6 mo. ago • 83%

What's a good budget home server?

EDIT : I'm going to use a Lenovo P500 (at around $130) with 8 threads (will upgrade it later) and 64gb of RAM. It support the E5 v4 family so that's great. If someone knows the power consumption, that would be cool!

Hello, I want to build a "homelab" and I'm searching for a server, what do you propose me as good options? I need something with at least 64gb RAM, can buy used, and minimum 16vcores.. Around 150$ If you have any good options let's comment below 👇 THX ❤

83 comments

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- Looking for recommendations for a racecar, at least 800 horsepower. Needs to hit 60 mph in under 4 seconds.
  
  My budget is $2000. Please give recommendations.
  
  LOL
  
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  “67 hemi cuda!”
  
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- Used HP ProLiant. It’s nearly 10 years old, but has 16 cores 64GB of RAM, and is just under $150 with free shipping
  
  https://www.ebay.com/itm/235286275608
  
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  The hidden cost of power usage could be a lot more expensive then something more modern though lol
  
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  Xeon E5-2670, with 115W TDP, which means 2x115=230W for the processor alone. with 8 ram modules @ ~3W each, it'll going to guzzle ~250W when under some loads, while screaming like a jet engine. Assuming $0.12/kwh, that's $262.8 per year for electricity alone.
  
  Would be great if you have an isolated server room to contain the noise and cheap electricity, but more modern workstation should use at least 1/4 of electricity or even less.
  
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  If they are up for that, I'd be happy to part with mine for cheap. They'd need to get an E5-2650 (v2) to meet their 16 core requirement but a pair of those are pretty cheap.
  
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  Wouldnt bother with Gen8. We literally throw them in the e-waste recycle bin.
  Either get a Gen9 if tight with cash (also EOL) or Gen10 servers which are currently supported and get current updates.
  
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  Look at the edit I will maybe take that
  
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At that price, the hardware will be ancient and you will spend more on electricity in a year than you spent on the server.

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- there's no solution? maybe mini pc's?
  
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  Not with 64gb ram and 16+ cores on that budget
  
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  No? The prices are out there for everyone to look at.
  
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Lmao dude thats simply not happening at that price.

You could get part of the way there with an old Dell server, but you’re probably gonna be paying closer to 2-300 for a decently spec’d one like you’re describing. You’re probably gonna be looking at a 10 year old twin quad core setup with a tdp of like 500W combined for JUST the cores. Your power bill is going to murder your budget, even if you somehow find a magical deal on the box.

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- You can usually find HPs for cheaper although they are pretty picky on what they work with. For some reason, HP decided that it will work with stuff they have not certified but the fans will constantly be at 100%.
  
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  I've edit the post with what I found, seems good and be more power efficient
  
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Bear in mind, a system that is built to be a dedicated server will be meant to crunch data. That means 2 things:

loud fans

heavy electricity use

If you just want a lab, I suggest getting a desktop PC and loading a server OS on it. Practical hardware experience isn't too valuable because platforms change and they usually make them super simple to maintenance with lots of online support. Getting a desktop will also save you some bread on initial investment.
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- A self-hosting server does not necessarily crunch data and it doesn't have to have loud fans or use lots of power. It can idle in the 15-20W range with an Intel CPU and if you put the HDDs on standby when idle.
  
  1
  
  Yep, I'm speaking in generalities. Overall, my point is that a homelab doesn't need something expensive because it may not be heavily used, so most of those features are not necessary. If the guy had mentioned running a business or customers, that'd be a different story.
  
  You even had to qualify your own statement that one has to modify hard drive power consumption to achieve acceptable noise levels.
  
  I had a SIEM running on a mini-pc like a champ. It cost me fifteen bucks and taught me a lot. Build to requirement, not title.
  
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Honestly that sounds overkill for someones. First time into self hosting.
I would start with something like a Nuc or a secondhand 1 liter PC (dell optiplex/HP elite mini/Lenovo ThinkCenter) which are dirt cheap on eBay.

Do you have an indication of what you want to run that requires that mid range gaming setup?

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- Definitely agree. If you need to spin up a bunch of discrete VMs for labbing, that's one thing, but noise, cooling, power consumption, and space all come into play for dedicated hardware. I host a variety of services and they all run on small, low energy hardware (which is often pretty cheap). I just spun up a matrix server on a $100 ebay HP ProDesk which has plenty of power (probably enough to deploy my whole stack).
  
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What are you going to host/ use the server for?

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- At least 10vms and one NAS system
  
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  10 VMs? For what? Have you heard of docker?
  
