Beginner, zero xp, homelab build questions

Hardware Hub Build a PC
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I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of looking into homelabs. I’m in my 40s and I’d like to learn something new. I’ve built PCs in the past but have zero experience with Linux or Switches and the like. I have enough hardware to put something together without buying anything other than a PSU and maybe more RAM. I’m interested in something involving:

  • Minecraft Servers for kids/family.
  • Plex or Jellyfin.
  • Family photos/video storage.
  • VPNs, Ad Blockers, etc.
  • Console Emulation.
  • Simple Website Hosting.
  • Network stuff for the house.

I figure starting with media streaming, Minecraft servers, and photo/video storage would necessitate learning about some of the other stuff. Mixed family so our kids split their time at their other parents’ house and would need to remotely access their Minecraft servers, etc.

I have the following in terms of hardware:

  • Asus Prime z790-P Wifi, 32gb ddr5, 13700k
  • MSI z790 PRO-A Wifi, 16gb ddr4, 12700k
  • Gibabyte b450m, 16gb ddr4, 5600x
  • 2 x 4tb Ironwolf HDDs, 1TB NVME x 2, 500gb NVME, 256GB SATA SSD, 500GB SATA SSD
  • Asus Prime 201 and a Fractal Meshify 2
  • Asus 1050ti.

I have other hardware (some higher end gpus, 7800x3d, Asrock 670E board) but those are all for gaming pcs. The above is what I wanted to utilize. I was thinking about going with the build below:

PCPartPicker Part List:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor
Motherboard: Gigabyte B450M DS3H WIFI Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory
Storage: Samsung 850 Evo 250 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Storage: Inland Professional 512 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Storage: Seagate IronWolf Pro 4 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive
Storage: Seagate IronWolf Pro 4 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive
Video Card: Asus Phoenix GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB Video Card
Case: Asus Prime AP201 MicroATX Mini Tower Case
Power Supply: MSI MAG A550BN 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply
(This is the only item I need to buy. I don’t have a spare PSU.)

I can make an NVME drive available to stick in the above build. Again, I have zero experience outside of building a couple of PCs. Not expecting to pick this stuff up overnight. The 5600X is currently in my daughter’s rig, I have the 13700k in my rig, and the 12700k setup (MSI Pro Z790 DD4 16gb) is not currently in use. I was going to put the 12700k in my daughter’s rig, but I’m open to building something in the Meshify 2 with one of the Intel set ups if that makes more sense to work with since I have no experience at all. I don’t know if the additional PCIE lanes etc. are important starting out.

If I go the 5600x route should I be concerned about 16gb of ram not being enough? I could buy another 16gb kit for the 12700k and stick 4 x 8gb sticks in the 5600x build.

For internet/networking I have my ISPs modem/wifi router combo. I have some dell rewards cash that I was thinking of using on a TP Link TL-SG108E (8 port unmanaged switch with some management features?)

Thanks for reading my wall of text here. Won’t let me post links, so sorry about that as well. And if there’s a place anyone would recommend starting I’d appreciate the input. There’s a ton of content out there, but I’m not finding much that starts me at square one…I’m assuming I just put the build together and crash and burn until I figure some basic stuff out.

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I’ve had bad luck with coil whine from TP Link switches (the power bricks, specifically). Monoprice (used to?) sells switches as well, and it had no coil whine. At this point, I’d say get a 2.5gb switch, since most things will start coming with 2.5gb ports. Unmanaged switches are something that tend to last multiple decades unless VERY poorly built.

I can’t really speak to the requirements of MeinKraft or Plex. I will say that while more expensive, moving your movie storage to SSD from HDDs is life changing. Especially when more than one person is watching content at a time. Or when you have someone who likes to skip around. For movies, cheap SATA SSDs without DRAM caches are fine. Avoid QLC flash drives. How do you tell? Look up performance reviews. If the drive can’t hit and maintain 500MB/s sequential read and write, it’s using QLC flash. Cheap drives from 6 years ago could hit 500MB/s sustained speed, so that really is the bare minimum; anything slower and you’re just wasting money, better off with a HDD.

If space is a premium, convert/download your movies to use H265 instead of H264. A 17GB 264 movie will be around 7GB in 265, with no visible (as in pixel-peeping screenshots) quality loss. AV1 is still far too performance intensive to be recommended.

One thing to be aware of: Nvidia has limits on how many encode streams they support. There are/were ways to jailbreak that limit. But hopefully someone else with more knowledge can comment. By parallel streams, I mean, if you have 3 kids and the 1050 was limited to 2 streams, then only 2 kids could watch content from Plex at a time. Plex always re-encodes the stream, so be aware of that potential limitation. And maybe my data is outdated.

