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It's not about buying new hardware. Home Lab and getting started, it's basically a software zen garden. It's never been harder than it is now to buy hardware and put things together. And there's never been another time where we needed enthusiasts to come forward and, you know, show off your home lab and share with the group, you know, what problems it solves for you, how it works. And it's also the theme of this year's Devmber. But this is a not about Devmber, not yet. This is really just a soft launch kickoff. And it runs the gamut. It runs the spectrum from castoff business class PCs. You get from the local electronics recycler for practically nothing to building your own machine. This is basically a glorified micro ATX case or
building something with castoff Enterprise stuff. These are 9year-old V100 GPUs. Okay. Well, they were announced 9 years ago. They're really like six or seven years old because the V100 was popular for a while. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Get in, loser. We're remaking Tech YouTube. This is a hardware and software Zen Garden thing. You do not need to start by buying anything. And in fact, you should not start by buying anything. Tech YouTube is about using the technology to do something awesome for yourself. You're like the whatever somebody gets out of a real zen garden.
You can get the same kind of thing out of this. You're it's a real skill. You're learning things. You're putting things together. You're maybe eventually building a service that moves you away from subscriptions. That is the point with all of this. But let me explain conceptually. It really is a software Zen Garden. On the one side, there's probably stuff that you've heard of. Proxmox. It's a really nice virtualization platform. A lot of people use that for the home lab. A lot of people use that for the home lab since time immemorial. At one point, VMware was really popular, but I don't know. V Broadcom has really made a lot of
enemies lately. VMware less popular. HyperV also kind of popular as a virtualization platform for your home lab, but again that's more you're putting a lot of work into your Zen garden and that's cool. Uh there's truness. Truness is a thing and truness is really good for the enterprise and the version of truness that you can run on all of this hardware is not bad but it leaves a lot to be desired if you don't want to cosplay as assisted or you want you know sort of the simpler version of your home lab zen garden enter hexos uh you know hexos lionus uh tech tips lionus um sort of understands s what I'm talking about here with you know just people want a user focused user centered experience and so hexos running on top of the
really awesome true NAS engine giving you a different UI like I get it I get what that's about there are also a lot of new and upand cominging uh NAS oss uh Figo OS that one's out of Singapore that one's also really promising as an easy button and so like this hardware that is also a spectrum of things that you can do and also like the hardware and what you can do with the hardware has changed. So like I'm I'm recycling enterprise hardware but everybody's recycling enterprise hardware so the cost has gone up. At one point these V100s were only $200 each and they were 32 well uh the $200 ones were the 16 gigs of VRAM. into ones that were about 350 or 32 gigs of VRAM. And the reason that the price didn't get lower
is because people in universities were still buying them for floating point 32 and 64. This is a brand new Minis Forum Ultra and it's got a GPU in it, but this GPU takes up two slots. This is a SFF uh 4000 uh ADA generation from Nvidia. And so like this little powerhouse has a ton of cores and a ton of RAM and 25 gigabit Ethernet. And it's also ludicrously wildly expensive. As a home lab host, it's pretty nuts. But you don't have to buy anything. This is not about that. This is the Jones Bone N4. So these have been on eBay lately for as low as $100 each shipped, which is fantastic. This is a microATX case. It has an ordinary microATX motherboard in it. You know, it's me, so I've had to dial it up to 11. And I have a gigabyte
motherboard in here that also has built-in 25 GB, but this is an AM5 system. And uh it has 3 and 1/2 in hard drives in the front and that's fine. This is another Minis Forum machine. This one also has a PCIe expansion slot, but it's only single wide. So like if you wanted to put the SFF4000 in there or like the B50, it's like, oh, that's not going to work. Well, hang on. Well, we've got a workaround for that. I'll show you. And then we got the business class machines. So, like this is a Dell. It's a Dell desktop. Dude, you're getting a Dell. It's like these are not amazing. They only one gigabit uh DDR4 slow DDR4. Probably not a lot of DDR4. Maybe only 8 gigabytes.