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Unless you have use case for that much horsepower I would suggest, like others here, buy a mini PC as a start and if you need more down the line buy a second one. They are cheap, fairly quiet and don't use much power.

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The only option that fits your budget today I can think of would be picking up one of the old xeon combos off of AliExpress. I spent like $100 on a MB+CPU+64GB DDR4 combo with a 2880 v4 I think. 14c/28t at any rate. You can probably grab a case/power supply/video card used for under $50 on eBay.

Please note that I'm not saying that this is a good option; it took a lot of fiddling for me to get mine running smoothly. But if you've got more time and patience than money, it might work for you.

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https://labgopher.com/

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- My man!!! I forget about this site!
  
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Damn, what do you need that much RAM for?

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- Virtualization
  
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- If it becomes an AI homelab, that's not so crazy.
  
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  I know there are valid use cases for that much, I just always like to check that they didn't just see an LTT video and think they need way more than they do.
  
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I'd recommend to go with some form of mini PC. If you don't need much CPU power there are some very cheap N100 ones where you can upgrade the RAM.

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- N100 are low power, but quite capable of doing most things you'll be asking a simple service box to do for you. Good option, and cheap.
  
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  Yes, the only real drawback is the single channel memory connection, but that's rarely a bottleneck.
  
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Are you just starting out? I got started with home labbing with a Raspberry Pi 2B (1GB RAM!) and an external HDD I had lying around. I host Yarr, Navidrome, backups and a dashboard app Ive written on there and I am quite satisfied. I would really recommend starting small with hardware you already have and then buy new hardware as you go along. I am also using Tailscale. With this you can get your initial setup up and running in a day and save money if it turns out home labbing isnt for you or you dont really need the hardware.

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- thx
  
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Any old Dell desktop/workstation/server should reach those specs. Poweredge rX30 and up, precision XX20/30 and up or optiplex (don’t know or understand that product line). Most of them are being rescued from the landfill. Might have to spend a crap ton over your budget, like 5-10x over, but you will get those specs.

Look at an r430 barebones, no cpu/ram and build from there using spec sheets from Dell on what it takes. I was able to get one for $400 3 years back, even came with 16gb of ram and a single 10 core Xeon e5-v3.

Also, what are you doing that need these kinds of specs? Running more than 10 VMs at once? Cloud gaming? Form follows function.

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- I want to run at least 10vms and one NAS system
  
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  What are the VMs for? Could you use containers instead?
  
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If your budget is $150, then you need to look for used options on eBay. Look for Dell Optiplex or Lenovo ThinkCentre towers. You will not find specs that good in your price range. But maybe you can get a decent CPU and save money to upgrade your RAM later.

MAYBE you'll get lucky and find an old Dell server on eBay. Sometimes IT guys will sell their company's old server for a profit. But I personally wouldn't buy one of those, the monthly electricity costs are stupid.

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Honestly, when it comes to your specified amount of Cores & RAM you'll have tough luck. Got myself a MiniPC with 5700U and 32GB of RAM, two 1TB SSDs (mirrored) and 3 NIC but that was still 500€ after waiting for a decent deal.

Even buying a used PC off eBay will most likely cost far more if you insist on your specs.

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- I've edit the post with what I found
  
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https://www.newegg.com/intel-nuc10i5fnhn-frost-canyon/p/2SW-000B-005P1

Intel NUC 10 Mini PC,Frost Canyon NUC10i5FNHN,Win10 Pro Intel Core i5-10210U,Up to 4.2GHz Turbo,4 Cores,25W Intel UHD Graphics,WiFi6,Thunderbolt 3(64GB RAM+1TB SSD)

$570 USD

This is basically what I run my home server apps with, all 10 or so in Docker. It's way more $$$ than you're hoping for but it kicks ass.

Good luck,

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- THX but your solution is way too expensive
  
  0
  
  That's about the minimum price for what you're asking.
  
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  You can bring the price down some by reducing the ram (since I think 16gb is plenty for this purpose) and the storage (like if you already have a NAS).
  
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I guess some perspective on some other comments here. I have a dell r720xd dual xenon's 16 total cores 128gb ram it uses roughly 200watts per hour with the 11000w power supplies. it can get fairly loud when using lots processing power. I bought a 12u rack to mount it nicely in my office. It is also my guest bedroom, while everyone we have had doesn't mind the noise not all guests would appreciate the white noise even with many of the cpu intensive stuff turned off and it as quiet as it goes. Fans full tilt would be obnoxious and hard to concentrate.

