solarbird | (Reply)

From:

Basically, yeah. And unless they're graphics production servers, very little video capability. (You wouldn't game on them.)

Blades are noisy as fuck though, and surprisingly large.

Honestly, if you want to do something like that - specifically run a server for... most things, really... - and physical space is an issue, get a small microATX case with decent venting (better and higher cost, Fractal Torrent Nano, okay but lower cost Cooler Master Q300L).

Then get an microATX motherboard that is NOT specifically labelled for gaming, and, say, a recent i5-level processor with TDP less than 100 watts, and integrated graphics. (Intel: anything that does NOT say "discreet graphics required," AMD anything that's called an APU, iirc.) If you have a 65 watt max TDP processor, you're probably fine with the stock cooler. If you go over that, maybe go overkill on the cooler, but stick with air cooling, you don't need water. And the only reason I'm even saying that is because closet.

16GB of RAM will be fine for anything you want to run out of a closet - hell, 8GB would be fine really - and whatever storage you need.

NO graphics card, that's why you have onboard graphics.

That would run pretty much anything you'd want to run in a closet and take up meaningfully less functional space than a server blade. The only exception maybe would be if you wanted to also run a NAS on it, since it's nice to at least have the possibility of hot swapping hard drives if and when they fail.

You could still do it, and if you do, get a dedicated NAS card with hardware support, it'll be faster.

Then just make sure it has access to airflow (which is why I don't really recommend actual closets) and you're good to go.

You can get smaller than that if you have more money and want to learn more stuff. Size is all about the cooling. You can get a server down to the size of a PS4 without working too hard, you just have to know more about what you're doing. And you can get even smaller - hell, you could absolutely run a decent server for a lot of stuff off a NUC.

So size doesn't have to matter. It's more about the cooling.