I have a B450 motherboard, 16gb DDR4 3200 RAM, 1660 Super gpu and a Ryzen 5 2600 CPU. I don’t plan on updating the GPU this time, because I don’t play a lot of games that require anything more, I’m playing a lot of older titles currently. The problem is this also makes me feel like I shouldn’t update the pc at all.
I think I mostly just want to mess around with a decent home lab, but because I dont have an intended use case I’m struggling to justify. I also had parents who don’t like to spend money on this sort of thing and I’ve got their disapproving voices in my head.
The plan is to upgrade to a 5900XT and 64 gb of ram and probably run a lot of virtual machines in a little lab environment but I’m not sure how often I’ll have them all running so it could be overkill. The upgrade is about $700 all up too so not small but not too much. I know I’m extending the lifespan of a computer instead of e-wasting the entire thing but I’m still a little apprehensive.
Good idea or nah?
P.S. I run Linux Mint on all my machines if that somehow changes anyone’s mind or is somewhat helpful? Can’t let the arch users be the only ones to announce.
Edit: thanks for the replies. I went to bed so I’ll try to reply to people as today goes. Thanks for the ideas and the one person who asked if I was a sex worker, you’ve made me laugh and think.
You could upgrade, but if you actually want to learn tech I would recommend getting a server. Grab an old HP or similar machine and chuck a few HDDs into it and install proxmox. Keep all the VMs off your main system and then you can shut down without impacting them. If you mess up badly you will still have your main system to help recover from the mistake.
In terms of learning tech, I’m not looking to learn in the traditional “home lab” sense. I work in cyber, and the vms I’d be running are likely different from a regular home lab. I’d be learning how to make a windows domain and how to attack/defend/configure. Realising now I should have said that in the post.
I do like the idea of having a server rack but I don’t have any storage space for that so it’s a future idea at the moment. Hence upgrading the tower to effectively be a server but also gaming.
You don’t have to get a rackmount server or even purpose built server at all. My lab at the moment consists of a stack of old HP desktops that I stuffed a bunch of memory and drives in. Regardless my recommendation would be to get a separate box to run things on as it makes things easier to deal with in the long run I find.
Main things you’ll want from the box is memory and storage. CPU is not as important in a single user environment.
Home lab racks are tiny these days but I hear ya.
I have a HP EliteDesk 800 G3 as a server at home. It is small enough to fit on my printer stand, it has two 4Tb HDDs for data in raid 1 and one 256Gb SSH for the OS and VMs to run from. It has 32GB of RAM and works really well. I have a few VMs for managing media, one for my personal jabber server (Open fire), another for calendar and contact sync, and Syncthing. I also have another 16GB of RAM unallocated so far which makes me itch for another VM to spin up, but so far I haven’t had something come to mind service wise. Because it is all off my main system I can do updates, change my HDD, take my machine with me, and I always know my server is OK. The same goes in reverse, I won’t bork my main system when doing server stuff. It is very handy and I find it useful to segregate things, but your situation obviously could demand a different approach. That said, I would recommend it instead of upgrading just because of the stability and segregation of risk.
Hey I really appreciate you taking the time. That’s super well reasoned and I see the benefit of the approach. I’ll have a think!
I’m still getting used to people shortening “cybersecurity” to “cyber.”
It just seems like you’re saying you work a sex chat line for a living. No disrespect if you do, but I assume that’s not what you meant.
Lol what part about that said sex worker/chat line? Well, you got me: For only $99.90 per hour I’ll talk to you about zero trust best practice that’ll get you rock hard. You’ll be begging me for a vulnerable endpoint to appear in my network sooooo bad. And I might even let you phish one of my users but I’ll make you my bitch first.
I’m really not sure of that’s what sex chat lines are like but I think it’d do something for half of lemmy…
“Cyber” is short for cybersex.
That’s like people calling Tech “the industry” I suppose.