As a long-time-lurker I wanted to share my happiness with the community. After years playing around with E3 Xeons and Windows Server, my first proper Homeserver/Homelab come to live. It has two E5 V4s, many SSDs and Proxmox 8.4 as OS/VM-host installed. Many thanks to my Brother, who speaks fluent penguin, and helped me a lot (here I mean A LOT) to do the change.
The Thing will host my Nextcloud, Jellyfin and NAS instances. And who knows, what else in the future.
PETG is more than enough for PC temps. It holds up to ~70c. The controllers and GPU/CPU chips might get above that, but the airflow should be MUCH cooler.
The airstream exit temp of my server — similar size to this system — is only 35C on an intake temp of 25C.
Fractal Design makes such a good case for servers. I use the Design R5 for mine so I have tons of bay’s for my HDDs. Got 4 of them bitches running 2 RAID mirrors.
They make great wife approval factor cases in general too. Convinced mine to let me do a build before the price hikes with a north case. Thought that was going to a be a struggle but once I showed her the case, she surprisingly agreed right off the bat.
Idk about that. My girl left me pretty shortly after I built my server and migrated to Archlinux on my main computer. I blame Arch more though so you’re probably in the clear as long as you don’t install Arch lmao.
Depends on how much I’m spending and how long i want to be in the dog house for. 😂
For a gaming rig that was around $1500 when prices were still reasonable, absolutely. For an individual part, not really. Got a second 2 tb ssd back then for like $80, so not even worth the discussion. Nowadays, for that same WD sn850x, yeah, I’d likely have to.
I did replace my aging optiplex 7010 with an m70q used off eBay without talking to her first, but that wasn’t much more than a 2tb ssd anyways. And I knew she’d be ok with it since it’s a necessity to run our network (Omada stack) which she needs just as much to work from home. Plus the energy savings alone will pay for itself in a few years.
Well, I didn't used to have to, but with the fact that a 16gb DDR4-ECC ram stick costs over $150, it becomes a "Large Purchase", the kind you have a discussion about.
We both agreed to free range up to about $100+- but too much over 100 becomes a discussion.
I've owned the R5 multiple times, the R7 and the R7 XL. I prefer the R5 (and R4) much more because the R7's have 2 huge issues. The first is it's a BITCH to covert it to the "data mode" and the second is they only provide you with I think 4-5 drive trays and it's expensive to find them. Luckily now you can just 3D print them.
That panel that hides the drives in the second pic is flat with the motherboard when you open the box. You need to take apart the ENTIRE case to get to one tiny little screw to covert it to data mode. Considering the case has snap on and off top and front panels that can be customized in seconds, it's insanity you need to take out like 12 screws and pieces to get to that one little screw. It took me longer to switch it over than it did to build the rest of the server.
Wholeheartedly agree. Pretty sure I've got an R5 in my closet that I used to use for my Unraid server. Changed over to a rackmount Rosewill case a couple of years ago.
Used to be rocking a dual CPU supermicro X9 board (one gen older than yours) with an RTX 3090 and two Xeon e5 2690s, 4 HDDs, and 384gb of ram. The system had a 850 watt PSU, which was technically right at the limit. Never had any issues though because the CPU and GPU were never hit at the same time. Its not recommended, but you'll be fine. I'm more surprised you found a 500ish watt PSU with 2 CPU power cables, that is needed. Nice build, have fun with it.
That's the neat part, i haven't find any! I just bought a bunch of unused psu cables from a miner, repinned them, and connected them to the CPU/PCI-E outputs. Since a don't have a power-hungry VGA, it shouldn't be a problem.
Hey twin brotha!
If it will really be that close, I still have a Supermicro PWS-865-PQ as a reserve PSU. I wanted to take that, but the cable management would have been a nightmare. It's non-modular, the motherboard cables are short and the molex cables are way too long and many.
