I know an argumentum ad populi when I see one and mine ain’t one. I always take into account the scenario for which someone is asking for certain hardware and in this case, server hardware for this homelab seems completely counter-productive.
Context matters. I guess I formulated my response wrong, of course there are others, I haven’t mentioned things like ECC support (at least as far as DDR5 is concerned, where the RAM slots are different) and like you mentioned, other features + quite some more. The reason I said only IPMI, is because I was referring to AM4 and AM5 Asrock Rack Motherboards that OP mentioned. Sure, you can run DDR4 ECC on older Ryzen CPUs, but they’re still consumer CPUs without the pricey server CPU features.
For most home servers like the one specified above, you can easily get away with a consumer ATX motherboard.
And the cost of running that 24/7 (remember OP needs a NVR) will make it so that in 6 months, you were better off buying consumer hardware that use as much power at full peak as an older server at idle. I’m exaggerating a bit, but in my case I got an older Xeon build for free and it doubled my power bill (I kept all my systems 24/7 on, but had to start stopping that thing and powering it whenever I felt like it).
An odroid h3 will idle at 10W with 2x HDDs, almost 10x the idle consumption of an epyc 7252 server. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the pentium 6005 in the h3+ is so weak that it needs to be full tilt all the time and that the cameras record 24/7 and not in bursts on motion detection. We’re still talking maybe 55W for the full package at full tilt, compared to 100W at idle. There’s a reason most DVRs and NVRs ship with a really low power CPU (I have a DVR myself, the 6 cameras combined are using more power than the DVR, at least at night when they’re blasting the IR lights).
I agree with you and Exard about GPU idle power, which adds a lot, but OP needs a GPU not just for gaming, but also stable diffusion. Maybe it’s worth splitting the build into a separate one? Not sure, doing a few very high end builds will increase the costs too much for just the power bill to save enough, which is why I’d still suggest an 8 core Ryzen X3D with the GPU. Again, context matters and OP is looking for a desktop workload mostly, with some minimal things that are generally attributed to servers, like running 2 VMs and a few containers.
Highly dependent on where you live and how expensive electricity is. Both where I was and where I’m now, electricity wasn’t cheap.
For a business, or even a professional that is making money running the machine, then going ECC is understandable and I would encourage it too. But for a home lab, where no money is being lost for downtime, then going with the bigger cost hardware just for the redundancy and other protection features becomes questionable.
And over the years, electricity goes up in price anyway, unless you’re lucky enough to live in a place that just got a cheap fuel source and a new power plant built nearby.
The homelab of today is starting to look way different than the data center of yesteryear. Nowadays I see more people, myself included, going to great extents to avoid going full on virtualization and instead running containers that are not live-migratable, but they use way less power (and are way jankier, like check out the struggle to add a NFS share in a container).
And microVM technologies like firecracker allows you to skip most of the virtualization overhead for linux VMs and only allocate a subset of hardware to them, which is all that most services will need. Full-blown VMs in the homelab are mostly used for running other OS (windows and BSDs, or others that you can’t easily run as a microVM).
These are squeezing more utility out of low-end consumer hardware. And you can get the same benefits out of server-grade hardware (arguably it applies even more to server hardware, because you can squeeze quite a lot more out of them, since they can run more things, but with a very large aggregate overhead, which means a very large performance savings from avoiding the overhead). However, servers in the homelab are very much going to mostly idle. Even consumer CPUs are going to mostly idle, which is why I see more appeal for lower power consumption and skipping very nice features to have, like ECC and lots of expansion.
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