It doesn't The power supply in them is guaranteed to be crappy. Probably 300 watts. But, you know, with a GPU like this, these are only 75 watts. And so this because it doesn't require external power will work in our Dell or our lowprofile Dell. It's like our lowprofile Dell only has two expansion slots. If you put the B50 in there, it's going to take up all the room. Or maybe you need more SATA connections. Like this only has two SATA connections. So what can you do? Well, we've got M.2 that give you more SATA connections. I've done videos on that kind of stuff in the past. If we want to take this GPU and make it only one slot instead of two, like our SFF4000, guess what? Nerdware can do that. So, I've got the Nerdware B50 conversion kit
and I've got the Nerdware 4000 SFFF conversion kit and even Intel fans. The crazy thing about the 4000 SFFF kit is that you get about 5% more performance because if you use the fan adapter with the SFF 4000, the power budget for the fan doesn't come out of the GPU budget. So the GPU gets all 75 watts whereas with the fan it gets like 70 watts, give or take, and so you can do more stuff on it. Now, there was a crate of B50s that showed up on eBay, and it didn't immediately sell out, and I was like, "All right, we're going to be able to get Intel Arc B50s for like $400 on eBay, which is a steal."
They're gone. Even before I did the video, it wasn't my fault. Wasn't even subbed. I'm sorry. But 16 gigs of VRAM, you could do a lot with this for your Home Lab server. And this is modern technology. and you're shoving this, you know, into this obsolete sixth gen Intel, it doesn't matter. You're you're going to be able to run all the home lab stuff with it, no problem at all. Okay, so what's next? It's like I'm I may be interested in subscribing to your software Zen Garden newsletter, but what are we doing here? What are we putting together?
Well, in the runup for Devmber this year, we not every year, but a lot of the years in years gone by because there's a lot of software developers in our community. um we put together an event that usually runs about 3 months toward the end of the year. It's a lot of students in our community and it's like just put together a software project, do a project for you and so that's like it's good for the soul. It's good for learning. It's it's like the all the good things about a Zen garden with AI and everything that's come with AI. You know, the software development landscape is a little different than it used to be. If you are just really excited for something, you can do software. There have been a lot of people that have
posted a lot of vioded stuff on the forum and definitely A+ for their excitement, but they don't know enough about what they don't know that anybody that is in the know that looks at it will, you know, it's a conversation that has to be had. And so the conversations are a little different in terms of putting that stuff together. So I'm laying out this hardware and we're building a spectrum. At the low end of the spectrum, we've got a couple of these business class Adele machines that don't really have much. And then the middle of the road stuff is going to be like my John's N4 with a build. And then my high-end home server. This is a Cooler Master like gold frame case. Like this is this had its own build video. You
should check that out. This thing is nuts. It has two V100s in it. and some other stuff that I got on eBay. And it's Zen 4, which is, you know, amazing still in 2026, especially with the unobtainable. Like, this is the extreme high-end crazy local AI build software thing. You don't need local AI for well, I mean, local AI is fun because the privacy and all the other stuff, but you don't need local AI unless you just want local AI. Like, that's going to be a whole other separate set of conversations for the uh the thing. But Figo OS in this lineup, HexOoss in this lineup and looking at that and then of course Proxmox. Those are the three threads. Well, at least we're going to have, you know, at least two of
those between Figo OS and Hexos. I want there to be an option. It's like this is still going to be CSS Zenguard and you're going to have to cobble these things together because the software is not one monolithic thing. There's not one monolithic piece of software to do all the stuff that you would want to do in terms of book management and document management and media management and sharing things with your friends and photos and backups and all this other kind of stuff. And Hexos really checks the box nicely on a fair number of those things. They just launched buddy backup and that is a nice feature. And so I want to do some content covering these things and how it goes together. And then of course
Proxmox. And so with Proxmox, I recently did a how-to on Frigot, and there were tons of landmines, very frustrating landmines with Frigot that you could trip over. If you're using a GPU like this, you can do a lot of video analysis offline, not in a cloud, and do it really well at very low power. And so this thing upgraded with our Nerdware cooling kit in one of these small form factor machines. Even buying one of these, it's still a better deal than a dedicated NVR appliance, network video recorder appliance for, you know, your home security cameras or your home security system. So these are the these are the kinds of unlocks you get putting this stuff together. And like I say, toe
in the water, you're spending zero. You probably could go to your boss and say, "Hey, we got any computers in the basement I can have or, you know, flea market kind of stuff." You really don't need to spend a lot of money. You don't need to get big hard drives. You don't really need to do anything. And so, at the low end, get your toe in the water with the Zen Garden thing before you decide how far you want to go. And there's a lot of people in our community that have gone really even far beyond this. And this is why we've done some of the really expensive build videos that we've done. So, let's take a quick look at FIGO OS.