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I’m using an old gaming pc. 16 gb ram and i5 9400F. Less specs than what you’re looking for but I’m running Nextcloud, Plex (@4k), Pihole, home assistant, and an entire Debian virtual machine. All of that uses 10GB of ram.

If ya want budget, you can go really far with low specs.

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- Yeah, I agree. I've wanted to get into home servers for a while now. The final push was me running a Valheim server for me and my friends on my regular PC, while I also recently got some old parts from a friend that had build a new PC.
  I just needed to gather a few more parts that were missing (case, SSD and CPU cooler) and now it's running like a dream. It's some old-ass hardware: An i5 4460 with 8GB of DDR3 and a 250GB SSD. That's a 10 year old CPU. Doesn't seem like a lot and I haven't put a lot of services on it for now, but it still runs surprisingly well. I'm currently running a Valheim server with often 2-4, sometimes 5 or 6 players playing at the same time, Adguard and Syncthing. And yet, only 2.4GB of Ram is in use, with often around/less than 10% CPU usage, maybe a little more when a lot of people start playing VH. The CPU temps are around 30-33 degrees Celsius today, and that's only because summer is arriving. It was consistently around 25 degrees Celsius in the past week. Today I tried to add a Wireguard server to it, although I ran into some problems and I wanted to put some more thought into what OS to run anyway (It's just Ubuntu Server for now as I just wanted to get the Valheim server to run for now).
  
  I'm starting to get into an infodump, but long story short: You can indeed get really, really far with some very cheap hardware. I've only spend around 50-60 euros on it so far, by having some luck, patience and keeping an eye out for deals or viable hardware that people want to get rid of. You can always upgrade to something more powerful or more energy efficient, but if you just want to get into the hobby, you really don't need a lot.
  
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  That’s awesome that you’ve got such an old PC doing so much!
  
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You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.

For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.

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You need at least $1,000,000

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- And a helicopter.
  
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What are you actually gonna be doing? Not 10 virtual machines or whatever you said, what actual services are you gonna be running?

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- Sorry I says vm but in fact this is containers
  
  In Proxmox :
  
  VM with Truenas Scale VM with Debian to run docker :
  
  wireguard
  
  reverse proxy
  
  jellyfin (+ jellyseerr)
  
  radarr, sonnarr, prowlarr
  
  nextcloud
  
  pfsense
  
  duckdns
  
  zabbix (and maybe grafena)
  
  NUT
  
  Pie-Hole like
  
  2 websites
  
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I'm assuming you've never built a computer before because even 32 GB of RAM costs more than $150 🤣

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- 32 GB of DDR4 RAM is about 70 USD here. But you don't need 32, you can selfhost plenty of stuff on 16 or even 8 GB. Heck I ran mine on an old 4 GB stick for a couple of years when I first started.
  
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  I ran about 10 orb12 docker containers on my raspverry pi with 4gb of ram + Debian (and OMV5).
  Red lined the thing plenty of times.
  
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- Bro think about used part and I don't need 7200mhz ddr5
  
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- Huh?
  4x 30€ is not 150€ on my calculator (DDR4 RAM I bought for my Intel NUC which I use as my server)
  
  Now if we talk about DDR5, 2x 16GB, ECC and registered Kits...That might fit.
  The kit I bought was 148€ in April 2023. Even now it's 125€.
  And it's not really an isolated case of cheap ram...
  
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eBay and look for used Dell servers. I'd go for a Dell R2x0 series for a starter box. Maybe a used Dell Workstation if you want a tower.

2

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
LTT	Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NUC	Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
Plex	Brand of media server package
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage

[Thread #728 for this sub, first seen 30th Apr 2024, 23:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

You can find HP Proliant dl360 G8s and G9s for about that price if you want enterprise grade.

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- Or a single black ink cartridge for the same price
  
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I wouldn't worry about a specific number of cores, as that doesn't translate at all to CPU performance. Instead look at single thread performance.

So something with a Core i5-7500 on ebay for example, should be able to get one in your price range after buying more RAM.

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Go on eBay, punch in the price you're looking to spend and search for an old server. Keep in mind some manufacturers use proprietary connectors.

Look for servers with lots of ECC ram, clean photos of the internals.

They probably won't have a drive that's pretty common.

To meet that 16 core requirement, you'll probably be looking at older dual socket systems.

Edit: a quick search I found this. https://www.ebay.com/itm/225978893065?

Not a perfect match but the price is pretty good.

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You might be able to find an HP DL360 for around that price

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What's a good budget home server?

In Proxmox :