtualization. Great video 👍 Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.

[@thestrykernet]

Thanks for covering power consumption as that's one thing I'm really looking for as I consider replacing my SNB based Xeon server box. Quick note: the W680 lists the i5-12500+, and on Ark the i5-12500 and above shows ECC support, but everything below it doesn't.

[@kkr-xyz]

On Supermicro page there's also info about motherboards with R680 chipset supporting ECC memory for LGA-1700 (e.g. Supermicro MBD-X13SAZ-F). So maybe an alternative to W680.

[@thestrykernet]

That's supposed to be the embedded chipset, and the embedded processors do tend to support ECC across the whole line so it will be interesting to see what pricing ends up looking like.

[@Prometheus722]

Thanks for the video, Wendell. I built a home server in 2020 with the i3 10100 and it was really surprising how powerful, inexpensive and efficient it ended up being (30-ish watt idle before HDDs). It was also nice during the height of c-word that I could just walk into my local computer shop and grab one off the shelf, while AMD product was borderline non-existent. Its looking like the i3 has been an underappreciated value king for at least the past few generations.

[@slim5782]

Power consumption has become a real concern. Always looking to reduce HDD power consumption

[@MRPtech]

I've been running Intel NUC 12th Gen i7 with 64GB Ram + Mirrored Raid. Previously i was using refurbished Office PC which was using 3x more electricity while idle compared to current NUC. I am absolutely happy with my current system.

[@cromefire_]

With energy prices old hardware isn't that great, but higher end market new hardware is also expensive pretty fast... It's really hard to choose. Might be getting an E5-2683 V3, but with those prices a 5950X might almost make sense...

[@h2oaddict]

From lots personal experience, old hardware is usually a waste of time and money. Especially if you need a bit of ram...

[@cromefire_]

@@h2oaddict Well that processor would take DDR4, so RAM prices are the same it'd only be power and price probably

[@dev9619]

My PM friend at work sold me a Dell R510 with 96GB RAM and 2 TB for $100. It has helped immensely in learning different IT tools.

[@Sunlight91]

30W idle power for a Dell Optiplex??? I run an HP ProDesk 600 with an i5 9500 to host my websites. It uses just 7W in idle thanks to a platinum efficiency power supply and 12V motherboard. I guess the 8GB 2666 DDR4 is quite efficient as well as is the nvme SSD. It did cost just £150 on eBay.

[@gleep23]

Yeah enterprise gear is great for learning (Eg. Cisco lab), but 4U servers are way to noisy, hot and expensive to run. The Tiny Mini Micro / One Litre PCs are a superb alternative.

[@zone619]

Running my home server with ECC Ram & raid controller & GPU passthrough on AMD 4750G platform. It's amazing. Way better than those enterprise antiques I've been worked with.

[@camjohnson2004]

I used one of those M.2 to 2.5G adapters in my Thread ripper server (Zen+ so i has 3x NVMe slots on board) With you taking about the cable that connects the RJ45 port to the M.2 card not being ideal when it comes to signal integrity i got around that by building my own connector cable using CAT6 Ethernet cable and using punch down IDC connectors (similar to ribbon cable connectors used for series ports) that way the twitted pair remains mostly un-broken. sure its not as good as having it soldered direct the M.2 device but far better than the one they provide

[@matthew3353-t3o]

at 16:33, If that is an Intel X550-T2 then it should do 2.5GbE and 5Gbe. the older X540 NIC's only do 1Gbe and 10Gbe. Excellent Video BTW.

[@TheRogueBro]

I got an old Dell that I did unspeakable things too that is now my home server. i7-3770s (the "low power" model). Gave it 16gb of RAM (only a dual slot) and then put it in a Silverstone NAS case. It's been running strong like 5 years now. Runs my game servers, VM's for pi-hole, media storage, you name it! It's been the best! Although I would love to upgrade/replace it for more cores, RAM and more HDD space now

[@Quarky_]

That clip of Wendell foraging was hilarious :D :D Good job editor :)

[@ianranson3570]

Is there any reason you’d use the M.2 2.5G NIC over a USB 3 2.5G NIC? I have been using a USB 2.5G NIC for my home server because it was super cheap on Amazon (£9) and it seems okay - CPU usage does sometimes go fairly high, but not sure that would be any different with a PCIe NIC (but open to being told I’m wrong on that - from some brief googling around I couldn’t find a decent answer)

[@Sunlight91]

Probably USB has more overhead and latency, but it might not matter for your use case.

