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 ❤
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
Not the cores but you can get 2x16gb sodimms for something like an Intel (now Asus) NUC. But that won’t be cheap lol.
Dunno if there are 2x32gb kits but maybe some higher end mini-pc has 4 bank ram or even full length dimms.
Got a 490W or 650W PSU. Looks like the CPU is probably around 9-10 years. I’d say probably not much. I bet it’s idling would be around 120-200W depending on # of disks, disk type, and if your using the PCI slots.
For reference I’m running 4 Intel NUC11i7s, $400/unit bare metal, 64GB ram (2x32) $120-$130, and the most expensive part is the flash storage I am buying to fit my needs. Power on these are like 10W idle and max is like 60W each when using turbo.
I am not the best at estimating power usage but like I said depends on the configuration it has. That’s just CPU, not including powering everything else so it’s idle load will be higher. RAM, disks, type of disk, amount of disks, GPU or other PCI cards, etc every additional component adds to the idle watt usage.
They have some measurements from their machine though depending on GPU and CPU at least it’ll probably be higher. Also, if your hosting stuff 24/7 your CPU load won’t be 100% idle so you certainly would be higher than it depending on what you host.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s what I thought as well! I was quite surprised with what it still can do, so I’m really happy with it! Especially since I love giving tech a longer/second life when it’s still good. I always try to get the most out of it and this project is a great success :)
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).
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What are you going to host/ use the server for?
At least 10vms and one NAS system
10 VMs? For what? Have you heard of docker?
Not every project can run in docker/linux.
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?
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).
At that price, the hardware will be ancient and you will spend more on electricity in a year than you spent on the server.
there’s no solution? maybe mini pc’s?
Not with 64gb ram and 16+ cores on that budget
Not the cores but you can get 2x16gb sodimms for something like an Intel (now Asus) NUC. But that won’t be cheap lol.
Dunno if there are 2x32gb kits but maybe some higher end mini-pc has 4 bank ram or even full length dimms.
deleted by creator
You’re not going to get anything like that for $150.
~$200 will get you a nice mini PC with 16GB RAM
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
Have you tried picking yourself up by your bootstraps?
“67 hemi cuda!”
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
The hidden cost of power usage could be a lot more expensive then something more modern though lol
Look at my edit do you think it’s better?
https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkStation/ThinkStation_P500/ThinkStation_P500_Spec.PDF
Got a 490W or 650W PSU. Looks like the CPU is probably around 9-10 years. I’d say probably not much. I bet it’s idling would be around 120-200W depending on # of disks, disk type, and if your using the PCI slots.
For reference I’m running 4 Intel NUC11i7s, $400/unit bare metal, 64GB ram (2x32) $120-$130, and the most expensive part is the flash storage I am buying to fit my needs. Power on these are like 10W idle and max is like 60W each when using turbo.
do you think that this thing would be around 150W?? I think more about 50W Max, for example the cpu is relatively low-power
For comparison, I run a thinkstation p300 with i7-4790 (TDP 84W) 24/7 and the power usage looks like this:
Even when idling this old processor still guzzles 45W. Certainly not as nice as GP’s that only use 10W during idle.
hummm… yeah that’s a bit power hungry
I am not the best at estimating power usage but like I said depends on the configuration it has. That’s just CPU, not including powering everything else so it’s idle load will be higher. RAM, disks, type of disk, amount of disks, GPU or other PCI cards, etc every additional component adds to the idle watt usage.
for sure but even with all my stuff I think that something like that would draw around 40-50W idle and up to 90W running
Found this https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6943/lenovo-thinkstation-p500-tower-workstation-review/index.html#Power-Consumption-and-Final-Thoughts
They have some measurements from their machine though depending on GPU and CPU at least it’ll probably be higher. Also, if your hosting stuff 24/7 your CPU load won’t be 100% idle so you certainly would be higher than it depending on what you host.
Do you think it would be better to go to an consumer cpu instead of a xeon?
Agreed. 100% would not recommend going this route for a homelab, but it does meet every specified requirement
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.
Look at the edit I will maybe take that
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.
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.
I just want to correct something is that the TDP is the power under load, so if the cpu is not 100% used it could be 20 hours at 25W and 4 at 90W
Power scaling for these old CPU is not great though. Mine is slightly newer and on idle it still uses 50% of the TDP.
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.
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.
That’s awesome that you’ve got such an old PC doing so much!
That’s what I thought as well! I was quite surprised with what it still can do, so I’m really happy with it! Especially since I love giving tech a longer/second life when it’s still good. I always try to get the most out of it and this project is a great success :)
You might be able to find an HP DL360 for around that price
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.
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.
Yes, the only real drawback is the single channel memory connection, but that’s rarely a bottleneck.
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.
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.
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,
THX but your solution is way too expensive
That’s about the minimum price for what you’re asking.
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).
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.