Hello, i’m very tight on money, i’m looking to expand my homelab
Use case is virtualization for productivity/gaming/AI workloads
I’ve been looking at a few xeon v4 cpus, like the 2660 v4 or the 2680 v4, both should work fine for 2-4 VMs running off it. Some servers for example are the Dell R730 which could fit 2 GPUs or preferably custom boards with the X99 chipsets.
Prices available in my region for a (used) Dell r730 machine range between 900-1000$, including 64gb ram and dual Xeon 2603/2620 v4 cpus, while a consumer system with (used parts) i7 10900k (or the AMD equivalent) and 64gb ram costs 500-800$
Are these xeon machines worth buying long-term (4-5 years)? I’ve been also looking at consumer options, but I’m not sure of the main differences between both consumer vs enterprise machines
“EPYC”-based machines are not available in my location, neither ebay/amazon, so i’m very limited in options, what should I pick? A Xeon v4 machine or a AMD/Intel consumer system?
If you are talking about AI and gaming workloads you are going to need a GPU so form factor is important. I squeezed a 1050ti in my Dell R720xd for a gaming vm a few years ago and it was great but nowhere near what is needed for running simple inference on open source models. I’d consider more of a gaming rig for AI workloads. See /r/localllama
I ended up picking up last year’s top of the line Mac Studio with 128gigs of shared memory on sale at Microcenter for ai inference workloads. I’m using its 10g onboard to connect to my R720 via sfp+ to cat 7/rj45 and dig that. I have many secondary use cases for the Mac Studio which is a pleasure to have at my desk. If I was a PC gamer, I might have gone that route.