[@Chris-lb9wg]

Overhead, etc and I've had really bad luck with them. Last one ran great and one day got real flaky. Will definitely be giving this a try.

[@Chris-rm1pn]

Another advantage is that it's an Intel NIC, in comparison to reatlek for the usb stuff

[@EmilePolka]

those m.2/mini pcie nic, I usually dont use the breakout board for rj45 and instead repin it using a cat6 cable and directly connect it to a switch/modem/ONT

[@GreenCinco12Official]

a while ago I bought a relatively cheap Fujitsu Esprimo Q556 with 4 Core/8 Threads and upgraded to 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM. Proxmox Idle (2 Container, 1 VM) at around 14-16W. Small but great start into a homelab that does not need a lot of power (rip energy prices).

[@s1mph0ny]

I'm going to counter-signal you on running ECC for non-xeon processors on older intel generations. Definitely doesn't work for HP's "off-enterprise" workstation boards in the Haswell generation, and I've used a xeon on the same board so know there's nothing wrong with the setup otherwise. Makes for an unfortunate limitation because hardly any of the Xeons include an IGP, which means you need to give up at least a lane of PCIe for graphics. This is all being limited based on a configuration bit, the hardware is of course the same. Intel didn't make a completely separate run of xeons with 72bit memory controllers while leaving the normal boards behind, but it seems they've been manipulating board vendors into disabling the full function if the "wrong" cpu is installed.

[@andre-le-bone-aparte]

@17:49 - This is what we all are thinking... buying older Xeon retired workstations converted to homelabs or using custom Alder Lake builds.

[@exeptMusic]

I would do this, but im paying out of my ass for electricity right now. It is not an option to run old Xeon platforms

[@Quettesh]

I'm using unRAID running on Ryzen 5 3600 + B550 MB in second hand Define XL and I'm really happy with it so far. It is mostly for backups and media, so one 2.5Gbps LAN is more than enough.

[@leonf3678]

You can get one of those small aliexpress pcs with 4 2.5gb nics with the N6005 pentium for a small router too, they consume like 15w

[@comfysofa1549]

Ive got an r720 (backup) and an r730 (main machine) just sitting on a shelf....the noise problem is not an issue....if youre brave enough you can pull the stock tumbledryer fans and put in Nocturas - the ceiling rpm of the noctura is 3k - correctly wired in the onboard iDrac sees this correctly....ive left mine on for days/weeks at a time with no heat issues whatsoever and ive not seen the power usage go over 300w (about 150) is the normal load when doing its base plex job - plus you get the idrac control so you can remote power up and down....

[@Sudoer95]

One thing I will say is be careful when using AM4 for home servers since some mobos will outright refuse to post properly without some form of video out. I had to buy 2 boards before finding one that could successfully boot into proxmox without any form of video out.

[@180doman]

HDMI dummy dongle literally costs just few bucks. I also had motherboard which didn't boot without monitor. Bought the dongle for about 3$ -> problem solved.

[@Sudoer95]

@@180doman Thats not my issue tho, the AM4 cpus I use don't have igpus and I occupy all my PCIe slots with non GPU cards so this fix wont work if you literally dont have a video output device at all.

[@AegisHyperon]

Should've bought a server board and used the IPMI

[@Sudoer95]

I do have setups with IPMI im only mentioning this because in the video he talked about buying boards without such thing and wanted to mention it in case someone else went this route.

[@NamesGolden]

I'm hoping more homelabbers start building small off-grid solar power systems as a UPS for their lab. might cost a bit more than a plain UPS, but so does the rest of our crap. victron is the what most homelabbers should check out, but there are many all in one units like the mpp 1012 that will do the job for small labs and keep a fridge/sump pump going during long term outages. in most places you can get two used ~250w panels for well under $200. its a shame that grid-tie isn't very possible at a small scale in the US

[@Turalyon0001]

I love this video series, that's giving so many ideas ! Thanks Wendell.

