Slowdown in the homelab segment

[Greg_E]

Looking at some of the sections of this forum, it appears that the current pricing on "stuff" has kind of crippled the homelab area. Not seeing nearly as much talk in the DIY Server area. Not seeing nearly as much traffic on other sites with related content either. It's hard to believe that people have stopped learning, or that everyone has built up their labs to the point where they don't want to upgrade.

I'm just trying to get by with what I have now, begrudgingly buying the odd ssd as needed to try something. Wishing old enterprise servers would come back down in price (and include the ram they stole). This whole situation is crushing. Maybe time for some prominent people to write articles and make videos about this, it's not always about the new shiny (and now expensive) stuff coming out.

 

[i386]

I think a ton of questions an be "answered" by google ai directly, so no need to go to specific forums

It's hard to believe that people have stopped learning, or that everyone has built up their labs to the point where they don't want to upgrade.

"Don't want" and "can't" are two very different things ._.
I want mellanox sn2700 switches with 32x qsfp28 ports for my home network backbone, but with prices north of 1800€ here in germany I can't do it.
Same with gpus, ssds and network cards for different systems

 

[louie1961]

With the increases in prices, I stopped building hardware and shifted to building/learning/experimenting with more stuff on the software side. STH has never really been my go to for learning about docker apps, which most of my services are. I also find that Claude.AI does a better job at writing docker compose files than some of the stuff I see on forums. So that has had an impact as well.

 

[Greg_E]

"Don't want" and "can't" are two very different things ._.
I want mellanox sn2700 switches with 32x qsfp28 ports for my home network backbone, but with prices north of 1800€ here in germany I can't do it.
Same with gpus, ssds and network cards for different systems

And that's the point, up until July of 2025 the "can't" part wasn't as bad, look back even farther to last year and I'm wishing I had spent the money then on more storage, or bought bigger sizes of drives then because the comparable prices were far more attractive than now.

My want list is more powerful "servers" for my lab, I'd really like some HP DL360 gen 10 with around 128gb of ram. Price a few months ago was around $600 each (dual processors), now you generally don't even find them with ram installed because it's higher profit to pull the ram and sell it (lower shipping).

My other want list would be find a way to add uefi to my HP DL360 gen 8 servers, but that isn't really possible. Most of the things I'm messing with require uefi now.

I'll agree, I could kind of use more 25gbps ports, messing with HCI hypervisors is showing my 10gbps as a weak link. I may still be able to move three of my HP t740 over, I have 3 open ports on one of my switches and would prove out what I think I'm seeing as a shortfall.

 

[nabsltd]

now you generally don't even find them with ram installed because it's higher profit to pull the ram and sell it

I was looking at relatively new hardware (Xeon 6 or Epyc 9000), and found that I could get a very powerful CPU plus motherboard for around $1200, which was fine for even a 5 year expected use. But, even 32GB of RAM would be $600-900. I had wanted to duplicate my current 256GB system, but that isn't happening for a few years.

 

[louie1961]

The only reason I recently upgraded my main Proxmox node was because I already had some DDR4 EEC UDIMMs and I found more of the exact same UDIMMs on ebay. Two 32 GB sticks for $225 total. About the exact same time I also found a RTX 2000 ADA 16 GB for $160 on Facebook marketplace. So I changed from a Node 304/Ryzen 5 Pro setup to a 4U rackmount with a Ryzen 7 5800XT and a new motherboard, so I could make use of the new GPU. I had really wanted to go to an Zen 5 CPU, like the new Epyc 4005 parts, but settled on Zen 3 for the next few years. I am very satisfied with it.

 

[Wasmachineman_NL]

I'm waiting to move out before I commit to a (small) homelab. What I want is going 10G for the seedbox and main rig at that point.

 

[CyklonDX]

prices are indeed kinda stopping from testing/playing with things; Even if I could buy them I don't, as they do not make sense to purchase for the price.

Next thing is that there's very little development recently; and plenty of features are stuck in development pipe (for linux intel battlemage sriov etc), and still not in stable LTS branch. AMD behaves like an a**h*le, NV about the same if not worse... At work i do play with newer hardware, but even that new hardware ain't anything special to make it worth the price they ask for it.


worth adding the price for electricity is literally draining any desire to run things.