1 Like
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Hi @HeySourpuss , welcome to Level1!

the good news is that in today’s world everything is software. So, the hardware you have is plenty sufficient to get started. With time, you may find that you want to upgrade a thing or two, but at that time you know why and will feel confident about it.

Man, how did you get into your 40s without picking up Linux? (just kidding). The good news is that you have a list of apps you would like to get working. That will guide you as you get onto your wild ride around building a home lab.

I recommend starting with a basic NAS.

  1. Find a spare computer or build one from parts.
  2. Install a NAS. I recommend TrueNAS scale (scale because it’s Linux underneath, but you’ll find other opinions here). It will just work (c) for file sharing, and comes with quite a bunch of other apps (hundreds) ready to deploy. I recommend checking out Jellyfin, PiHole, NGinx Proxy, Piwigo. These apps alone will tick off many boxes off your wishlist
  3. Create a virtual machine in TrueNAS, pick your favorite Linux distro you want to learn (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu) and install. Pick a small project, e.g. running a minecraft server. Make it happen.

This list will keep you quite entertained for a while as you learn all the new software apps. I’d put networking off until you feel comfortable with all the aspects above.

From the last point to engage with networking,

  1. Watch a youtube channel like this one.
  2. Install PFsense or OPNsense into a virtual machine in TrueNAS
  3. Get a cheap managed switch (something like this or something like this)
  4. Get at it!

… and most importantly:
HAVE FUN!

1 Like
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@HeySourpuss Welcome to the L1T Forums, hope you have a grand time :slight_smile:

@Jode gives some very good advice for beginners. I would like to focus more on the hardware side of things, that is, what is a good homelab server hardware in 2024?

Well, for your use case I would say remote Console Emulation would be the most demanding thing, though if you just need somewhere to store your roms legal backups of totally legit purchased software, then that is different. Regardless, most of what you want to do can easily be done with a mid to low tier CPU here.

So we have two things to look out for, one is performance and the other is power draw. Keeping a system running 24/7 turns out to not be very cheap, since every watt this thing draws from the wall equates to roughly .72 kWh per month. At a constant load of 250 Watts, that is going to cost you ~180 kWh a month, which is not that fun to pay, even if your electricity is cheap. Over a year that system might be as high as 10% of your yearly electricity bill. 250W idling is not unusual for an EPYC or Xeon system.

On the other side of the coin, a Raspberry Pi setup would sip power around the 5W-15W range, but not have enough performance to do much of anything. You could build a janky NAS from it or one of it’s many clones, but the performance would be almost worse than a regular local HDD. What good is a 10GbE connection if you can only transfer at 500 Mb speeds?

In my opinion I prefer something a bit more well-rounded. Here, for instance, is a small ITX build that can still do Plex transcoding and support ECC memory. I post this to let you know what to aim for, not necessarily build this exact build.

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 5 7600 $198.81
Motherboard Asus ROG STRIX B650E-I GAMING WIFI $311.99
Memory NEMIX RAM 2X16GB DDR5 4800MHZ CL40 ECC UDIMM $136.48
Storage Samsung 980 250 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 $60.21
Video Card ASRock Low Profile Arc A380 $119.99
Case Jonsbo N3 $166.00
Power Supply EVGA SuperNOVA 550 GM 550 W 80+ Gold Fully Modular SFX $99.99
Total $1093.47

Now, this is more pricey than it could be. If you were to switch to a 14100 build instead and skimp on the case and ECC RAM, you could easily come down to $600-$700, but then you would lose out on quite a few really nice features. You do not need niceties like ECC RAM. This does not mean these features are worthless in a home setting.

I also recommend that you consider going up the stack a little. A Ryzen 7900 is “only” another $150 and provides double the computing power. Though, to be clear, a 7900 is overkill unless you plan to start running desktop VMs or compile the Linux kernel once every 20 minutes.

I hope the above helps some to avoid the most common pitfalls, and good luck!

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Thanks for the responses. Probably should have been more clear and concise. I have no experience with Linux, servers, networking, etc. I have built PCs. I have some existing parts: a 5600X with a B450M board, 16gb of ram, a 1050TI, and 2 x 4TB HDDs with some SSDs. I’d like to run some Minecraft servers for the kids, plex/jellyfin, VPN, etc. I was also planning on picking up one of those inexpensive TP unmanaged smart switches that have some management features. Is that sufficient to get started or should I pick up more RAM?

Alternatively, I have a 12th and 13th gen intel I7, mobo, and ram (16gb ddr4 and a 32gb DDR5) which would give me more PCIE lanes that I could use for the build instead.

Finally, where should I start? Just pick either Proxmox or Unraid or something and attempt to get it up and running?