> Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me.
Well, your monthly power bill would be much higher than needed with either those light bulbs or a server like that.
Those light bulbs can be cheap to replace with more efficient variants. This was already true approx 30 years ago, back in the 90s.
I got solar power. Without that, I wouldn't be having a Xeon server right now.
Don't get me wrong, to each their own! That is the fun thing with homelab. You can optimize for power, price, noise, size, heat, or a combination of these. Then you can decide to have a couple of machines dedicated or have one large VM. Then you pick the OSes.
For example, right now I am settled for my homelab server. I got a cluster to play with, too. I got a 10 gbit switch (which I only put on if I need the speed, otherwise I use a second hand Brocade with 10 gbit SFP+ uplink). Loads of fun. But my router is just an Edgerouter-Lite. EdgeOS is dead, and it doesn't have failover nor does it run a VM. If I run it in bridge mode (which I do now) and I use Wireguard it doesn't saturate 1 gbit at all. So I am looking for an alternative which is a bit future proof. Ie. with SFP+ because I will get fiber instead of DSL eventually.
A bit of a typo, I meant to write that I used to have dozens of 60W light bulbs; all the lights in my house are LEDs now.
I’ve been debating trying to find a smaller, low power computer to reduce energy; it’s hard to find a small one that have 10GbE or that would take a pcie card. Maybe I can find a Thunderbolt one.
Right, I guess most of us used to, but we save a lot of money that way. Still, why waste money on energy when you don't have to? If you could invest some money on different, more efficient hardware?
Yeah, Thunderbolt would work. I use LAG on my NAS with 4x 1 gbit, I got some devices with USB-C to 2.5 gbit NIC, these are cheap (30 EUR or so). I'd then use that managed 10 gbit switch which I put off by default. If I'd need the speed, I'd put it on. Thunderbolt is even better (way faster and cheaper, multipurpose, though you'd need to set up TCP/IP over USB), but I prefer AMD over Intel.
If you want a TB4 one with Intel, there's many Intel NUCs available, very cheap on Ali. Many of the ones I saw not from Ali are just rebrands (some, admittedly, with Coreboot).
Annoyingly, I can't really do 2.5G because when I was looking to upgrade my network, I ordered a bunch of 15 year old old 10GbE switch, because I mistakenly assumed that that would work with 2.5G as well. It turns out that the 2.5GbE came after 10GbE and so compatibility is not guaranteed, so I ended up having to upgrade everything in my house to 10GbE to make the switches work. Fortunately, used 10GbE cards from data centers go for around $40 on eBay. Thunderbolt cards cost a lot more so I only have one for my MacBook, and it's a big chunky boy that weights half a pound.
I was looking into some of those single-purpose computers, some of which will sometimes have a PCIe slot.
Well, your monthly power bill would be much higher than needed with either those light bulbs or a server like that.
Those light bulbs can be cheap to replace with more efficient variants. This was already true approx 30 years ago, back in the 90s.
I got solar power. Without that, I wouldn't be having a Xeon server right now.
Don't get me wrong, to each their own! That is the fun thing with homelab. You can optimize for power, price, noise, size, heat, or a combination of these. Then you can decide to have a couple of machines dedicated or have one large VM. Then you pick the OSes.
For example, right now I am settled for my homelab server. I got a cluster to play with, too. I got a 10 gbit switch (which I only put on if I need the speed, otherwise I use a second hand Brocade with 10 gbit SFP+ uplink). Loads of fun. But my router is just an Edgerouter-Lite. EdgeOS is dead, and it doesn't have failover nor does it run a VM. If I run it in bridge mode (which I do now) and I use Wireguard it doesn't saturate 1 gbit at all. So I am looking for an alternative which is a bit future proof. Ie. with SFP+ because I will get fiber instead of DSL eventually.