Behold, Figo OS, you know, initial setup. So, activate now. Okay, it's premium. I don't know. Juryy's still out on this. I'm just taking this for a spin. But, we're going to do the free version. We're going to try the free version. And if you look at the free version features on the website, it's got Docker and it's got the stuff that we need. So, I think it'll be fine. Now, for our initial setup, it walks you through creating a volume and it gives you options for creating the volume. There's different file systems that it supports and it supports my favorite ZFS. ZFS is the slowest, but it has the best data integrity. It also supports ext4 and BTRFS. BTRFS, if you just have two drives, can be a good option. It has
error detection and also supports a RAID one like functionality. So, it does mirroring and it can figure out which mirror has bad data, which is more than you can do with Linux MD and ext4, the file system. ZFS, of course, has the best data integrity. You could set up a mirror with two drives, RAID Z1 with three or four drives, and RAID Z2 with five, six, seven, and beyond drives. So, it's just if you have one or two drives worth of redundancy, but all of that is fully supported here. And setting up a storage volume is pretty much the first option. Now, notice also it has install Figo Photos and install Figo TV. Figo TV is pretty awesome.
We'll take a look at that in a second. But Figo Photos is their answer to something like image. And if you go with Figo Photos, then you're going into the uh you know walled garden probably want to pay for it beyond the uh you know the premium features. But I would also encourage you to take a look at image because image is really good and free and you can run that via Docker and set that up on your volume and all of that will work fine. Now, FIGO TV is a whole other separate thing. You can check out the website for that, and that's getting a little beyond what I want to get into for this video. Basically, you can just drag and drop your shows and uh it'll work except for it doesn't know. It's not great because
this is not the new Magnum PI. Oh, yeah, it is. Huh. That's weird. Okay, never mind. Uh, but it is wrong about this one because it's like this is Star Trek the original series and it's like no sweetie, this is the animated series, not the original series. But, you know, it could be worse. Could definitely be worse. It's not bad. It's really, it's not bad. And you know, the other reason why this is amazing, it doesn't nag you about a subscription and you can share access to your TV shows with your friends without them also having to have a subscription. like uh I remember the days when Plex was amazing. There's also Jellyfin. You can run Jellyfin via Docker because it has the Docker thing.
Like this is a whole rabbit hole that you go down with this HomeLab stuff which isn't this video, but I have a feeling that there's going to be a lot of this kind of stuff in the video or because you know again this is my first experience with Figo OS. I usually do this kind of thing manually from Docker. you know, I'm doing the super nerd thing, but I'm trying to explore options that are not the super nerd option that are also not, you know, forever subscription based or at least balance like if you're going to do a subscription, I want to see really amazing new features added constantly and the relative cost of the subscription to be very low, you know.
