Comment by buybackoff

The article is good, but it is intimidating buy its size and scope. A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk. I have one with 64GB RAM and it could fit so so many things. NUCs are very efficient to run 24/7, but become noisy with sustained CPU load. For that one could grow the setup with OptiPlex or Precision Tower (can haz ECC) SFF from eBay. These Dell SFFs are very good, quite small yet proper desktops/servers with proper quiet fans, could fit 10G Mellanox 3 cards (also from eBay for $40), and you could stack one on top of another horizontally. Don't go older than OptiPlexes with 12th gen CPUs, electricity and space they take could become a constraint. The used ones with i5-12500 are already very cheap. With LGA1700 one could put i9-14900 (non-K) there if needed.