It’s Jeff’s fault.
The Jeff I’m referring to is Craft Computing (https://www.youtube.com/@CraftComputing). And while it’s mostly his fault, Techno Tim also has a lot to answer for (https://www.youtube.com/@TechnoTim).
Having watched Jeff’s videos for years and tinkered around with Proxmox on and off, using a Ryzen 7 1700, I decided to get a bit more serious. I’d stupidly bought an old HP DL360 Gen 6 a few years before to use for tinkering but it’s just not practical in a small UK home. I needed more cores and more memory to play around with and IPMI/IDRAC would be great to have so I settled on the kit below.
It comprised of a Supermicro H11SSL-i motherboard, EPYC 7551P CPU and 128GB Samsung 2133 ECC DDR4 (8x16GB).
This would give me 32 cores – 64 threads, which is more than enough for my needs (Or so I foolishly thought). The cost? £530 ($685) from Ebay. Shipped from China in just over a week.
This was paired with a Noctua NH-U9 TR4-SP3. Also from Ebay for £85 ($110).
I’m not looking for ultra performance, just raw cores to run all the random shit my brain thinks of. 256GB RAM would feel more balanced to go with that many cores but money is a thing and having guitar as a second hobby means funds are always tight.
The initial driving force for doing this is to get rid of Windows on my main pc and switch to Linux as my daily driver. It’s something I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time. Game support on Linux is now excellent and I’m getting more and more frustrated with Windows. It’s also a shitload of fun playing with virtual machines and containers.
My plan was to run a Windows 10 VM for access to Teams and the Microsoft suite of apps we use for work. I’ve read conflicting reports of using Teams on Linux as Microsoft decided to retire support in December 2022 – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1519135/installing-microsoft-teams-in-linux. Some people report having found ways to make it work but most just suggest using the web app. Ewww.
I had a 500GB NVME drive, 250GB NVME drive in a PCI card, 250GB Samsung EVO SSD and a 1TB Samsung EVO SSD to start things off. The old DL360 had 7x 600GB SAS hard drives that I also planned on using for the NAS.
This was all being housed in an old NZXT case with a 650W PSU.
March 16, 2025
