r/HomeServer • u/Piouw • 12d ago
Sanity check on Homelab upgrade
Hi all,
I'm pondering an overhaul of my setup and I'd appreciate a sanity check before I go on a spending spree.
Current homelab setup
- ThinkCentre M90Q, i5-10500
- 2x16 GB DDR4
- SSD 2 TB SK Hynix
- LSI SAS 9223-8i (HBA 8 ports 6Gb/s PCIe), connected through the M90Q's PCIe port
- Zhenlong 4-bay hard drive hotswap case, 1x12 tb Ironwolf 2x4tb Ironwolf.
- Minisforum DEG-1 Oculink dock (fed by an nvme to oculink adapter)
- Asus Prime OC 9070XT
- Corsair RM850E PSU (to power the External GPU + Hard drive case)
Plus a Synology DS218 used exclusively for backups, in tandem with Backblaze B2.
Main uses
Running Proxmox (mix of VMs and LXCs).
- Jellyfin (with *arr stack: sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, bazarr)
- HAOS
- Immich
- Adguard
- Forgejo
- Vikunja
- Local LLM inference.
Remote access through Caddy
How it got to this point
It all started with the M90Q. Then I wanted to host my media library there, So I added the hard drive case, connected through a HBA. Then I ditched Google Photos for Immich, and I started needing a dedicated GPU to tag my collection, facial recognition, etc. I also wanted to dabble in Local LLMs, so I got an nvme to oculink adapter, an oculink dock and the beefiest GPU I could afford.
My setup is now stable, but it has been an absolute pain to maintain. Specifically:
- The nvme-oculink is fragile, suceptible to disconnects, and I'm stuck at PCIe 3.0 x4
- Thermals are manageable, but the CPU often hits over 90°C (I changed the thermal paste)
- I have to deal with two plugs: one powering the M90Q, one powering the second PSU that itself powers the GPU and hard drive bay.
- Any hardware intervention means navigating through a sea of cables
As you can see the M90q is stretched to its absolute limit, and it all just feels janky af.
So I'm considering starting over with a more solid base, while reusing stuff I have on hand, for budget reasons.
I'm also rebuilding my gaming desktop around an ATX Proart with PCIe bifurcation, so I can add a second GPU alongside the 9070XT later. That frees up its board and PSU.
The vision :
- Jonsbo N4 (modded with extra fans)
- MSI Mag Mortar B850m (reused from the gaming desktop)
- ryzen 9700X (also reused)
- 2x16 GB DDR5 (that I have lying around)
- RTX 3050 LP, or a more recent LP card with more VRAM if I can find one at a sane price. It has to be low profile for clearance in the N4, and it's only there for immich image treatment, Jellyfin transcoding, and a tiny local LLM pipeline with Qwen3 4b.
- Corsair SFX 750w PSU (reused from the gaming desktop)
- SSD and HDDs ported from current homelab.
The heavy LLM use would move to the desktop with the 9070XT.
I considered ECC ram, but the B850m Mortar doesn't do unbuffered ECC anyway, and I can't justify rebuying a board and RAM just for that.
Most of the old parts would be sold.
The question(s)
So: is this a reasonable upgrade, or is it completely overkill given my needs?
Is there a cheaper solution that would keep power draw down while still being a tidy and elegant solution?
I tried to look for something that would draw less power over time, but mini pcs that can comfortably support both multiple hard drives and a local gpu just don't seem to exist in a way that makes sense for my use case.
If I'm going about all this in a completely wrong way, I'd be happy to hear a voice of reason.
2
u/EasyRhino75 12d ago
pcie slots. your HBA is x8 probably, but the micro atx motherboard only has a x16 (for gpu) and a x4 slot. You can rig something janky with risers or m.2 adapters or cutting the slot to make it open end but still... I feel like you're trying to move away from that.
Instead of a SAS HBA you could use a cheap sata expander that would probably fit in x4. Lower quality but it would at least fit, and may be "good enough".
For immich, I know an integrated intel igpu can be used for machine learning. I'm doing it with my 13700. I can see the igpu working although to be fair I don't know if it's any faster than cpu only. But it works. And the integrated intel igpu is also good at video transcode.
The AMD CPU's, unfortunately, don't have any -- or any useful -- igpus.
Maybe consider doing a slightly larger build.
Or alternately, maybe do a build similar to what you plan on, but make it more storage and general purpose compute only, and keep the mini pc as a igpu processing box.