My First Dedicated Gaming & VM Workstation (with a £400 Budget) - Why Planning your Real-World Needs is Important to Saving Money

I forgot to mention the 1st gen Epyc combos on eBay. Those alone are pushing the budget though.

On the power savings part, one of the no-brainers is to consider bringing a 10x4TB (32TB effective storage with RAID6 or ZFS equivalent) disk array down to a 3x16TB array, or perhaps a 3x20TB. Another is to have tiered storage with, say, two mirrored 2TB SSDs as the “active” storage, and then you only spin up the 10 disk array when doing backups - This really saves on wear and tear.

For power savings, remember that 1W = 1Wh if run for an hour. That means, 1W saved in average draw is 24Wh saved per day, 720Wh saved per month or 8.76kWh saved per year. If you can cut the average consumption with 50W that is 438 kWh saved every year, which translates into real money (I pay ~$0.15 per kWh, including all tariffs, so I save ~$1.25 per year for every W I do not use right now).

And yes, the hardware market changed around 2015-2016 when the technology in server space kind of stagnated (that is not to say there isn’t new developments; the new developments just do not need new hardware for the most part, except for the AI tech bubble).

Right now, all the server software paths are more or less fully explored, which has drastically reduced the need for beefy servers. Dockers, vms, multithreading and containers is the main part. Today, server chips trade low idle powers for more efficient utilization, meaning they suck in a home setting where utilization is normally never higher than 10%, and sometimes as low as 1%. Heck, it is not unusual for a home server to stand idle for a week and then see a burst of activity on Saturday only to idle for two weeks the next month. In that kind of scenario, it is stupid to have a 50W idle CPU that bursts to 80W when you can have a 20W idle CPU that bursts to 100W. Average will still come out below 50W.

The modern home lab

With regard to the home lab, there have been quite a few changes in general (but you might have more special needs) that make me doubt the need for a full ATX system filled with expansion slots will ever be necessary, ever again.

First, USB finally got fast enough to support most peripheral needs, reducing the need for a fully populated PCIe system. PCIe today is required for NICs, GPUs, and storage, and NICs and GPUs are optional in servers as most motherboards can be had with a 2.5Gb connection.

Heck, even video has stagnated on 4k right now, and those “only” need 25GB per 2 hour movie, so even a single 16TB drive can host hundreds of those. Most people no longer need more than 2TB-4TB on their desktops, and if they do need more, 8TB TLC sticks are available for like $600-$800 today and will go lower and lower as Samsung release their 256TB drives. This is of course pricey, but with four m.2 slots you could get like 16TB of fast redundant storage + a boot drive. Today.

HDDs are falling out of favor quickly as 100TB SSDs start becoming affordable for big data, and thus reduce a whole rack to a 2U server. Meanwhile, SATA can no longer keep up with storage sizes, it gets choppy already with 8TB, with 16TB-22TB we are talking maybe a week to resilver a redundant array. This is why I believe HDDs are finished in the home market.

Since around 2015 a Raspberry Pi home server is no longer a meme, and quite a few actually have them sitting next to their router as a cheap always-on access point for some simple stuff. Sure, it is a dirt cheap computer that is not very capable, but it does the job, and these RPi boxes are more and more replacing old 2010-era hardware racks actually - since the RPi is more reliable than the 2010 hardware, and you can do something else, like install a literal wardrobe closet where that rack was.

Then you have developments like the Asustor Flashstor 12 Pro which, in theory, could serve all the files you’d ever need for a mere $800 + $200-$250 per 4TB disk, up to 40TB of usable storage. Power draw? Less than 50W, fully populated, with an idle hovering around 25W.

Reason I am showing you all this is not because I believe your vision is stupid, but because I really believe, genuinely, that there are better ways to achieve that vision - it goes outside your budget, yes, but it is still possible to do all this with, say, a £1000 budget.

I hope this gives some food for thought, and sorry for sounding a bit snarky earlier. That was childish of me.

Yeah, I hadn’t really considered hardware that new because of both the price point to buy the hardware and then it’s actual cost to operate it, those to figures combined would end up making ot.more expensive than if I had just gone with older but more poeer hungry hardware.

On top of that I have no idea of what part or model numbers to search for when looking for pre-built desktop worlstations from OEM’s that use this hardware, this information just doesn’t seem to be widely circulated online, or at least not where I have been looking.

But thanks for the tip, i’ll have to keep an eye out and see if anything pops up locally for a ridculously cheap price that doesn’t have a insane amount of power draw.

Thanks for being so patient with me, and sorry for the late replies.
I honestly thought that I had already replied to this message when I read it last week but clearly I had not.
So my apologies for that.

Now, onto the great advice you’ve provided me with.
I haven’t actually done any measuring of my ACTUAL real-world power draw yet, but I fear it may be significantly higher on average when my systems are idle than I would like it to be, and given that I am located in an area that is charged £0.30 per kWh of electric (close to $0.40 per kWh) and I really want to reduce my resource usage as much as I can do, it is really the next thing that I need to focus on.