[@jdogdarkness]

From what I understand the alder lake celerons and such like the 12100 only boost up to 4.1 GHz (allegedly 4.3 according to specs). I personally would want less than 12400 if single core is important for a project.

[@twistidclowns]

Ive done then same thing but I broke out the dremal and soldering iron, allowing my thin client to look stock from all but one side.

[@vulcan4d]

Still rocking my low power Xeon Haswell. Don't see a need for more in a home lab and now stupid low cost.

[@middle_pickup]

I would like to see idle power benchmarks for alder lake vs old xeons. Maybe x79 or x99 platform systems. Those Chinese boards for those old platforms have become popular home NAS plex servers. I'd also like to see x265 benchmarks on those. My server is either transcoding a bluray rip in handbrake, streaming my plex library or sitting idle. I'm simple, but I do want to know what the power savings are actually like.

[@Klorel123]

would it not be better to use a pentium silver? power draw otherwise seems to be much too high for home users. i have to calculate with 35eurocent/kwh. I can't let ordinary hardware run 24/7. And most users won't need a lot of performance, the server will just idle most of the time.

[@DigiDriftZone]

I recently bought a Mac Mini M1 16GB ram for a server for £600 second hand. I run Github Actions on it for continuous integration, it is my media server, it runs my Ansible stuff and it's super quiet and power efficient. It is connected to a small USB hub with 4 x SATA to USB adapters going to 2TB SSDs (8TB total at 500MB/sec on a budget) - all mounted under my standing desk and completely invisible. Something to consider!

[@mauldus]

Perfect timing! Just got my B550. Going to be my htpc/steamos/retro front end for my entertainment center. Playing media from my supermicro fileserver.

[@bcnom]

Hey Wendell! Have heard about your channel but have really dived into some videos recently as I'm on my homelab journey. Currently repurposing some mini-ITX machines into streaming vgpu machines and this video was a godsend. It makes sense but never guessed there would be M.2 form factor intel chipset NICs. Just picked one up and just want to say appreciate all your videos! :)

[@jacoblee4424]

Replaced my old xeon E3 workstation/server with the minisforum hx90 recently. Got rid of the wifi module on the m.2 a+e jack, and swapped in one of those NIC's. Best i could find was a realtek based one that was 1gbit as it needed to be low profile (think 90deg bend right off the header). It works great as an additional input for ethernet (used as a security onion listening port from my switches span). Power draw is down 40w from the old setup, and the new ryzen 9 w/ 64gb ram has a ton more power. Great video outlining these options!

[@chmedlychmedenstein916]

Dell 3040 idles at 65 watts?? My Dell 7040 machines generally idle under 20 watts. I'm curious what you have in that box... btw, haswell seems to be the turning the point where idle power levels really dropped low.

[@Digi20]

its very mainboard dependant - but yes. i have a haswell i5 powering my NAS and without the HDDs, its about 31W idle - thats with network card and a hot LSI HBA. so i guess around 20-22W without those. sandy/ivybridge was quite a bit more.

[@ewenchan1239]

I'm currently using the Beelink GTR5 5900HX mini PC and I'm running it for about a week now, and I'm still just checking it for stability. But so far, it's absolutely rock solid/stable. I bought the 64 GB of RAM/1 TB NVMe SSD option and it just humming along, with 10 VMs running concurrently right now and it's sipping power compared to my old Intel Core i7-6700K (which also had 64 GB of RAM as well, running the same 10 VMs). My Intel system (which also had a GeForce GTX Titan) was pulling around 200 W. The Beelink GTR5 5900HX is currently pulling somewhere around maybe like 40-50 W. Yes, the Beelink system probably costs more now than it would cost to build said Intel Core i7-6700K system, but the 5900HX also sports 8 cores/16 threads as well. And if I wanted to, I can set/configure the TDP on the 5900HX and take it back down to the default setting of 35 W, and cut the power consumption by some, and give up a little bit of the performance that comes with the 45 W TDP as well. But at least you can do that. So far, so good. REALLY happy with the system so far. (And the Beelink GTR5 sports DUAL 2.5 GbE NICs as well PLUS WiFi 6E.) So it's a great little system for a homelab. HIGHLY recommend it.