 

[marcoi]

I put off upgrading home lab due to price increase sometime around july/aug 2025. And I will keep the current stuff for as long as pricing is insane.
But I was lucky to get a few things last year with good timing but i dont expect deals like that to happen again for a while.
PS - I do expense the hardware for my business so its not just personal usage here.

• I was able to get some 26TB HDD from WD with discount codes. Still a small fortune, but i should be good for a while now.
  • WD website didnt have any drives for sale when i recheck last week. Not sure if AI got them as well.
• I got a used Qnap NAS off ebay, and a used cpu upgrade for it. I had some ecc udimms for a prior purchase so i was able to get the ram up to 96GB. I have it setup for VM NAS Storage and VM for work.
• I was able to get some used dell 3.86 TB SSD drives off ebay.
  • I got Lot of 15 Dell EMC MZ-7LH3T8A 3.84TB SATA 2.5" 6Gbps Solid State Drive w/ Caddy for 2K. So 133 per drive. They originally had them for 2900 but i made an offer that i wasnt expecting to be accepted lol.
• I was able to get an Nvidia reference 5090 card directly from Nvidia.com for 2k msrp. It was a serious Pita and took a few months to get.
  • Card is worth more now then when i bought it due to AI.

So even with crappy prices, i was able to get some deals and keep my homelab from going to stale.
Right now I am playing with AI stuff.
Also keeping the homelab up to date with software updates etc..

 

[Rand__]

My main reason is the increased power consumption of newer hardware.

I dont need tripple the perf for double the consumption, I need more PCIe and memory on same/lower consumption (for faster low qd storage)
That coupled with ever increasing board/cpu prices (even before memory based inflation) made me stop buying new stuff.

O/c power costs already made me stop deploying newly bought builds before that, I didnt mind 1kw/h at €0.18 but at €0.28 ?

Unfortunately the industry is going the wrong direction for my use case (or probably a lot of home-labbers), but hopefully lower tier hw (small to med business vs enterprise) will move to a spot where its interesting again, since I don't I'd be willing to run 450W CPU's at home

 

[marcoi]

My main reason is the increased power consumption of newer hardware.

I dont need tripple the perf for double the consumption, I need more PCIe and memory on same/lower consumption (for faster low qd storage)
That coupled with ever increasing board/cpu prices (even before memory based inflation) made me stop buying new stuff.

O/c power costs already made me stop deploying newly bought builds before that, I didnt mind 1kw/h at €0.18 but at €0.28 ?

Unfortunately the industry is going the wrong direction for my use case (or probably a lot of home-labbers), but hopefully lower tier hw (small to med business vs enterprise) will move to a spot where its interesting again, since I don't I'd be willing to run 450W CPU's at home

that is why i ended up getting solar at my place. Electricity is like .22C per kwh. I think i average around 2-3Kwh per month with my home lab running 24/7. If you can get solar to cover the costs of electricity it helps run less efficient hardware. Only thing is solar takes money to buy and usually takes 7 years to get your return on investment. Also solar doesn't work every location.

I would love to see a company come out with products geared for home lab users.

• Good perf to power ratio (under 50W for 20+cores and up to 128GB Ram)
• Low or no noise
• Small size
• IPMI for remote access

I left off costs, knowing it be high since you can't have everything included.

 

[reasonsandreasons]

Yeah, I have a E5 v4 box running at home and I'm hard-pressed to find anything that's a reasonable upgrade iso power consumption, at least with my current needs. Local LLM would maybe push me to a new box, but since I run a Mac Studio as my workstation it's cheaper and more power efficient to overspec on RAM there. I keep wanting to upgrade (playing with Optane DIMMs would be cool!) but it is sorta impossible to justify as anything other than a power-hungry toy.

 

[BlueFox]

I would love to see a company come out with products geared for home lab users.

• Good perf to power ratio (under 50W for 20+cores and up to 128GB Ram)
• Low or no noise
• Small size
• IPMI for remote access

I left off costs, knowing it be high since you can't have everything included.

So, Core i7/i9 T-series CPU with W680/W880 chipset? Been available for years.

