Anyone have any suggestions for a budget (yet powerful) home server?

Tom Chantler recommended I find a HP ProLiant MicroServer Generation 8 for around £200 to £250 on ebay and upgrade the CPU to Xeon E3-1260L (cpu's cost around £25 to £30). To quote from Tom's blog post,

"The important thing to note is that the Xeon has four physical cores with hyperthreading enabled (meaning eight available CPU cores)

" COOL! this nice compact server can be upgraded to 16GB ECC ram, and the Xeon chip Tom recommends is a low thermal chip and can be passively cooled with the heatsink that comes with the stock box. Meaning it's pretty quiet! perfect for home server.

hashtag#synology hashtag#tomssl hashtag#homeserver hashtag#docker hashtag#qnap

Update 30th March 2023 - what ended up finally purchasing

I ended up purchasing a Minisforum NAB6, for £539 from Minisforum. Small compact unit pictured below with the cover off. I'm using it as a dev server and running proxmox bare metal virtualisation on it without needing a host OS wasting CPU.

Intel Core i7-12650H (10 Cores/15 threads) 4.7Ghz
Quad 4K @ 60Hz display support (Wont be using, but this is impressive if you use it as a desktop!)
32 GB Ram (DDR4-3200 Dual Channe)
1 TB SSD (PCIe4.0)
Dual 2.5Gpbs Ethernet
USB-C power out, (5V3A) also impressive if you want this as your desktop replacement
Windows 11 pre-installed. (I've exported licence keys and will run on Proxmox if I need it.)

Here you can see the server in my dev homelab which is a 4U Rack Head, Black Sub-Zero amp box I bought off amazon from www.gear4music.com.

I've got a Mikrotik RB5009 router in the box, (you can see it above the NAB) but this is all just for prototyping, development and testing.

Installing Proxmox (bare metal) Boooyaaa!

Running docker on LXC on Proxmox

Here's a video that describes step by step how to run docker on proxmox. (bare-metal).
It describes step by step two ways of doing this
1. By installing docker on the proxmox debian host OS
2. Alternatively by using super lightweight (purpose built) LXC container

Both options are described, step by step. Pros and cons of both are also provided.

(this post was originally published on LinkedIn in November 2022. Subsequently moved to my personal blog with updates on what I eventually purchased and additional notes on setting up portainer, proxmox et al)

Disclaimer: These views and opinions are those of the author and do not constitute professional advice. Neither Alan Hemmings nor Goblinfactory Ltd (if mentioned) shall be liable for any reliance on this content.