I need to find out how much power I am drawing from the wall already , and then from that data I can decide how critical it is that I reduce that power consumption to much lower levels.

I do not directly pay the entire power bill in my household but rent does contribute to it, and it would be to my advantage to reduce those costs if I could.

In regards to the usage of HDD’s I have already decided since making this post originally that from on I will only be buying SSD’s for new Data Storage needs and for replacing existing HDD’s some of which are now coming up-to 10-Years Old which has me concerned that they might begin to show signs of failure in the next 5-Years despite their lower than average usage for my type of system.

Going forwards then your suggestion/hinting at more compact and power efficient all-in-one systems (sort of like those 1-Litre PC’s from Dell, HP, Lenovo) may be more on the right path as to what I should consider investing my funds into.

Some kind of Asustor Flashtor-esque machine would be nice to upgrade to, the only thing really limiting that for me is that those devices come with CPU’s and Chipsets that simply don’t offer enough Threads or PCI-E Lanes for my kind of future looking perspective.
If I am to invest in hardware like that then I need to know that it will have enough PCI-E Lanes to support all of it’s ports being populated without any bottlenecks from Micro-Controllers splitting up lanes into USB Adapters like some of the current solutions are doing (not sure about Asusutor, but other brands are doing this and I hate it).

I only have £400 a month to spend on EVERYTHING that I might need, from food to governmnet documents and all the stuff in-between, so my actual budget is really closer to around £200 a month that I can happily spend on stuff.

I’m a tech enthusiast without a budget to support the hobby, that is the sad reality for me, that is why my budget of £400 was so strict and low, I simply cannot afford more than that with any ease.
And if bills go up then my spare budget goes down, and in these current times my budget has seen a drastic leap off a cliff into a never ending canyon, such is the state of the British Economy.

If Flash Storage actually started to match or even beat the Price-Per-TB of HDD’s then this converstion would be slightly different, but as things currently stand the Price-Per-TB for consumer storage products hasn’t seen any SIGNIFICANT improvements for almost a decade now, so despite Cloud Storage getting cheaper we budget concious consumers really aren’t seeing any big changes for the better, and that sort of aligns with all the other BS that other industries have been doing to keep the prices of products artificially higher than they should really be just so that they can capitalise on a lack of sufficient market regulation.

Anyway I am going political now, sorry about that, I just felt it was relevant to vent my anger at society and it’s failings.

Thanks once again for all of the great advice, and I wish you the very best.

Peace :v:

Given your limited budget, I have some suggestions:

  • Don’t try to fit everything into one machine! Get one hypervisor/NAS, and one gaming/workstation machine. It will be cheaper, more flexible, more power efficient, and it will allow you to focus on sourcing one set of functions at a time, rather than you trying to buy very expensive server parts that can do it all (lots of PCIe lanes etc).

  • Don’t reject HDDs entirely. They work well for backups and media storage and are cheaper. One or two HDDs don’t draw a lot of power either, but avoid elaborate raid setups with many small drives! (Raid is just for uptime anyway - backups are usually a higher priority in a home lab setting.)

My VM server & NAS cost me well under £400 (without storage!) and draws ~30 W idle. These are the prices I paid about a year ago, including 25 % VAT, converted to GBP:

  • CPU (£102): AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G. I found a good deal for a new one; today I’d look at Ebay and also at the 5650G. Make sure it’s not vendor locked (or that you can return it if it is)!
  • MB (£75): ASRock B550M-HDV. If I did it again I would get an ASRock B550M Steel Legend instead for 6x SATA ports, more PCIe slots, and 2.5 Gbit/s LAN. The HDV works fine though and is a bit cheaper.
  • RAM (£80): 2x 16 GiB Mushkin Proline DDR4 3200 CL22 (MPL4E320NF16G18). Get whatever DDR4 ECC UDIMM 3200 that is cheapest.
  • PSU, case : I reused what I already had.
  • CPU Cooler (£15): Arctic Freezer 7 X CO

This is a pretty capable machine, especially for the money! It works fine as ZFS NAS, for torrenting (deluge), and for hosting a few game servers (Factorio and Valheim in my case). You certainly don’t need 256 GiB of RAM or 24 cores for this! And you can split your purchases over several months if necessary.

For storage I’d suggest used “enterprise” SATA SSD(s) as system drives, VM backing, torrent storage and such. Get perhaps one smaller system drive and one or two larger storage/VM drives - you’ll have to keep your eyes open for deals - don’t pay more/TB than you would for a new, consumer NVMe drive! Backup to one (or two mirrored) online HDDs and use any old HDDs you have for offline backups.

For gaming - get whatever you can find that seems like a good deal and matches your budget and needs. No need to worry as much about idle power consumption here since it won’t be powered on 24/7!

These suggestions don’t match your original requirements, but could still work for you, especially given your limited budget.

For a total of, say, 64-128 GiB of RAM, 50-ish PCIe lanes, and 16 cores, you’ll pay a much lower total cost if you split it over two machines rather than trying to get one machine having it all!