Jankily Upgrading my Janky Homelab
I like to do my hardware upgrades in bundles - the idea of making one small iterative change at a time just feels like going through the sweaty process of breaking things down and building them again for minimal gain.
When I initially built my Homelab machine, it was a way to make use of a defunct desktop - it has a 12-year old i7 and the cheapest motherboard I could afford while doing an internship to replace the one that shorted.
A year or so ago I did some upgrades, adding in a SATA card so I could properly use many drives, and boosting memory from 8 to 16GB - a lifesaver.
What I figured out with this upgrade was that pulling out the whole machine to do just a couple of small things felt like a tremendous headache - especially when the RAM upgrade didn't take.
I probably seated it wrong or had some cable pushing it askew, but after only a couple of attempts to fix it I just threw my hands up and accepted my 4GB lot for another several months.
When I bought a dedicated NAS unit, taking the drives out of the Homelab gave me a chance to reinstall it and I was trucking along at a glorious 16GB for a while, but at some point during a reboot it stopped detecting the full complement again. Probably a motherboard issue then.
Getting direct replacement parts is truly pricey when dealing with decade+ old hardware, so instead I'm looking to upgrade from my 2 PCs ago CPU to my 1 PC ago build - my old R5 3600x is sitting around in a box somewhere, so what could I achieve with that?
It turns out, quite a lot!
I'd need a new motherboard as I brought the old one forward (based AM4) but that's mATX anyway and my homelab case is ITX only. AM4 motherboards are definitely moving into that same "expensive to replace" territory but thankfully the Chinese market is keeping them vaguely alive, so I can get a B550 for <£100 still.
| Seems reputable enough
Memory is a real delight - a cheap 2x32GB set is also <£100. The mobos all have m.2 as well so I can add one of those to save SATA slots for other nonsense, another £50 for 1TB. I still have my old stock cooler, but the Noctua L9a is only £40 - an option if I'm feeling spenny.
The end result is that I could ~2x the CPU capacity, 8x Memory, and reduce power usage for <£300 - kinda sick?
I usually like to start from the budget and work my way down to a spec, but when so many parameters are decided before I start it makes sense to see how much it'll cost and decide if it's worth it from there. I think this might be.
If I decide to pull the trigger on this I'll document it on here.