Now in the docker guey that they have they you know they do give you a register to browse um the images that are available but you can also just use compose and compose is really something that I like to see in the guey here. There's also portainer but like portaino portainer has gone premium and subscription lately too. So, you know, this process is sort of inevitable, but it's all based on open source software and you can always go back, you know, to the beginning and it's like this is open source. We'll just go with the open source thing. I want to see the fe people work on it get paid, but at the same time, it's also not millions of dollars worth of effort. Like for good functionality, I'm probably willing to
pay on the order of $1 $150 a year, but I want that to snowball functionality and I want that to snowball the kinds of useful things that it's doing and also minimize the amount of headache that I have. I don't want the value per dollar that I have to asymtoically go to zero. Um, as has happened with, you know, things like Plex. Just cuz you set up a NAS, a NAS is not a backup. It could be one of your backups, but you need to do 321 backup. That's not anything I'm going to get into for this video. But Figo OS also has a backup task that you can set up so that the NAS backs up to something else. You can set it to back up to a USB hard drive that you can unplug and take with you. Maybe have a rotation of those, but the NAS by
itself, not a backup. So, one of the warts here is the implementation of smart is really very superficial. What it should do is keep track of all of these smart variables. And what is happening is this drive has a couple of reallocated sectors, but the drive is fine. And because it has a couple of reallocated sectors, the drive is throwing a warning. If you acknowledge the warning, that by itself is not, in my opinion, sufficient to warrant complaining about the drive. But if the drive has sufficient grown defects or it has new errors that are introduced or like the helium level goes down or whatever, then the drive is correct to surface those errors to the user and warn them. But here this is a you know this is maybe a little
vibecoded or not actually like somebody didn't look super closely at the smart implementation on other systems like truness in order to implement it here because trass's smart implementation was a lot better. Although ironically, uh, True Ness got it in a little bit of a kurfuffle here because in the free product, they dumbed down the smart implementation and a lot of people lost their minds because whoever removed that didn't understand the subtlety of that or they were paper papering over how amazing that feature actually was and removing it to like the premium thing on the Trina side. I don't know. But this is this there's a little lot of little things like this in Figo OS they need to
improve. All right. Now, let's take a look at Hexos. The deal with XOS is that it's a different user interface for TRAAS. Like TRNAS really is an enthusiast's operating system, but you have to learn the lingo and there's a lot of stuff that is going on under the hood that is fantastic. There's a lot of features of the software here to do with uh resiliency and error correction and managing uh the hardware, managing errors reported by the hardware that you don't see, but it is probably worth learning. But I don't want to scare you off because this is not really nearly as
complicated as it used to be even a couple of years ago. Like this is this is perfectly reasonable point-and-click software. And that is the idea with Hexos is like we're going to use all this amazing truness engine stuff under the hood but give you a simple easy to manage UI. Now as you go to install Hexos if you're going to use something like Ventoy just copy the ISO over. Guess what? That doesn't work because Hexos inherits the sends of the predecessor TRES. So you have to use something like Rufus if you're on Windows. You have to flash the ISO to USB to get here. Otherwise you get an error if you boot from Ventoy. At least
I did. Then we just reboot. And so here we are on the hexos screen. Wait a minute. All right. The default username is truness admin in hexos. And yes, this is an insanely badass overkill core ultra 9 386H with 128 gigs of memory mini PC minis forum with USB drives attached. could also do a uh addin controller for SAS disc shelf. So, what you actually want to do is go to deck.hexos.com and then we can do find my server. And it's like, oh, there it is. We'll call it hocus pocus because you know it's been hexed and it's like, wait, wait a minute. You've only got one hard drive. What? That's not even the right one.
Yeah, that looks a little better. Kind of. It doesn't have data protection. Yeah, it's fine. Minimum of three drives. That makes sense to me. It's going to erase that. It's okay. I like how easy they're aiming for this to be. Good job. Hey, welcome to Hexos. We can configure users and add folders and install my first app. Makes life easy, doesn't it? So, this is a beta product. They're still working on it. But again, it's designed to be point andclick. It's like you log it's the phil It's the philosophical difference here.