[@emlyndewar]

I know there are only so many videos you can do rounding-up mini PCs as home servers, but it is great content.

[@lOQl]

I just use a 5 year old HP Elite book mini, it, placed the biggest 2.5 inch HDD i could find in it and for expansion I just use USB HDD. It's a great setup for nextcloud dlna torrents and anything else you need through docker Power consumption is low and they even have reboot features on power out/resume. It makes no noise aside form HDD spinning.

[@Aint1S]

Literally on the day I bought some hardware to expand my network, this comes out! This is tempting. Just trying mesh my wireless network and extend it until I settle on the backbone.

[@Duke.Chocula]

This would be much better it was keyed A+E (Same as a WiFi card). Most of those Dell/HP/Lenovo systems come with a m.2 WiFi card, or at least a slot for one. PCIe 3.0 1x = 985MB/s or 7.8gb/s PCIe 4.0 1x = 2GB/s or 16gb/s After overhead I would think that these slots would be cable of 5Gbps and 10Gbps respectively. Plus would make use of a slot that is otherwise wasted.

[@joshua7551]

Wendel: "Cast off enterprise hardware" Me: So, like the 3 T420s that I got from work? Wendel: "Heres an Optiplex 3040 SFF" Me: 🙃

[@daymianhogue1634]

Thing to note on the Dell optiplexi 8th gen based ones are starting to be found reliably at good prices just snagged a refurbished i7 8700 (6 core 12 thread) one with no ram or storage for $140... but regularly saw 8-16GB ram with 250-500GB ssd ones for $300-400, which is the same price the i5 6400 (4 core 4 thread) with 8GB ram you put I the description is going for.

[@davidgermain]

what about the laptop mainboard? pull the wifi modules out of them and put in the nic module... low power 5 in on the case. yeah the power supply will be tricky but probably no worse than some of the other options

[@OwlishGeorge]

Personally I went with a SuperMicro EATX (EEATX? whatever their format is) board with a pair of old Xeons, 128gb of ecc and shoved it into a Fractal Design Define 7 XL with a bunch of cheap drives. Works great for just about anything I could want to do and gives me plenty of cores (20c/40t) and memory to work with for virtualization. Best part of it all is that it's dead silent!

[@mocfunkyy]

In using an old PowerEdge R210 II as my router with a quad 2.5G nic. 1 2.5g goes to modem and the other 3 go to my switch. Yeah it's older and less efficient hardware but it was super cheap up front

[@ethans4783]

I think a good conversation to have (if you haven't had it already), is the necessity for people to look for "server-grade" hardware for their self hosting needs. is there a huge benefit to getting a xeon compared to a core series chip if I'm just running plex and other assorted docker containers with some applications. my current setup is a Dell Optiplex 9020 with a i7 4770, 32gb ram, and 12tb in ZFS. minus storage the system was less than $200 shipped. add a used UPS and new battery for ab $50 in, is there anything else I could benefit from by upgrading to a xeon or other server grade stuff?

[@SharpsWorkshop]

If you're running ZFS, then ECC memory is a definite advantage. If your current platform supports that then you will probably be fine!

[@Digi20]

@@SharpsWorkshop its stil a myth that ZFS is more ECC dependent than other file systems. to my best knowledge, it is not. @ethan´s i also run a haswell sytem for truenas. got an i5 4690,nice midrange gigabyte board and 32gb ram for a bit over 100€. basically the board and cpu where bonus on top of the RAM. added the cheapest be quiet 400W psu for 35€ and put everything in a beautiful old lian li case i had flying around. works like a dream without any hickup.

[@Airbag888]

I recommend you guys Wolfgang channel and especially one of his last videos where he explains how to get your idle consumption to single digits

[@SkaterKonks]

All those small form factors are great and all, but how are you supposed to attach a bunch of HDDs?

