5 Things You Can Do With A Cheap Server PC

In the consumer space, high-end PCs and their components are designed for gaming first and foremost. Server rigs, on the other hand, are built primarily for enterprises and are fine-tuned for industrial workloads. Although server-grade systems can cost thousands of dollars, even an affordable mainstream PC can surpass a premium server in gaming benchmarks.

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NAS or dedicated server: Which is better for your home network?

Network-attached storage is growing in popularity, but many people are overlooking dedicated servers, which offer more flexibility and features.

As such, it’s not recommended for gamers to go around buying server PCs that bear 20-core, 40-thread Intel Xeon chips. But it’s a completely different story if you’re into home servers or want some extra oomph in your productivity-driven tasks. Heck, even an outdated server rack sold at bargain prices can be put to good use with these five amazing projects.

5 Video-editing war-machine

You’ll need to invest in a GPU with plenty of VRAM, though

Just like gaming, video editing can be extremely taxing on your hardware. If you’re rocking a low-end processor with a few cores and threads, it can take a while to touch up some short footage, let alone render long recordings.

That’s where server systems, especially PCs with dual-processors, come in handy. While they aren’t as amazing on the efficiency scale as your average computer, you can grab any old server released in the last five years and comfortably use it for all your video-processing tasks. That said, you should remember that your GPU’s VRAM plays a huge role in video rendering, which is why you’ll have to invest in a decent graphics card to get more mileage out of your video-editing server.

4 Deep learning workstation

With enough PCIe slots to develop your own AI

With the recent developments in the artificial intelligence sector taking the world by storm, now’s the best time to get started with deep learning and neural networks if you’re planning to build your own AI. That said, you might encounter certain performance issues if you try to train large generative models.

For starters, most modern systems lack the provisions for multi-GPU setups, and you can realistically only fit two – or at most three – high-end GPUs on a consumer-grade motherboard. Meanwhile, your average server mobo contains tons of PCIe x16 slots, where you can add as many graphics cards to expedite your machine learning workloads. And speaking of AI…

3 Local AI hosting system

That can generate text and images with ease

Third-party AI chatbots and image-generation tools have mushroomed in recent times. However, their lack of privacy, combined with subscription-based models that force you to pay an additional sum to unlock advanced features, is a bit of a downer. Thankfully, it’s possible to host LLMs and image generators on a local machine – like a server PC.

Sure, you’ll need a dedicated GPU if you’re planning to generate realistic images with your server PC. But what makes server PCs amazing for this project is their mind-boggling RAM capacity. For reference, most motherboards can only support dual-channel memory, leading to lower bandwidth when using LLMs with higher parameter counts. In comparison, server-level mobos can support as many as twelve channels. Leaving the memory bandwidth aside, the sheer number of physical cores on server systems can provide much better performance in CPU-intensive AI tasks than your average PC.

2 Multi-drive NAS

Capable of storing terabytes upon terabytes of data

Regardless of whether you’re buying a NAS enclosure or building a rig from scratch, the number of drive bays remains one of the most important factors. Most of the cheaper pre-built NAS setups cap at 4 drive bays, and you’ll have to pay upwards of $500 if you want one that can support more than 6 HDDs.

The situation is somewhat better on full-tower PCs, though server racks are arguably the alternative for data hoarders who need to slot in a boatload of drives for their storage needs. Heck, there are certain rack-type chassis that can hold upwards of 15 HDDs! Additionally, since most NAS setups don’t require a top-of-the-line processor with fast clock speeds, you can save some money by choosing a cheaper, outdated server PC for this purpose.

1 Proxmox home server

After all, most server hardware is built for virtualization workloads

If you’ve read my recent articles on XDA, you may have noticed that I’ve become fond of Proxmox. As someone who spent years dealing with the lackluster performance of Type-2 hypervisors, I was absolutely blown away by the superior performance of Proxmox when I installed it on my seven-year-old system.

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A beginner’s guide to setting up Proxmox

It’s quite easy to configure Proxmox for your home lab server

Unlike your typical game, virtualization tools favor CPUs with extra cores and massive amounts of memory over high clock speeds and faster-than-light RAM frequencies. Therefore, even a cheap, outdated server rig will provide solid performance in a Proxmox-powered home lab. In fact, you can even take your Proxmox server to the next level by running macOS Sonoma simultaneously with your favorite Linux distros and containers.

Repurposing old server PCs into home lab setups

Server PCs can be quite the gold mine for DIY enthusiasts, as there’s no shortage of projects you could build with them. For example, you could use the uber-popular Home Assistant to automate all your smart gadgets. Then there’s the media server rabbit hole, which includes the likes of Jellyfin, Plex, Kodi, Emby, and other incredible tools, and you can easily spend weeks trying them all out.

Despite all their pros, server PCs can have rather complex (and dare I say, misleading) naming schemes for their parts, especially on the processor front. So, the next time you spot an old Supermicro, Intertech, Rosewill, Dell, or HP server on a clearance sale, be sure to thoroughly check the specifications before purchasing it for your home lab.