Recommendation building powerful yet efficient home lab

Hello everyone, for the last few months I’m building my own home-lab on TrueNAS Scale and few days ago i went for Proxmox for much superior virtualization ability.

As for right now I’m using my old hardware:
Ryzen 7 1700,
2x16 GB RAM,
B350 Gaming Pro Carbon,
SuperMicro 9300-8I HBA,
Fractal Define R6,
and added here few HDDs - 4x4TB Ironwolf in RAIDZ1 and 2x14 TB Exos SAS in RAID1 (got them for 150€ each, brand new with warranty to 2028) and for boot drive I`m using A2000 1TB from Kingston (i have also 480GB WD Red NVMe, which made many problems under TrueNAS Core/Scale) + 120 GB BX300 for temporary containers.
Finally i would like to have 6-10 Exos drives for full RAIDZ2 and storage + 4x4 TB SSD (860 Evo from Samsung for example, because higher DRAM than MX500, which have 512MB right now IIRC) for VMs, maybe Wazuh + graylog for my PCs inside LAN and so on.

Everything is working just fine, but i see that this machine is lacking in some aspects - mainly RAM support for only 64 GB max, not as many cores as i would like to see and lack of ECC support (or RDIMM).

As for right now i think i found something which would be pretty OK for my needs - and that would be Epyc 7D12 on H11SSL-i v2.0.
Yes, i know that this CPU is heavily restrained because of it’s TDP (where i can increase TDC/EDC a little bit to make it go faster - after certain point i can lose performance), it have problems with Hynix memory, many units are blocked to Dell platforms only, there is only 1DPC and so on.
I can get CPU+MoBo combo for like 400$ and it would be pretty nice cost, because i have 4x32 GB M393A4K40BB1-CRC4Q which i can use on his platform.

But for what i would go for this platform? Well, mainly to learn new stuff, how to work on proxmox environment, create whole environments for backups and storage, AD (Windows and LInux based), DNS, whole networking elements, how to properly create self-signed certificates and deploy them so that i can use it at work (yeah, I`m working as sysadmin as for right now with basically no support and knowledge how to properly operate many elements but I’m trying my best to get it done properly).
As a bonus it will also work as plex/jellyfin/Emby server, maybe Minecraft server (where higher clocks would be much better) and VPN (Tailscale) to have access to my internal network) + maybe remote backup for my brother and friend (for which i can use Exos drives).

Is my decision right or is it lacking in many aspects? I would like to get everything working under 500$ and have still possibilities to expand it further. I could also look at newer Ryzen CPUs like 3900X, 3950X or even 5900 due to much superior single threat performance but lower multi-threat but platform won’t work with RDIMM and many MoBos with better equipment cost MUCH more with worse PCI-e connectivity.

Thanks everyone for every comment which can help me in the future :slight_smile:

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