Ultimate home server with 2 GPUs and 4 m.2 slots, ALMOST

Hardware Hub
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1

Hello Fellow L1 geeks,

I have found, in my humble opinion, the ultimate home server machine for cheap. It is the dell precision 7750.

Here are the specs:

  • Intel i7 10850H / i5 10400H / Xeon M (All three have intel GPU)
  • 4 Ram Slots and all 3 CPU SKUs can do 128 GB
  • Upto NVIDIA RTX 5000M (16GB), you can get RTX 4000M (8 GB) or RTX 3000M (6GB)
  • 4 m.2 slots
  • 2 thunderbolt ports: capable of creating the thunderbolt cluster that WENDELL spoke about in a video
  • It only has gigabit lan, I am using a usb to 2.5G adapter.

I have the intel GPU running Jellyfin, the NVIDIA GPU running Ollama and Stable Diffusion and the CPU manages all other containers.

The best place to buy: dellrefurbished website. Get it on the days you have a sale, can get it for about 500 - 600.

Comes with a battery !!! => No worry about power outages / fluctuations. Hook it to a decent UPS and you have a system that can have a power backup system easily for hours.

The only feature I wish I could do is install proxmox and use vGPU to split the NVIDIA GPU for Ollama and other projects that can use a GPU, WHICH IS THE REASON FOR MY POST. Having the ability to split the GPU means even more utilization of the machine.

WENDELL, please take a look at this if you get a chance. There are other laptops that have 2 GPUs and I believe laptops are great platform for self hosting.

2

the gpu power can be nice especially the vram. But the cpu does fall a bit behind. I don’t think these are widely available for the prices you mentioned, i see older models for much higher prices online but i am only looking at the market in the netherlands. They are about 1000-2000 euro.

4

This is for sure an interesting option for some use cases. The bonus is good power efficiency. Main drawback is extensibility, I’d say. Especially for NAS use, you can’t have hard drives. Possibly noise too.

Another interesting development is the cases you can get for framework motherboards. Those could give your old laptop a second life as a home server.

It all depends on your use cases and the price you’re paying.

5

Hmmm, check ebay and see if you can get it delivered. Dellrefurbished is where my company’s machine will end up, however they are USA based only.