 

[T_Minus]

YES. Power cost is the new currency of the future with AI... we are deploying more solar as we're at over 40c kWh now minimum and spike to over 50c by the end of the month... it's not sustainable even with minimal AC usage, and a non-electric house (gas appliances).

As @reasonsandreasons said those Mac studio's reallly do well with power... I recently got a couple, and I'm amazed what they can do with such little power! So little my power meter blips between nothing and 20w, this was a reason I got another low-end mac mini just to see what I can do with it, the power is so low!

Aside from that my purchases have been mini-pc RAM and m2 nvme before they're even more pricey, just to finish a couple builds and deploy here for home usage.

And as most everyone else, most time now is playing with the various AI models and orchestration systems and local LLMs.

2026 the year AI subscriptions surpass my streaming subscriptions

 

[reasonsandreasons]

So, Core i7/i9 T-series CPU with W680/W880 chipset? Been available for years.

I have (and generally like) one of those boards, but the idle power consumption (at least in my experience) is not meaningfully better than Broadwell and number of available PCIe lanes is significantly worse. The 4.0x8 DMI link helps a lot in the latter case, letting you hang a PCIe 3.0 or 2.0 NIC off the chipset, but the lack of x4 bifrucation is bad if you want any amount of NVMe beyond a boot drive or two. If you really need single-thread performance, yes, go for it, but for anything else I think Broadwell is probably a better buy.

 

[CyklonDX]

give me home nuclear battery or give me death.

 

[louie1961]

I would love to see a company come out with products geared for home lab users.

• Good perf to power ratio (under 50W for 20+cores and up to 128GB Ram)
• Low or no noise
• Small size
• IPMI for remote access

I think there is pretty performant hardware out there, if you build your own. My entire homelab draws about 240 watts at idle. I run a Proxmox node (Ryzen 7 5800XT, RTX 2000 Ada, and 128 gb of ECC ram), A pfSense box (IMB-V2000V motherboard with embedded Ryzen V2516), a QNAP 10gbe 16 port switch, a wireless access point, a SynologyDS 1621+, and a TrueNAS server (Xeon D1541 based with 64gb of ECC ram). Also included is the cable modem, the T-mobile 5G home internet device box, and the Ring alarm base station. All my "servers" are DIY / home brewed

I am pretty happy with the power to performance ratio. I fit it all in a 12U rack, and it is nearly silent. I think the only thing I am missing is IPMI for my main Proxmox node. The pfSense box and the TrueNAS box both have IPMI, but I don't use it. I could always add something like a PiKVM to the mix.

 

[TrevorH]

give me home nuclear battery or give me death.

Is that meant to be OR? AND sounds much more likely...

 

[marcoi]

So, Core i7/i9 T-series CPU with W680/W880 chipset? Been available for years.

I don't want to invest in old tech though.

I rather see a high core/freq optimized CPU that comes with CPU/iGPU/NPU and power optimizations like it was a mobile cpu.
It can be packaged as a desktop cpu in size so more bits could be added for iGPU processing, etc.
Hopefully it would have quad memory channels and at least 16 pcie lanes.
Some of the AMD chips are kind of getting there.

I would take that system and run hypervisor like xcp-ng or proxmox where i could spread out the resources between VMs/containers etc..
I know both xcp and proxmox has been making some progress in passthrough of the iGPU. Not sure about the NPU.

 

[Greg_E]

My homelab on the mini side draws about 300 watts average, less if I concentrate on one hypervisor or the other so I'm down to 3 hosts plus a workstation and the NAS. The Harvester system being HCI I could turn the NAS off too. I did this on purpose a while ago and have several posts as I built it up, heat, noise, and power were the big concerns. And that's one reason my HP DL360 gen 8 just sit in the bottom of the rack, lack of uefi is the second. They would make a great Harvester or Rancher cluster if they had UEFI and you could afford the power, heat, and noise.

But I'd like more CPU in my mini-lab, and there are few ways to get there without about $1000-$1500 each host (I have 8 hosts now). The biggest issue is the ability to use PCIe cards for networking, I have 10g SFP+ and really probably need 25g for anything that's HCI. Not too many choices in the low power draw mini-PC market that can take a PCIe card.