Do I log in to cosplay as a system administrator or do I log in to have a little dashboard, a landing page, the aforementioned Homerar thing. So, it's getting a little ahead of things for this video, but just enough of the toe in the water. Like, if you just want to jump ahead, that's what the forum is for. And user groups, like you can do this. You can try this. There's there's no harm in just putting a few things together. Then, you can install some apps, Firefly, and ROM and, you know, paperless. Oh, paperless NGX. Uh, you know, some of you are just getting into that whole adulting thing.
Paperless NGX really works really well. Again, a little outside the scope of this video, but home assistant. Yeah, come to the forum. This is what our community is about. We are, you know, it really is get in loser. We're going to redo tech YouTube because we're going to build our own stuff. There's no reason not to. And it's going to run on whatever hardware we've got. Now, Proxmox, Proxmox, like I say, is a virtualization platform. And I'm running Proxmox on both of our Minis Forum machines. This is the MS A2. This is a 16 core AMD machine. It has a single slot and this is a pretty badass little machine. Obviously, it's not designed to have a bunch of drives connect to it connected to it, but you can check out
our full review of this if you want to learn more about the machine. It does have 10 GB SFP plus connections and it does have, you know, RJ45 LAN connections as well and 40 GB USB 4. There these are not perfect machines. They do have some warts. This is the MSO2 Ultra. This is another one that we've also reviewed separately. I really like this design and I wish that Minis Form would uh adopt this design for some of their machines like this one because this design has not one but two slots and one of them is a double wide slot. So, you don't even
need to modify your GPU if you're going to put it in something like this. Unfortunately, they don't have an AMD version of this, but this machine is nuts. It has four DDR5 memory slots. If it wasn't for the shortage of literally everything, I think this would be an absurdly popular option from Minis Forum. I think the best bang for the buck though is still to just build your own. And you can build your own with something like this. This has a true server class AM5 motherboard in it. And sometimes you can find those for over just over $100. But, you know, an affordable microATX AM5 motherboard is around $150 at the time that I'm shooting this video. And you can add a lowcost, you know, 65 watt or lower
power CPU and get it done. There's also a lot of accessories for these on eBay, like, and it's also 3D printable. So, I've got some drives in here, and the power supply that I'm using is a little deeper than a normal one cuz it's cheaper. And so, the back of this wouldn't go on. on it. So, I had to 3D print uh an accessory for this. But like the Minis Forum machines, even though I've got four slots back here, the layout on this motherboard is not awesome. And if I use this, I end up blocking some of the resources. Um, you know, depending on your motherboard, you might block a slot or you might block something that you want access to. And where this is a serverish motherboard, I've got some other stuff going on with like, you know, M.2
adapters and things like that. And so I really want to use the Nerdware single slot adapter for this as well. But this is just a PC and so this PC you could run True NAS or HexOS or you know whatever on it and it's fine. We also reviewed Beink NAS's lately like the two and the 4ay um FIGO OS like they're shipping FIGO OS on it which is where I got introduced and to that operating system and it's got some warts. It's got some more. It's like everything, but I was impressed with how userfriendly it was and how it still gives you advanced features like Docker for virtualization and ZFS. So, with that preface, let's take a closer look at Proxmox and what Proxmox gives us. And finally, here's Proxmox. But this
Proxmox mention is really just a stub for our other content. You see, we've done extensive writeups and videos on Proxmox and the evolution of Proxmox and welcome VMware refugees for Proxmox. Proxmox is a you know batteriesinccluded fullfeatured virtualization and para virtualization host. It is a becoming a reasonable alternative for VMware for a lot of businesses. Not everybody. But I mean VMware has a ton of really amazing enterprise features that you know but for most people you know the bottom 80 or 90%. VMware is better than Proxmox in the same way that OS2 warp was better than Windows 95. And yet you know Windows 95 won out in the end because of the insanity of IBM.