[@alt5494]

It would be interesting if raptor lake had a 32 E-core CPU with no P-cores.

[@jasonoutman420]

That's what I want too, would consider a 16C variant also

[@Cooper3312000]

I’ve never had any problem with external storage or 10g nics over thunderbolt with VMware esxi just shows up as a pcie device.

[@m4nc1n1]

I just built a mini ITX box with a Intel Core i5-12400, 32GB DDR5 RAM and five 14TB WD Red. Running SCALE-22.02.3 on it now (learning TrueNAS), but the 2.5 onboard is not cutting it on throughput (about 70MB/s copy). When I tossed in a 10Gbe it got weird. Sees it...even gets an IP, but can no longer access the GUI unless I go through the onboard.

[@Chris-lb9wg]

Received my m.2 2.5gbe nic from Amazon and can't get it to run. Shows multiple PCI devices under Other Devices in Device Manager on nuc8. Intel drivers/pack does not help, ideas?

[@Richb711]

what about nested virtualization where you can choose the VM hardware e.g. assigning as many nics as you want to test with. I just don't know how well the bus would handle this.

[@spiralout112]

Alder lake with the w680 might actually be a great idea. Ive got a pair of R320's and a R720 that hasn't been turned on in months. Actually just run one 320 usually, and yeah idle power consumption is the name of the game and about the only consideration when it comes to upgrading. Also it's comical how quickly after getting a small rack I started thinking about a SFF setup. Either way if it could idle at 20-30w that would be sweet, performance isn't really a big deal but high clock speed would be nice. Just wish virtualization didn't love lots of cores so much.

[@IK4MS]

Yeah now all we need are W680 boards...

[@Sunlight91]

I run an HP ProDesk 600 SFF with an i5 9500 to host my websites. It uses just 7W in idle thanks to a platinum PSU.

[@spiralout112]

@@Sunlight91 Yeah that's the dream right there, lack of PCIE expandability is the only hang up I have with most SFF stuff. Probably move to something like that dell in the video with a pair of half height slots one day.

[@whocares3132]

I had a request. Could you put Idle power uses of motherboards with freshly installed OS(WIn and debian or ubuntu) only a ssd drive attached to it and nothing else except mouse keyboard ofcourse) ? For homelab I think this info is important

[@Level1Techs]

It's in the next video in the series :)

[@mytech6779]

My old synology NAS (single drive, 1G ether, Linux so more than just NAS) idles under 10w and peaks at 20-25w, the 1G ether is more than enough to saturate the WD-red spinning disk.

[@benjamintrathen6119]

There is a mainstream H670 itx board from asrock with dual nic, unfortunately the nic's arent the latest.

[@Chris-lb9wg]

If keyed the same, any reason this 2.5gbe card wouldn't work in place of the stock wifi m2 nic?

[@dh66]

Oh yea! Thanks for the heads up on the 5950x sale! I've been patiently waiting for a deep discount on it. Wifey gets my 3700x.... What to do with the 1800x though.. No board for it now!

[@R055LE.1]

Not just the electricity concerns anymore, the old enterprise equipment is just that.. old. I've run into situations where even though I had all the cores in the world a 4790k smokes them in actual performance. I run actual enterprise testing and apps at home and I got to a point where my Dell 610's are off completely, it just wasn't worth fighting them anymore.

[@ThineHolyBacon]

Current homelab is 3x Lenovo Tiny PC's w/ Mellanox Connect X-2's and 1x Mikrotik 10GbE SFP+ switch. About 6L of volume, including power bricks and all at 10Gigabit speeds :D

[@randaldavis8976]

I have a rack & some HP 9000 (d350/712) unix gear, getting a bit old now, but "retro". My current desktop will become my home server unless I go for a cheaper upgrade.

[@benjamintrathen6119]

UPDATE: ECC support for W680 chipset: Only on the i5 12500 and upwards in the product stack, same with 13th gen.