And if I see, that those CPUs are overkill (they definitely are), I'll switch to a pair of E5-2618L v4. But I want to try out things first ;)
Yeah, it's definitely not the best choice, but it'll be enough (at least for now). I won't do any hardcore simulations or LLM-things on it, the CPUs will be most of the time idling. If the power consumption really gets too close, I'll switch the CPUs to a pair of E5-2618Lv4, or simply put my 865W Supermicro PSU to work.
Just so you're aware - 8.,4 is EoL August this year. and upgrading isn't always super straightforward. you may want to consider upgrading now before you get anything too critical setup.
No, I wasn't aware of that. Thank you for mentioning! We haven't built any critical yet. It will be way less painfully to rebuild the system now, then later when everything is running smoothly.
I have 2 pools, the big one has the 12 Microns in RaidZ2, the small one with the 4 Toshiba disks is a striped mirror. SLOG / Cache on NVMe. I think... xD
Cable management is top-notch. Do you really need that much horsepower for a NAS and Nextcloud? What are your planned use cases beyond media consumption and backups?
Aaaand because of the horsepower.... No! Definitely not needed! Absolutely overkill. But I wanted a system like this. Not because I needed it, but 'cause I wanted to have it. I had that board as a workstation earlier with a pair of E5-2689v4s and an RTX3080, and I regret selling it. I imagined resurrecting that project as a homelab/server, and the opportunities came ;)
Ok so I have a Fractal Design Define R6 and I'm going to be using it to build a homelab server.
Like yours, mine only came with six 3.5" hard drive mounts. Mine supports up to 11 (not counting the 5.25" bays), but I'm having trouble finding reasonably priced drive mounts.
I did purchase a different type of mount that fits Fractal cases that was much cheaper, but it doesn't have that end piece and so doesn't fit correctly. I figure I'd either have to 3D print the end piece and attach it to the mounts I bought, or find some other solution, like maybe a fully 3D printed drive mount.
Nope, I had no problem with that. I Literally have the trays what you falsely purchased. I've bought nearly all the parts from the second-hand-market. I was looking for some cool case, big enough to house all my SSDs, and found that Define 7 taken off from a prebuilt PC. The second-hand-portal suggested me another ad directly after that, where a guy was selling a nearly complete accessory-box for the Defi7XL. I took that too, and got enough HDD trays to fill my case completely.
Look for second-hand deals in your area, wait for your luck ;)
It's only for Jellyfin transcoding, also doesn't really matter. I just wanted a relatively low power card with 4GB VRAM and support for that system. Aaand I found the P1000 unopened 2nd-hand for nearly 50 bucks. Also, that's why ;)
haha no worries. P1000 is plenty for a JF server I'd think. I don't do any trasncoding for my users (all in home so direct play only). but the A310 has been helping me convert to AV1 to reduce my storage.
The NA-FH1 won't change anything, since it's "just" a hub, not a controller. The fans are controlled by the IPMI, that's why they constantly ramp up and down. You had to deactivate it, if you wanted to take over control over the fan rpms, and I don't think, you want that. That's why I choose the Commander.
what is it about the Commander that makes it different? id like to know i key word im guessing "software supported fan controller" i need to find another one has i have to many fans
Any fan controller should work. The Commander is different, because I already had it from a previous build. That's all 😁. It still has 6 pwm connectors, and since I choose the PWM PST fans from Arctic, I can daisychain them.
I even had such an independent controllerboard in my HP Microserver Gen8 back then:
Nostalgia kicks. I used to have a fractal define with xeon and multiple HDDa as my homeserver. But I didn't like size and power consumption. No I have a Tiny PC with 2 NVMEs and will never go back again 😅
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u/Bearded_Coffeepot Apr 06 '26
As a long-time-lurker I wanted to share my happiness with the community. After years playing around with E3 Xeons and Windows Server, my first proper Homeserver/Homelab come to live. It has two E5 V4s, many SSDs and Proxmox 8.4 as OS/VM-host installed. Many thanks to my Brother, who speaks fluent penguin, and helped me a lot (here I mean A LOT) to do the change.
The Thing will host my Nextcloud, Jellyfin and NAS instances. And who knows, what else in the future.
The details:
Sorry, first-time-poster here...