Proxmox is winning in the uh premium open-source platform aspect. And so if you want to run a real thing with Proxmox, you can do that. Proxmox is also really popular in the home lab. And so check out our other tutorials. This is what the UI looks like. I've got a little container here which is I've set up Proxmox on the N5 Max from Minis forum. Um, and is a great virtualization platform and this is how I'm passing through AI to that with this. But also you can install Figo OS on the Minis form in 5 Max. Somebody just did that on the FIGO OS subreddit and you should check that out. But I will call out the community scripts community-scripts.org.
This is mostly for Proxmox, but even they're expanding and it's like you can run this on uh other hosting platforms other than Proxmox. I would not recommend community scripts for anything production, but for home lab it's pretty cool. This walks you through installing Docker and like Docker on Proxmox. There's some landmines there. You've got some reading and understanding. You don't want to run Docker natively on Proxmbox, but you can create a virtual machine. This walks you through that. But otherwise, it's pretty point-and-click to install Jellyfin, Pi Hole, Engax Proxy Manager, Hermes Agent, Frigot that I've mentioned before.
Frigot actually there are some landmines with that. I've written a how-to for that. And so, Proxmox is definitely at the other end of the spectrum in terms of cosplaying as a system administrator, but you will get some amazing life skills and really understand how things work under the hood. But the stuff that this is doing with containers and Docker is really structurally basically the same thing that you do all the way at the other end of the spectrum with like Figo OS and its Docker interface. So functionally it's not really a lot different even though we're speaking a whole bunch of different languages.
Look how easy. Oh, we can install this and we can do Spotify and Alma Linux as a VM. There's a lot of options. Proxmox is awesome. And so you can imagine Proxmox running on our beastly gold machine here with the V100s. You can run up whatever you want. There's tons of resources. I mean, I could even add the B50 for Frigot and then I use the V100s for AI tasks. And so I have lots of different virtual machines. So the possibility of lots of different virtual machines running under Proxmox with the memory on this. And then this becomes my home server. Now, you know, these Dell machines, this one, the tower machine, will only hold to two mechanical hard drives. And the desktop one really only holds one. You can you
can get two in there if you take the CDROM out, which is fine. There's also some 3D printable accessories there. Really, that one is designed for one. There's a desktop machine is a little bigger you could get two in. Uh, but USB drives, especially if you're using the ZFS file system, generally are okay. This is, you know, I've thrown some terminology around in this video. If this is your first video, your first introduction, your first fora into, you know, rebooting tech YouTube, I'm sorry for that. Um, but it is fun to learn. But I'm also acknowledging that you don't have to go off the deep end learning a ton of new technology and a ton of new stuff because there are a lot of options like Figo OS and Hexos that really do give
you a lot of functionality without having to learn a ton and you can get complex setups from copy pasting and putting things together. And if this has been enough to get you interested in building your Zen garden of software, check out some candidates for things that you can add to your Zen Garden of software. Cur curated list of amazing open source software. Thanks to one of our community members, Vivvante. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but yeah, look at that. That's a lot of stuff that's here. And some of it is Windows and some of it is Linux. Some of it is stuff that you can run on your home lab server. But this thread has been maintained since 2023. It's like
three years. So is a there's a lot of stuff here. There's just a lot of stuff here. Couple of things from just two days ago because everybody's going nuts with content creation and it's a lot of fun. Uh because, you know, the AI and that kind of thing. And yeah, some of it is just complete slop. All the all like the DAH guy has got like $15 million and a lot of what he's doing is just like the worst code ever, but it's functional somewhat. So, you got this sort of dichotomy of crazy going on. But it's nice to see functional things and uh most of the software on here predates the current zeitgeist. But you can really build your home lab, do something useful, learn a little bit, but not have
to cosplay as a system administrator. Or you can cosplay as a system administrator to the extent that you want to um and not be held hostage. And not being held hostage, I think is worth the price of admission. putting a little bit of work in and that the amount of work required is uh declining precipitously over the last several years. So build your Zen garden, get started. We've got the community that has been doing this since time immemorial and it's going to be a lot of fun. I promise. Now, if you are going to do the Nerdware conversion, some things you should need to know. First is like, well, why didn't Intel just do this? I mean, surely a single slot would be better than two, right? Well, this is a lot of copper.
