I’m considering setting up a home lab and truly self-hosting my own services. Unfortunately, my budget is limited to around $100-$150. I’m wondering if the HP Elitedesk mini PC is suitable for this purpose. I’m particularly looking at the HP Elitedesk 800 G3 or G5 models. Unfortunately, finding these devices in Dhaka has been challenging. So far, I’ve found a G3 on bikroy.com, but it comes with a 6th gen i7 CPU.

Edit: I ended up getting Elitedesk 800 G5 with i7 9th Gen CPU, 32 GB (Kingston) and 1 TB Nvme (a Chinese brand called Kingspec). I’ll get a new ssd later. The price was 35k BDT ($300 approx). The bios was locked. But I managed to unlock it by booting without cmos.

@selfhosted

#homelab #pc #selfhosting #selfhosted #linux #server #proxmox #hp #elitdesk

    • koala@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      If you are going to run Jellyfin or some other media sharing, the key is if you need to transcode media (recompress because the playback device cannot handle it or not). Likely not, nowadays, but research that. If you need transcoding, research; you might get by with an old CPU, or maybe hardware transcoding support, but it’s difficult.

      Outside transcoding, for file sharing/streaming, every simultaneous client will require additional horsepower and disk transfer usage. If you are the sole client, then likely you can do with an old CPU. But if you and three people more in your household are going to be using the system at the same time, it might be a bit complex.

      One of my home servers is a 4gb of RAM, with a “Intel® Celeron® CPU G1610T @ 2.30GHz”. It’s very old and low end, but for file sharing it works quite well, but it rarely has more than a single simultaneous user.