A homeland doesn’t need to be expensive. It can literally be a potato if you’re just trying to light a single bulb.
What are your needs? What will this homelab/server be doing for you?
If you want to cheap out. That’s fine. But will it handle your needs efficiently and effectively?
You can spend quite literally an endless amount of time and money. But ultimately what are your goals and requirements for this homelab?
I'd like to be able to use it functionally off the bat to backup and serve files mostly, but want something that I can slowly scale up to educate myself on/experiment with a wide array of things down the line. I assume there's no all in one option, but I'd like to make sure I have options. I'd like headroom for a bunch of self hosted services, to experiment with different OS and software and ultimately to learn how to create some tools of my own to help either with work (IT management for a small org) or just to have fun and mess around with. And like I said deep learning is endlessly interesting to me, but I think that's pretty far down the like atm.
I did some Googling and the general consensus seems to be stay away from the Chinese boards, while some have no issues, many have and don't recommend them. I guess my question is why go with x99 at all? The technology seems to be almost 10 years old yet they seem to have a pretty large fanbase and are regarded as reliable workhorse motherboards. Are you looking for a dual CPU high core count solution? What is your budget? Is power consumption important? Have you looked into AMD EPYC solutions? What kind of case do you have in mind?
Yeah maybe that's why they caught my attention. Money is certainly an object but I'm willing to piece it together slowly over time. Pretty much can only spend a few hundred bucks at a given moment before I need to wait for either a paycheck or a great deal, and really can't justify dropping thousands on a setup, but I also don't want to cheap out. I have plenty of storage (24tb in 4tb enterprise drives and then another 10 or so handful of other 1tb) but nothing else yet. I have a couple great deals on large eatx cases with tons of drive Bays. Thinking I might as well go big if I have the space (also it seems more cost effective to go with the lff boards). And yes I was at least initially thinking a dual cpu setup would be ideal, but seems there are a lot of mixed feelings about that so im less sure on that tbh. Looked at xeons mostly, but I do see/hear the epycs are great. I'll do some research on what's in my price range there today. Thanks for replying btw!
These days a barebones r730 or dl380 gen9 will often be cheaper than a generic chinese x99 board. (Barebone/CTO is generaly only missing cpu/ram/storage)
Uses the same typical e5-2600v4/ddr4 with sas hba+nic usualy included since they are specific to server.
And you then get psus,case,heatsinks,fans etc also included.
Buying a board and building is the expensive route, its usualy not taken unless you got nowhere to stash the noisy rack option.
Well I got no rack unfortunately so space is a concern. Plus my gf is very sound sensitive. I would Der be looking at the used. Market for everything but the board probably. Although there is a 720 with cpus and 64gb ecc for 120 at my local pawn shop. But they have "no idea where it came from" which makes me nervous.
For what you're doing, I would suggest that you're running a home server, not a home lab.
And with your workload, I would take a i3 12100 or a 13500 well before I stepped back in time to now almost decade old processors.
Empirical data; I went from dual 2660v4's to a 12600k (now a 13500) and have better performance in every single metric, while also having the best transcoder for Plex (UHD 770), while saving $30/mo on my electric bill (200kwh/mo for the 2660v4's, 80kwh/mo for the 13500 which is doing more with more disks than the 2660v4's ever did).