If I’m going to have a homelab, I’ll need some hardware.
Lucky for me, I have some in my basement. Over the years, I’ve slowly upgraded my gaming PC and have accumulated some parts. Of course, some got poached by my wife as her interest in gaming grew, but I still have some parts.
What’s in the basement? A PC case with all of the chassis fans and an old motherboard / RAM / CPU combo. For my sake, we better hope that the RAM still works otherwise this will get a hell of a lot more expensive. Also lucky for me, I have a 2080ti that has been chilling since I upgraded to a 9070 XT last year (thank goodness I did cause what the hell is that price now?!). Assuming all of these components work, that leaves my shopping list as: CPU cooler, storage, power supply, and a motherboard battery. Not too bad, but the storage has me.. concerned.
Shopping for components
I knew CPU cooler would be the easiest and cheapest thing to get - especially if I just went with an ‘ol reliable air cooler. I was able to find a Thermalright Assassin X120 on Amazon for $17, which is kind of wild. I knew they were cheap, but was still expecting $30. This was new, too; not even refurbished. This PC has an old Intel processor in it, so this should be plenty to keep it relatively cool IMO.
I started browsing Microcenter for storage and a PSU. I did not like what I was seeing. I didn’t want to completely cheap out on the power supply, because I know how bad that can go, but I also didn’t need something top tier. Storage was.. just depressing to look through, honestly. Even hard disk drives are insane at the moment.
My search took me to Ebay, where I found, what I consider, some damn good deals. I was able to find a 256GB Kingston M.2 drive for $27 - it’s not the most storage in the world, but for my current purpose, and that price point, would work perfectly. I also found a refurbished Corsair CX650M 80 Plus Bronze PSU for $50! Those price points were good enough for me; I instantly ordered them.
All together, about $100 to complete the hardware side of things.
Putting it together
I’ve put together enough PCs in my life, or at least changed out enough components, that it’s not that big of a task. In fact, putting the components together is most of the fun for me. The motherboard, RAM, and CPU were already together. So first thing first was the CPU cooler - yes, I read the instructions, cause these things have a shockingly amount of parts. After getting that on no problem, I wanted to do a test.. after all, these components had been in storage for a long time, so I wanted to make sure they were still good.
More like I was praying they were still good, actually.
I did a quick Google (yes, I still Google things instead of asking Claude) to make sure just hooking up the two power cables was okay - turns out, that’s a fairly common thing and a way to test to make sure the motherboard posts. Cool! So time to break out the power supply.
Two plugs into the motherboard and one into a wall outlet later and it was the moment of truth. Lucky for me, this motherboard has a big ass power button and display on the board. Hit the button, immediately noticed the CPU fan not spinning, but then saw a bunch of numbers and then “A9”. Cool.. no idea what that means.
Quick Google - cool, that means it posted and made it to the BIOS. Also, I’m dumb and didn’t plug the fan into the CPU fan header on the motherboard.
At this point, I was ecstatic that it worked. Now it was time to put it in the case. Fast forward to it being in the case, relatively secured, with the GPU now seated as well. Did a test boot.. and the code is different. That’s weird. Now, I’m going to be honest, this was last night and I don’t remember the exact code now. Some Googling, and yes, even some Claude, told me that it was getting hung up on the CPU.. that’s weird.
Now this is important - I mentioned Claude, right? This is a lesson in making sure you understand what you are asking AI and knowing when it’s answers aren’t necessarily correct. Claude was certain that the GPU was incompatible with the motherboard and wanted me to flash the BIOS with the latest version as a hail mary. What I did instead was plug a monitor in to see if anything popped up.
Guess what? There was a message. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was essentially mad about being completely dead (I had to replace the motherboard battery) and told me to do a power cycle. So, I did. TADA - BIOS popped up.
HELL YEAH!
Next time
At this point, I was still waiting on my M.2 to arrive. So this was all the further I could get, but I was happy. All of the components were in place - after the successful BIOS screen, I tightened everything down for a more permanent hold. The next steps would be to slap the M.2 on the motherboard, grab Proxmox VE and install it.
From this point forward, it was going to be software battles.
…until I realized that the M.2 slot was directly under the GPU and I had to remove it in order to install the drive.