PC and Homelab Upgrades (Coming Soon)

- 3 mins read

It has been some time since posting and that is mostly because I have fallen out of the habit of writing (again), but I have been 10000% addicted to Balatro which is the only habit you realllly need to cope with the current state of the world. (Let me know if you need any tips to get to gold stake)

I am excited to say – as of this post :D – that this is no longer the case.

Well, not really… it is just a habit that I need to get into, hence restarting. It is a good time to start though because there are some cool things coming up ahead as it relates hardware and software running in the lil ol’ homelab and my gaming PCizzle.

New Hardware:

  • Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q Tiny (standalone mini pc - beefier than Raspberry Pi 4)
  • MINISFORUM Motherboard BD795i SE, AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX (CPU is on the mobo)
  • DIMMs (32GB 5600MHz DDR5) + 850W NZXT C850 PSU

PC upgrade

The MINISFORUM mobo is going to be an interesting one to build. It is Mini ITX small form factor, which is something that I have been wanting to do for quite some time now.

The mobo actually has a heatsink/cpu onboard which is quite nice. It has 2 SODIMM slots and PCIe 5.0. My intentions are to replace my current desktop.

I have the DIMMs and Power Supply ready to go. I just need to pick out a Mini ITX case and it will be time to assemble!! Don’t worry though, when that time comes, there will be another post.

I am on the fence on whether I will be upgrading my GPU. It hasn’t exactly been a great few years innovation and delivery when it comes to GPUs and that leads me to the thought that sourcing a graphics card which is reasonably priced will absolutely be the hardest part of this upgrade.

I am currently running a AMD 5700XT, which has served well and continues to run like a champ for most games at a more than decent frame-rate. I do have my eyes on something like a RTX 4080 or recently announced RX 9070.

I’m also pretty content with my 5700XT for the time being and unless I find a decent enough sale, I will probably coast it out for the next couple months.

Homelab / mini server upgrades

The upgrade to the homelab will be not only a hardware upgrade, but I plan on migrating all the docker services that I have been running on my Raspberry Pi 4 over to the new (for me) Lenovo mini PC.

I also have 2 x lenovo thinkpad laptops around that have been used as servers. It would be fun to make a stackable tower of laptops serving something - we will have to see about the thermals and tipping limit.

I will be sure to document all that stuff here as much as I can.