Like, you feel the weight of this. The weight of the heat sink far exceeds the weight of the entire cart. Second, there's some options for the fan, which I'm a fan of having fan options. Nerdware actually sells fans that are designed to plug into the Minis Forum motherboards. So, you can have a fan that plugs directly into the Minisworm motherboard, bypassing Intel's fan control, which gives you some more cooling in the chassis. I really like that because if you're going to run this GPU at absolute maximum full load, the fan profile that Intel uses is not as aggressive as it should be when we're talking about a tiny heat sink like this. So, in our kit, we have a
motherboard fan which uses a standard four pin fan header you can control from your motherboard. And then we also have the MS01 and MSO2 version of this fan which will plug directly into the Minis Forum motherboard because there were so many people using an ARC B50 in a Minis Fororum PC that they've got the option on the Nerdware store. It's madness. All right, if you're following along at home, our little Nerdware conversion went really well. It comes with thermal pads. You got to reuse some thermal pads. I'm slightly concerned that the VRM area directly underneath the fan does not connect to the copper heat sink anymore, but it is directly beneath the fan now. So, it's going to get active
air flow. I guess that's fine. But this is a pretty slick setup for this single fan. Oh, I've missed some screws on the end here. I need to screw those in. I'm not screwed. Uh, it also comes with a bracket, so you can use this full height or half height. Uh, but it's, you know, it's going to work great in our N4 Jones bow. It's going to work great in our small form factor Dell. If I do want to use it in our desktop class Dell here with FIGO OS, I can just swap out the bracket, the mounting bracket so that it'll work with a full height PCIe slot like this. It's like full height and then there's double width. So yeah, it's pretty easy to
install. It's just a bunch of screws that you have to install in your on your B50. But now this will work in a minis form like a A2, an MSA2. If you do the MSA2, definitely check out the extra fans that Nerdware has for that kind of a conversion. But don't feel like you need to upgrade to a GPU. It's just that our X79 DDR3 board is going to ride again. And this is the perfect anacronistic mix of technology. You combine a modern B50 with X79 and this will do anything you want to do in terms of media streaming, in terms of having an intelligent home security system where it's recognizing stuff off of the camera. If you want to run FIGO OS or FIGO TV or whatever, this kind of a platform can do it. And
that's part of what we got going on here. It's a whole spectrum of testing as we go through Dev Ember the next few months. So, this is the situation inside one of our Dell mini PCs. We got some lowprofile RAM. There's there's not really anything here. We need a drive for the operating system. That's going to be the 128 gig SSD. We'll just plug that in. Get some power. And this motherboard still has two SATA connections. Sometimes you'll get lucky and there'll be an M.2. On this motherboard, the M.2 is not soldered. You run into that sometimes with cheapy Dell systems. But with a drive for the operating
system and a couple drives of mechanical storage, it's plenty good enough. Things are a little better on the inside of our Dell desktop. Certainly more room for expansion cards and room for two three and a half inch hard drives. Now, these Dells have sleds that you have to use with the mechanical hard drives. This one doesn't have any. You can 3D print those or you can just lay them in there. It's fine. The desktop Dell is also in a little better situation terms of SATA connections.
It's got four total and the options run the full spectrum. This is basically a spectrum of the very least expensive options to the more expensive home lab options, but it's all still made with not super new hardware unless you go like the minis forum stuff cuz you know your small compact. I'm trying to cover some options here. So, the Dell mini PCs are my recommendations for uh you want to save a lot of budget. This is a microATX tower. It's got a lot of flexibility. The power supply is the thing that's the worst and suckiest. And the motherboard in it is really kind of terrible, too.
