The Server

By Iris

The server, in a sense, is the heart of the household. It can do everything from hosting game servers to serving as ones personal library. If you set it up in a certain way, it can even serve as a second brain of sorts. All of that said, it’s quite ironic that my server has always been made out of old and quite retarded hardware.

The idea of using an old PC as a server has first occurred to me years ago. There is no reason to older then 2023, since the configs were ass, I don’t remember half of the stuff and I never really used the server for anything back in those days. The only thing worth mentioning in the pre-2023 setup, is the fact that a Valheim server once fried the north bridge in my msi 990fxa which is quite funny.

At the end of 2023 I have finally decided to upgrade from my r7 2700 + gtx 1070 to something newer, and hence we get the new server from the old PC parts. The old build was in nzxt h200, so a decision was made to buy something more fitting for a server. I settled on Node 304 initially. But eventually moved the server into a Fractal Terra, since it’s smaller and therefore easier to travel with.

Terra and Node size comparison

A couple of pics of the server running in Yerevan. R7 2700, 1070 and Terra

Belgrade, just before Foxy came

Now, a couple of things have changed since moving to Serbia. First and foremost, some of the server hardware has been donated to Foxy, since he couldn’t bring his whole computer here. Most of the stuff is back to not being utilized by him, so it can be re-assembled back into being a proper server. Second, it is now sort of feasible to run quality llms on a single gpu. Taking into the account all of this, here is the list for the 2026 refresh build of the server:

  • 3900× 174 usd from foxy
  • NH-L9a bought like way back in 2018 or smth like that
  • Ram: 64gb ~100 usd bought in Armenian mountain town
  • B450 Strix for now
  • Fractal Terra already have it, need to wait till Foxy buys a Ncase M3
  • Ssds one M2 sata and one sata from Foxy
  • B65; not a priority and if it’ll be at a sane price
  • Hdds; two of them I think on top. Need to modify the top
  • SF750 from the main build

Interestingly enough, found out that the 3900× still beats the regular Mac M4 in “combined” benchmark, whatever “combined” means. It obviously is more efficient, however that is a problem for another day.

Some good references for what I want to do with the top of the case. The idea is to extend the top to fit two 3.5″ hdds, to not sacrifice the gpu spot. There is a guy on Etsy. The risers for the fans here. The top extension 3d model reference here.

This should be enough for the hdds The risers for the fans, 2 × 120 by 15 slims