Homelab critique

Hardware Hub
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I have a somewhat unconventional way of heating my house, setup listed below.

  • workstation - i5-8600K, 32GB DDR4-2133, 2x Nvidia RTX 3090, Ubuntu 26.04 (friend’s e-waste aside from the 3090s) - Used for: llama-server hosting models (Qwen 3.8 27B, Qwen 3-VL 4B), Ubuntu 26.04 VM guest as LLM blast zone

  • laptop - Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 5, Ubuntu 26.04 - used for laptop purposes

  • mini PC 1 - i5-4570T, 8GB DDR3-1600, integrated GPU, Debian 12 (decommissioned corporate mini PC) - jellyfin, couchdb(Obsidian), searxng, backups, custom webapp

  • mini PC 2 - Ultra 5 235, 16GB DDR5-5600, integrated GPU, Debian 13 (questionably decommissioned corporate mini PC) - docker VM with docker containers: hister, openwebui, forgejo, grafana, postgres, label-studio, minio, etc

  • mini PC 3 - (not set up yet) - ??? - I haven’t checked exactly what it is, probably similar to proxmox mini PC 1 (decommissioned corporate mini PC)

  • NAS - QNAP TS-231P

Context: I use the 3090s for coding via Pi+Qwen 3.8 27B Q4_K_M, Q8 KV and for custom apps where it’s used for structured data extraction from text, and images.

Some questions:

  • Is this a reasonable setup and distribution of services?

  • Is there a better way of organizing the services over the compute?

  • if I want to move the 3090s to a more expandable system with room for more GPUs, what would you recommend? I’ve previously thought about an old Threadripper for a 4-card setup but I’ve also oogled EPYC CPU+mobos

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I’m currently running a threadripper 3960x for my proxmox rig. It has been rock solid for the year I have had it. Got it used off of ebay.

Board has 2x 16 and 2x 8 pcie 4.0 slots. Three nvme slots and 8 sata ports with built in 10g networking.

Should give you plenty of room to grow the workstation.

Also, if you wanted to play with proxmox. You could put the workstation in a VM, and then run a bunch of your other services on the threadripper as well. That might free up a rig or two for you.

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I am no expert, but from my time watching multi GPU builds I have seen that a PCIE switch is most commonly used to provide GPU to GPU communication. Old motherboards seems to cause some issues when running models across multiple GPUs. But I understand why you want to move away from the 8600K when having so much GPU compute.

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If it works for you, great! Don’t overthink it :grinning_face:

I personally don’t systems without ECC and IPMI.
I would also add VLANs for network segragation.

Best homelab, is IMHO the homelab with a good DRP, that was actually tested.

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