There’s a few options now, but you can get Intel N100 ITX boards Like this one from ASUS with a soldered on N100 CPU for the cost of a normal motherboard.

If its just a NAS, and I do recommend having a separate Just a NAS, that CPU fucks hard.

Nah you about got it.

That’s cool.

Proton drive Linux support when?

And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.

Actually ASUS started to sell N100 motherboards with the CPU soldered on for $120

That plus a jonsbo N2 or N3, a few extra pieces, and its a few hundred dollars cheaper than the Ugreen options. Sure it will probably run Truenas instead of Ugreens custom truenas or whatever its built on, but that extra $300 is another 24TB hard drive or a HexOS lifetime subscription.

There’s also always the classic buy an old mid sized tower for $100 and slap two massive hard drives in it

Imagine less off a proper BOD and more of a 3D Printable holder for 3.5 inch drives and no actual connections.

I was considering a mini ITX PC with just an external SAS to Sata PCI card. But at the rate of just building that I might end up just building a better tiny nas box with maybe a jonsbo case like the N3

That’s basically what I’m going for.

How are you connecting the mini PC via SATA and how are you powering the BOD?

I usually follow the craft computing video whenever I have to set it up. He has a document in the description with all the things you might need to passthrough a GPU but only like half are needed to passthrough an HBA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hOBAGKLQkI

Proxmox wiki has a more concise guide IMO

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough

It was really simple to do in Proxmox.

You will find no name brand HBAs in IT mode on eBay for half the price of Intel, Supermicro, Dell, Etc branded ones. Do not buy the no names. I spent a week flashing and reflashing some cheap one, cycling through cables, etc. Nothing.

My supermicro branded one worked absolutely no issue. And I think it was like $40

It probably took a total of 30 minutes to pass it through and build the VM and everything. It took a couple days to rebuild my data from my previous truenas server but I had 10 TB of data on 4 drives.

The only issues I’ve had have been my own reading comprehension in setting up truenas accounts.

Are you using truenas as the entire homelab?

I also love messing with stuff until it breaks and I learn something, but I’ve decided I just want my files to be accessible.

So I actually have truenas virtualized with a passed through HBA so I can run proxmox to host all my breakable VMs while leaving truenas alone.

From what I understand its not as fast as a consumer Nvdia card but but close.

And you can have much more “Vram” because they do unified memory. I think the max is 75% of total system memory goes to the GPU. So a top spec Mac mini M4 Pro with 48GB of Ram would have 32gb dedicated to GPU/NPU tasks for $2000

Compare that to JUST a 5090 32GB for $2000 MSRP and its pretty compelling.

$200 and its the 64GB model with 2x 4090’s amounts of Vram.

Its certainly better than the AMD AI experience and its the best price for getting into AI stuff so says nerds with more money and experience than me.

From what I understand its not as fast as a consumer Nvdia card but but close.

And you can have much more “Vram” because they do unified memory. I think the max is 75% of total system memory goes to the GPU. So a top spec Mac mini M4 Pro with 48GB of Ram would have 32gb dedicated to GPU/NPU tasks for $2000

Compare that to JUST a 5090 32GB for $2000 MSRP and its pretty compelling.

$200 and its the 64GB model with 2x 4090’s amounts of Vram.

Its certainly better than the AMD AI experience and its the best price for getting into AI stuff so says nerds with more money and experience than me.

Funny domain names for hosting code is why godaddy exists.

I’m excited to submit my future CS assignments with

Ihatecode.com

Honestly if you’re not gaming or playing with new hardware, there is absolutely no point.

I’ve considered swapping this computer over to Fedora for a hot minute, but it really is a gaming PC and I should stop trying to break it.

True, but I have an addiction and that’s buying stuff to cope with all the drawbacks of late stage capitalism.

I am but a consumer who must be given reasons to consume.

The Lenovo Thinkcentre M715q were $400 total after upgrades. I fortunately had 3 32 GB kits of ram from my work’s e-waste bin but if I had to add those it would probably be $550 ish The rack was $120 from 52pi I bought 2 extra 10in shelves for $25 each the Pi cluster rack was also $50 (shit I thought it was $20. Not worth) Patch Panel was $20 There’s a UPS that was $80 And the switch was $80

So in total I spent $800 on this set up

To fully replicate from scratch you would need to spend $160 on raspberry pis and probably $20 on cables

So $1000 theoratically

Gonna write my short story about the orc barbarians who destroy human colonies that get too close to orc territory, not because they’re inherently evil, but because they’ve seen what human greed for power and domination does to subjugated races, the flow of magic, and the health of the earth. So they view humans as evil.

“Your kind knows nothing but exploitation! You drain the lands of their nutrients to feed cities of sycophants until they are fat! Tell me, adventurer, when was the last time you heard of a dragon attacking an orc caravan? We have no fear of such beings as they only attack the depraved greed of man.”

“Attacked the village? Do your handlers even lie to hired blades? Yes we burned the village you call Argath, but no one was harmed. Humans, as dangerous as you are, are still cowards. Surrounding a mining village and telling them to leave when they’re outnumbered ten to one is hardly, what you would call, a negotiation. We sent hunters to escort them out of the mountains of Gri’ut Kar and burned the village to ensure the trek was one way.”

The PIs were honestly because I had them.

I think I’d rather use them for something else like robotics or a Birdnet pi.

But the pi rack was like $20 and hilarious.

The objectively correct answer for more compute is more mini PCs though. And I’m really thinking about the Mac Mini option for AI.

Ollama and all that runs on it its just the firewall rules and opening it up to my network that’s the issue.

I cannot get ufw, iptables, or anything like that running on it. So I usually just ssh into the PC and do a CLI only interaction. Which is mostly fine.

I want to use OpenWebUI so I can feed it notes and books as context, but I need the API which isn’t open on my network.

I was thinking about that now that I have Mac Minis on the mind. I might even just set a mac mini on top next to the modem.

Ollama + Gemma/Deepseek is a great start. I have only ran AI on my AMD 6600XT and that wasn’t great and everything that I know is that AMD is fine for gaming AI tasks these days and not really LLM or Gen AI tasks.

A RTX 3060 12gb is the easiest and best self hosted option in my opinion. New for >$300 and used even less. However, I was running with a Geforce 1660 ti for a while and thats >$100