The original post: /r/homelab by /u/halgari on 2024-03-29 01:53:51.
I currently have a home server running on a old Xeon v2 workstation, and I'm quickly running out of upgrade space. I want to expand a bit, but would like some advice. What I already have on hand are 2x E5-2667 processors (6 cores each two sockets so 24 threads total), and 256GB of DDR3 ram I got for cheap awhile back. I'm running 3.5" drives and I'm pretty happy with those but would like to expand. Space/power isn't so much of an issue as I have room, and power is cheap here. Long term I'd like to get a few NVidia P40s so I can experiment with ML a bit.
Here's what I'm trying to figure out, I'd like to keep this upgrade below $1000. But I'm not sure if I should:
- Get a r720xd, or r720 lff, fill out the bays, and stick with V2 xeons. Perhaps upgrade to a higher end CPU and get more cores?
- Get a r730 or so, so I can get DDR4 memory and faster CPUs, not sure how much this would matter for my usecases
- Take the intel 13th gen mobo I have and put a 13500/14500 CPU in it, and get DDR5 + 14 modern cores, AVX2, quick sync, etc.
For my usecases, I'm using it as a NAS for my house, a plex server, a Docker host, and would like to eventually run some P40s or other datacenter GPUs so I can keep my ML experiments off my gaming machine. Long term I'd like to get 10G to my worksation and use the NAS as a iSCSI target as well. I'm currently running Unraid, but I may check out TrueNAS when it comes time to upgrade.
I'm running 3x 10GB datacenter drives, and I'd like to upgrade that to 6x and start using ZFS. I also have about 6x 1TB 2.5" SSDs I may hook into it.
So that's the question: modern cores on a "consumer" system with less RAM, a R730 class server with DDR4, or just max out something like a r720 with a crapton of RAM and the best CPUs I can find? And for that matter, do I go for slower xeons with more cores, or faster xeons with fewer cores?
Sorry for the rambling, thanks for any help.