His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
My Intel Core i7-6700K spent years at the core of my gaming rig, and once it was replaced, that CPU and the motherboard it sat in collected dust to the point where I had considered selling it, giving it away, or even recycling it. A quad-core Skylake chip from 2015 doesn’t sound like server material, but today, that same platform runs our photo library, a media server, a pair of game servers and a voice chat server, and the operating system it all runs on is Proxmox, which is totally free to run.
Proxmox costs nothing
And the decade-old CPU you own is enough to get started
Credit: 
Proxmox VE is a hypervisor, software that can turn one physical computer into many virtual ones. You install it the same way you would any other operating system, but instead of doing everything with a mouse and keyboard connected to the system, you manage everything through a web browser or SSH from another device in your home. It can run full virtual machines, which behave like separate computers, but most of what I host lives in LXC containers instead. Containers share the host’s Linux kernel rather than emulating a whole PC, so they use far less memory and CPU, which matters on older hardware.
Proxmox VE is open source under AGPLv3 and is completely free to use. Every feature is available without paying, though the company does sell optional subscriptions for its enterprise update repository and support, but the free repository is updated routinely too.
As for the hardware, the four cores and eight threads is plenty for a home lab because the vast majority of the time they're spent idling. The 6700K also supports Intel’s VT-x and VT-d virtualization extensions, so a ten-year-old chip handles the job without complaint, and 32GB of DDR4 leaves room for every container I’ve wanted to run. Your old gaming (or even office) CPU will likely support virtualization as well.
I built it out further
The potential upgrades are numerous
Free software on free hardware gets you started, but it doesn’t give you safe and reliable storage, so that's where I spent my money first. I picked up an LSI 9207-8i host bus adapter, which adds connections for more drives. Once it’s flashed to IT mode, it passes each disk straight to the operating system instead of hiding it behind a RAID controller, which is what native ZFS through Proxmox wants. It also delivered my first lesson in mixing enterprise and consumer parts, because cards like this have a known conflict with some Intel consumer boards over two SMBus pins on the connector, and covering those pins with tape was the fix on my Z170 board.
The HBA feeds two pre-owned Seagate Exos 7E8 8TB SAS drives in a ZFS mirror, meaning every file is written to both disks, so either one can fail without losing anything. Used enterprise drives offer a lot of capacity for the money, but their history is relatively unknown, which is why the mirror matters. I added a 2.5GbE network card, because a single modern hard drive can read large files faster than gigabit Ethernet can carry them, and a new Fractal Design Define 7 XL to give the drives a proper home.
Everything else is reused. The Samsung 970 EVO from my old build is now the Proxmox boot drive, and the RTX 3080 that used to run games now does the heavy lifting for half my services.
The everyday services that run on it
Still kicking over ten years later
The RTX 3080 is a bit reason why this machine punches above its age as a home lab. Immich, a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos, uses it through CUDA for face recognition and smart search, which makes it good enough to replace a subscription. Jellyfin, my own streaming service, uses its NVENC encoder for transcoding so the old CPU isn’t saddled with that work. It wouldn't be a huge issue, since the 6700K supports Intel's Quick Sync encoder which is actually quite good, but a modern dGPU will always be better.
The rest doesn’t need a GPU at all: Samba shares the ZFS pool as network folders for every computer in the house, so I can have the same pool of files no matter what system I'm working on. I also run a Minecraft server and a Counter-Strike 1.6 server that each live in their own LXC container, and a TeamSpeak server handles voice chat. NetBird is the cherry on top that ties it together, letting me reach these services from anywhere without forwarding ports on my router. Some of this replaced services I used to rely on, and some of it simply wasn’t something I had before.
Proxmox is the key
There’s a computer like this in a lot of closets, something that is still perfectly functional but might just need a few spare parts to get up and running. You don’t need a rack, a budget or a weekend of planning to start. Install Proxmox on the old PC you already have, spin up one container for something you’d rather own than rent, and see how it feels.