Homelabbers justify their work wrt productivity: "sparing me the headache of dependency conflicts and TCP port collisions".
But let's face it: tons of productive developers manage without having spent 10s-100s hours on a VM-per-project homelab setup.
Homelabbing is a hobby, and that's okay. Researching parts, building computers, automating provisioning, self-sufficiency, etc.
Tons of them also don't know how a OS works or how networks are made. Often that's no a problem, until it is one.
Of course "tons of productive developers manage without." Most productivity changes aren't make or break. That does not mean with hindsight it would be a bad investment.
But a homelab that's cost 10-100s of hours to setup and maintain to "sparing me the headache of dependency conflicts and TCP port collisions"...
I'm not saying I've proved it has poor payoff. I'm saying I don't believe it has good payoff, similar to all the other alleged "helps me work better" usecases for homelabs.
Homelabs are fun, and a place to learn/experiment.
I actually don't like researching and fiddling with hardware. I did it 20 years ago, but it doesn't feel worth it now.
- Buy a Dell XPS for $700. At the time I got one of the fastest Intel CPUs on the market -- I think it was THE fastest in terms of single-threaded performance. The whole machine is not that much more than the cost of buying the CPU alone. Look at the CPU prices on newegg or Amazon.
- Buy a bunch more RAM and disk off newegg. It's significantly cheaper than getting it from Dell.
(Optional: I replaced the video card with the one from Amazon, because the fan on the stock XPS was very noisy.)
I'm using that machine now and it's fast and stable. The case isn't ideal for expansion, but it works fine. It will fit a bunch of disk and RAM.
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Looking at Dell's site 6 years later, I think the strategy still holds. They go from $600-$800.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/xps-deskto...
For $800 you get this CPU which looks pretty damn fast.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-10700...
So the total cost with a bunch of disk and RAM is like $1000-$1200. And you spend 10 minutes unpacking the XPS box, and maybe 20 minutes swapping out the RAM/disk/video card, and you're done.
I believe that is a very good low effort solution to getting significant computing power. In my case, I wanted to build Android and other Linux distros from scratch, which requires a lot of CPU and I/O speed.
If you start going with custom components the cost adds up pretty fast, and the possibility of incompatibilities goes up nonlinearly. So I think it's a good idea to outsource most of this work to Dell. I have seen people spend WAY too much time being a system integrator.
It's not going to satisfy everyone, but I'd say it's the 90% solution for 40% of the price.
(I now feel tempted to upgrade my 6 year old machine, although I don't really need it :) )
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addendum: Wow the CPU that the XPS gives is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than that of the OP's build:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2680+...
17475 / 2927 single-threaded vs. 15513 / 1801. That is a HUGE difference because of the single threaded speed.
Although the Android build almost perfectly parallelizes (e.g. could use 16 or 32 cores), most software doesn't.
This is what I noticed back in 2014: desktop CPUs have better single-threaded performance than server CPUs, and that matters for a lot of applications, including running VMs I imagine.
It looks like the total cost of this build was $1,368.74.
So again I would go with the XPS + upgraded disk/RAM solution in a heartbeat. For $1000-1200 you'll get a significantly better machine.
For home lab situations, where almost everything is idle all the time then you're probably right.
But when you're working with lots of active VM's on hosts, the overall CPU throughput (more cores, hopefully fairly high clocks speeds) is important.
Just to re-iterate, the article author made the choice of "more cores" over "higher clock speed" for their situation already, and their build shows that. :)