Building a home server: the hardware

Recycling an old gaming rig

This year in 2023, I upgraded my main gaming PC. I replaced my perfectly capable 8-core 5800X CPU from AMD with their latest (and for now, greatest) gaming CPU, the 7800X3D. And since the 7800X3D also uses a different CPU socket (AM4) and a different RAM standard (DDR5), I also had perfectly usable motherboard & RAM.

AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X. Later, this particular CPU will prove to be slightly problematic.

Now, for a while I left this hardware in a box, imagining that I would list it on eBay and recoup some of the upgrade costs for my main rig.

However, while playing an excellent game (Satisfactory) which has support for custom servers, I looked into how much a dedicated server would cost to rent. Take well known server provider Hetzner, where you can rent dedicated commodity-consumer hardware. The prices start at €44/month!

Yes, yes. I know that you can find pure gaming rental services cheaper than this. But that means lock in to that particular game.

All you really need to host a game server (or, for that matter, web server) is a multi-core CPU, a half decent amount of RAM (8GB is more than enough, honestly) and a PC to house it all. And wouldn’t you know, I have some of these things lying around collecting dust!

So, since I have half a PC, I reasoned if I could assemble a PC for under £480 then I’d have saved money vs a year of renting one from Hetzner. The outstanding parts I’d need were a case to hold everything, a cooler for the CPU, some SSD storage, and a power supply.

Practically any case would work - the cheapest available would be fine. But since I want to house this in the living room, I wanted an HTPC (Home Theatre PC) form factor - basically a tower case lying down on its side. This will actually limit some of the cooling options, since the only readily available HTPC case in the UK (a Silverstone GD09, but a quite reasonable £92 excl. delivery) has a maximum cooling height of around 110mm. And, as I’d mentioned, this server was to end up in the living room, it also has to be very quiet. The Austrian company Noctua is the name of the game when it comes to silent, air cooling, although it comes at a slight premium. Storage prices have hit rock bottom this year, so a 1TB SSD was snapped up for just £42 on Amazon.

A widely shared piece of PC building lore is to never skimp on the power supply unit. The cheapest 80+ Gold efficiency with a wattage above 550W unit on the market is a Gigabyte p750M. An infamous gigabyte unit, that is known for poor quality, and a reputation for exploding. I opted to spend a bit more on a BeQuiet model, one that is speculatively rated A-tier on this PSU tier list.

Wow, look at that, under budget!

Ready to build

Building is honestly quite easy. Some have said it's LEGO for adults, and I can't disagree. It's still fun though :-)

All built, ready to turn on for the first time. I plug in a keyboard, mouse and the monitor into the motherboard, power it on and the fan spins up. Yay! Nothing appears on the monitor, boo! What’s wrong? Why can’t I any action? Well, experienced techies are going to know the answer. The 5800X lacks an iGPU. This means where I’d pencilled in [Optional] for the GPU above, it is in fact, required. No matter, thanks to the crypto mining crash of September 2022, old & cheap GPUs can be found on eBay, like this one I picked up for £65.

This GPU is so old, it required a driver hack to work properly. A strange .exe file the vendor supplied with it. Scary, if I think about it. Also, I included a WiFi network card, and an old sound card. Sound cards haven't been necessary for 20 years, but I might as well install it, if I have it.

I installed Windows 10 Professional on the machine, and proudly christened the CACONYM into the world.

Next time, we’ll talk software, and how I wrote this website :-)