Help Me pick my Path

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ShadowFlash

New Member
Jan 7, 2018
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Without trying to make an essay, I'm VERY cheap, and enjoy the hobby of ebay recycling. The philosophy has kept my home technologically relevant for a couple decades raising a pack of rabid boys. I've recently retired a G34 3-User "gaming" ESXi box to a single station box for my youngest kid. Shortly, I'll be empty nesting and wanted one last cheapskate fun build, this time focused a little differently. I've gathered some deals the past couple months for hardware, so here goes...

Mandatory Platform/Parts Bin (hardware already in-house): DL585 G7 (last of the Opterons)
6x HP IO Accelerators (2x 640GB each card)
Quadro 4000
Quadro K4000
GTX 650 ti Boost
RX 570
Bins of Misc questionably useful doo-dads

Reqs:
focus on single power user
Gaming needs are 1 station + secondary station for MWO, DDO, and Age Of Wonders: Planetfall (all relatively light weight)
Plex Server: 1080 x3 concurrent...no 4K needed

Right now I'm leaning towards>>>
UnRAID, with a cheap P400/600 dedicated to Plex
A basic 1-Socket VM with the K4000
and a dual Socket VM with an M40 slaved to the 4000 for "my" gaming station.

I'm VERY open to fun hobby like suggestions! Any Advice?
 

ShadowFlash

New Member
Jan 7, 2018
12
1
3
49
and I've watched youtube, so now I know everything lol. ProxMox seems "good'r" but I have no idea if I'd be getting in over my head
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
2,644
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Promox is very popular , specially in STH land.
Patrick use Proxmox to STH site as well as other stuff.

I moved away from ESXi to Proxmox many years ago.

Unraid is also good ,
I have a Unraid box with I5-9500 cpu for trancoding video
Truth, all my clients are direct play, no quicksync is necessary. I5-9500 is for just in case.

If you have a P400 card, then you could go with AMD.

Last month, I picked a ASRock B550 PRO4 board for $45 from Amazon.
Still waiting for a cheap AMD CPU to start the build

Few months back, Amazon had many super cheap Z490 boards ( around $75-$100 ) ,
z490/z590 board has 2.5gbe network, couple of M2 slot.
Find a cheap CPU, It would serve a good base for your home server.
Example . just received a cheap $80 I5-9500 cpu from ebay in the mail tonight.
 

ShadowFlash

New Member
Jan 7, 2018
12
1
3
49
Promox is very popular , specially in STH land.
Patrick use Proxmox to STH site as well as other stuff.

I moved away from ESXi to Proxmox many years ago.

Unraid is also good ,
I have a Unraid box with I5-9500 cpu for trancoding video
Truth, all my clients are direct play, no quicksync is necessary. I5-9500 is for just in case.

If you have a P400 card, then you could go with AMD.

Last month, I picked a ASRock B550 PRO4 board for $45 from Amazon.
Still waiting for a cheap AMD CPU to start the build

Few months back, Amazon had many super cheap Z490 boards ( around $75-$100 ) ,
z490/z590 board has 2.5gbe network, couple of M2 slot.
Find a cheap CPU, It would serve a good base for your home server.
Example . just received a cheap $80 I5-9500 cpu from ebay in the mail tonight.
I'm extremely set on using the DL585 for this project as an all-in-one.