Anyone here homelabbing with a Xeon CPU in their server? What kind of secondhand models are best worth it for homelab in terms of price vs performance and power consumption?
If you're not going to go full-throttle all day, every day, having SMP is good. For an homelab environment, I think 65W-95W band is ideal if you want to keep noise and heat output manageable.
While it brings some performance hit, enabling frequency-scaling (SpeedStep in older parlance) is beneficial. Using a 2U server will bring noise lower since you won't be using, counter propeller, 10KRPM 40-50mm fans.
If you want especially quiet servers when they're not under load, look at Dell PowerEdge. They run like sleeping cats when idle / lightly loaded, but scream like an agitated parrot if you heat them up.
Lastly, a good way to maximize performance without too much power consumption is using an "optimal" RAM configuration which utilizes all channels with homogeneous RAM modules.
We do the exact opposite since we're going "full throttle all day, every day", so I can't give you numbers on that front.
I need to get disks, though. That was not part of the deal.
However I won't be installing that thing at home. I'm not that mad, yet.
What do you do instead? Colocation rental in a DC?
It'll be a project-centric server. Not a general purpose one. For smaller tasks, N100 and RaspberryPi/OrangePi 5 series are more than sufficient.
I put my farm under the roof, in a properly enclosed rack. No noise and I'll also get some fire alarms to cut the power feed to the rack in case something goes bonkers up there.
(Any recommendations on CO2 extinguisher systems welcome)
I have no idea on CO2 extinguishers, sorry.
I got them as they were the cheapest path to 128GB support (in ~2014) and they're still useful today. I run one NAS/VM/home automation box and one Jupyter box with an nvidia GPU in it. They never complain. Neither does my power bill.