Hi my name is Angel. I am new to serverbuilds, but not new to general self hosting and having computers. I built my first PC when i was in college about 9 years, and I repurposed the computer to run unRAID. The computer is an AMD FX-4100, ya its super old. It’s been chugging along fine with 12GB RAM and an Asrock motherboard however, it is time for a hardware swap.
I came here to learn more about server quality gear as when I was first thinking about making a server, i thought extensively about buying a used Dell R710, but went with repurposing my machine as it was the cheaper option.
For this new upgrade i have had my eyes sent on the Ryzen 9 3900X with 32GB RAM @ 3600 MHz and an X570 board. However, after listening to @JDM_WAAAT on the episode of Self-Hosted podcast, I wanted to revisit server quality gear to see if I can get more bang for buck
I know it depends on uses, and what I use my server for at the moment is just about 20 docker containers and 1 Home Assistant VM. With this hardware swap i want to add on top of this a VM for Windows 10 Pro for gaming like COD, and use my actual Plex for transcoding a bit. I use a normal SATA SSD but want to move to NVME drives for both my cache as well as 1 NVME for pass through so having PCIE slots for an NVME expander would be great! The X570 come already with 2 NVME slots so that is good, but wondering how server quality motherboards fair.
Hoping someone here can help me understand if I am in my right mind to go the server quality gear or stick to my original plan. I also have to mention that i have about $700 right now that I was wanting to buy just the Ryzen CPU, RAM, and Motherboard for now and use the other stuff i have and later do a phase 2 and buy a power supply and then buy a graphics card for the Gaming VM.
Hoping someone can help! Thank you all so much!.