It's like I'm going to add a bunch of drives. No, not so much. This one is literally called landfill, and that's what we're running FIGO OS on. The small form factor can work if you only need a couple of hard drives and you're constrained for space. But if you're at a surplus and you got a choice of those, go with the bigger machine. It's easier to get fans for, it's easier to get parts for. if you're building options like the Jonesbo N4. I mean, it's a case that has some downsides, but it is, you know, pretty affordable. X79 rides. Again, this is a perfectly good platform for this. Like Steve and I were talking about that will work fine for everything that I'm showing in this video in terms of software. The Minis
Forum machines, these have been really popular audience for uh apartment dwellers because they're very quiet, but they're also insanely powerful. So, if you're more of an enthusiast and this is not your first Home Lab rodeo, those are options. This is the MSO2 Ultra and MSO1 and they've gone up dramatically in price because they're newer and they're really powerful and you're still buying them new. Maybe you're getting them refurbed from minis for them. Same deal with our Intel B50. Like our Intel B50 like this is a single slot adapter. You're spending a little bit of money here. And then I've really gone ostentatious so that you know this is our Cooler Master Frame. I'm going to do a separate video on this. it
has spiraled out into its own set of things because in here are obsolete V100's. The obsolete V100s have gotten a whole bunch that Nvidia abandoned those from a software standpoint a long time ago, but these are still really popular with academics and researchers, but also enthusiasts. There are people just like you and me working on the software for these. And so with two V100s that have a bridge, you can run Quinn 27B at like 50 60 tokens per second on this almost decade old hardware. And that's really what this video is about unlocking new functionality with new software on old hardware. And that's true even if you're doing offline home lab AI type things. Now, if you want to get something new, like you got an Intel
B70, I think the B70 right now is the current best deal if the AI that you're running will run on the B70 in the first place, the next best deal is the AMD R9700. Um, and then, you know, you go from there or older Nvidia gear, as I've done here in our you might notice a theme. Listen, I this is going to be a separate video. Look for that. But all of these run different stuff. And the CPU in here, it's another weird situation. Meta has off-road map Zen 3 CPUs that they've surplus like the 7D13, but you have to have a special motherboard that you import from China to run that. So again, this is the spectrum of options that I would actually like support and kind of recommend depending on what it
is that you want to do. You don't need anything more expensive than this. This is a new case with old hardware in it. kind of like the Jones Bow N4, which is a newish case with newish hardware. I don't know. And now maybe the context of Devember this year in 2026 will make a little more sense. You built a really amazing dashboard using a base like Homer, I think is how you say that. I always think of Homestar Runner. It's like here's the web dashboard and that'll link me off to image for images or nextcloud for document management or image and nextcloud image and nextcloud and frig or image and nextcloud and frigot and maybe I'm going to run my own mumble server or maybe I'm going to run my own voice server or something like that. That is what
devember is going to be about this year. Some development definitely applies. If you're a developer, you can build things, but you should show off and put together how-tos or an outline of what you're doing for your home lab. Have you got a really amazing home assistant setup with like touch screens on the wall? Show it off. Have you got a really amazing home assistant setup with like, you know, a web interface? You should uh you should show that off as well. I've got a video coming up where the ultimate home lab accessory is actually a cell phone connected via USB to your home server and from your phone that you carry around with you. You can remote in to your home lab. So if you run Signal
instead of running Signal as an app on your phone, you actually run Signal as a web app on your home server and you connect over Tailscale. So like all of your apps and all of your data mostly don't doesn't even live on your phone. So it's another layer of it's like oh you've lost your phone. Doesn't matter. that didn't really have any important data on it. Anyway, there's the HomeLab self-hosting thing really opens up a ton of amazing possibilities and neat things you can do. But it all begins with taking the first step on your Zen garden, maybe modding your hardware a little bit, thinking outside the box, but that's what it's all about. Level OneTex. I'm Wendle.
Come to the forum, forum.leveltex.com. I'm signing out and I'll see you there.