[@wisemasterbuilder]

Great Video for Our UPCOMING Projects! Thanks Wendell, L1Techs

[@Nightykk]

Sitting on an A300 with a 2200G, sipping about 14-16W, with a couple of VMs and several dockers.. More than plenty for what I do. Sadly the NAS next to it sucks about 35W doing nothing. That's my next goal to bring down. Did experiment a bit with using my old PC hardware as a server, managed to get a C6H mobo with a 1800X running at ~35W idle, with a slight undervolt/clock (3.6GHz boost).. It might still one day take over for my server/NAS... Still quite a bit more electricity sucking than the 2200G though, even if it has 4-6 times the power of that 2200G.

[@skyhawk21]

Hey where can I find cheap 2.5gb or 10gb nic for pci 3 x1 slot and or pci3 x4 and above slot and or usb 3 or c variety?? That works with server os software, also need a cheap 2.5gb switch and or 10 gb

[@crimsionCoder42]

I have a Nuc 9 pro and love it. Would you say that the NUC 9 Pro is still relevant for a home lab? They're dropping in price and I was thinking of going HA in proxmox with 3 of these. However, Lenovo came out with the Thinkstation p360 Ultra and you can get a similar size unit with a 12900 or 13900 with 128 gb ram. Should I wait till the price drops on the ultras or go with NUC?

[@benjamintrathen6119]

I also couldn't find 3200 ECC sodimm modules very easily with larger capacities.

[@mikescott4008]

Interested in the NUC to replace a Poweredge r220 for a hypervisor. My truenas runs on a t340 poweredge. Looking at replacing red WD drives with SSD for lower power.

[@JJaani]

Where is the video on the Ryzen open air build?

[@gempio2634]

I recommend doing some tests on Rocket lake CPUs. Ive managed to put together a homelab for about $400 but its i7 and 32 gig of ram. Add a small SSD and an efficient psu and its idling at 16-17W off the wall. I get that its more expensive than the optiplex but considering the lower power draw you will get your money back in a year.

[@yoman299mw2]

Any update video coming out with newer info? :)

[@Linkedblade]

Ive been reading that if you update the X550-T2 via windows, it does support 2.5 gbaset and 5gbaset

[@samghost13]

Thank you very much Sir. Question: Could i use my Ryzen 5800X ? I want to upgrade to AM5/X3D so the CPU cpild be used for a Linux Home Server

[@simoneatough6391]

That open air PC on the left, what is it? You mentioned it, but there is no link to any video or product

[@osrr6422]

I have one of those lil Dell SFFs (with an i3-4130t), makes a GREAT pfsense box.

[@Meister_Knobi]

I have bought an Dell Optiplex 3060 with i5 8500, 8gb mem and m2 250gb and a fresh proxmox Install ist idleing at around 10-12W

[@rasmusjonsson1348]

Hello! Is there a NIC that can run a subsystem (like a linux install) so that it's possible to boot a machine from a network storage (like NAS) and if so even control the computer by accessing the display output and emulate USB input (mouse and keyboard)? I might head over to the Level1 forum and check there.

[@tohur]

Just built me a cheap pfsense router with a quad 2.5 gigabit card found on newegg.. thing is a beast even it being built on intel fourth gen (old Living room PC). found a HP PC I got for free that was in a super small case that fitted micro ATX and was perfect to build a router in

[@goblinphreak2132]

What about a video about ultra-low latency gaming router setups? to ensure perfect gaming information transfer? because there are TONS of 3rd party articles talking about what to change to make gaming better, but there is no "scientific" verification.

[@LiLBitsDK]

hmm hadn't seen those nvme to 2.5gbit (or any gbit) had only seen them for pci-e slot and sata slots... so that is kinda interesting

[@JacobArthurA]

I tired to find the video on the open air system you talked about but couldn't, anyone have a link to it?

[@bfmvshinigami]

I have a 12400F + 3060. No other PC right now. Can I use this as both a server and my main PC simultaneously?

[@derekp6636]

been trimming the home lab down to all NUCs to save power and heat at the moment. the old t5500 was fun but the 11th gen cpu runs circles around it

[@hellosmarty7103]

What 5-bay hard drive cage is that on the open-air chassis?