Mini PCs With 2.5GbE: Picking the Right Box
A 2026 home lab guide to mini PCs with built-in 2.5GbE: NIC chipsets, idle power consumption, thermals, and which small form-factor box fits your use case.
Tag: homelab
All the articles with the tag "homelab".
Minisforum vs Beelink vs Trigkey Homelab
Three mini PC brands dominate homelab 2026: Minisforum, Beelink, Trigkey. Here's how to pick the right Ryzen or N100 box for your cluster.
Used GPU Buying Guide for Home Lab LLMs
Your no-BS guide to buying a used GPU for local LLM inference in 2026. Budget tiers from $200 to $1500 plus, real VRAM math, and tips to dodge the scams.
Rock 5B vs Orange Pi 5 vs Pi 5
Rock 5B, Orange Pi 5, and Raspberry Pi 5 compared for home lab use — NVMe, 2.5GbE, NPU, Frigate, k3s performance, and which one you should actually buy.
BIOS/UEFI Tweaks for Headless Servers
Before you rack that server and walk away forever, these BIOS and UEFI settings will save you from a 3 AM drive to the datacenter or your dusty basement.
Claude Code in a Homelab Workflow
Claude Code puts an agentic AI assistant in your terminal for real homelab work — compose files, bash, Ansible, systemd. The honest take on cost and data.
Network Booting Diskless Nodes with iPXE
Boot any OS over the network using iPXE — covers dnsmasq proxyDHCP setup, HTTP boot menus, Talos OS live boot, and the quick netboot.xyz shortcut method.
DIY NAS Build: Compute, Drives, Power Walkthrough
Build a proper DIY NAS in 2026: case selection, CPU choice, drives, HBA card, ZFS pool layout, UPS sizing, and a real power budget that will not fail you.
k3sup vs kubeadm for Homelab Clusters
kubeadm is the official Kubernetes bootstrapper. k3sup is a one-shot SSH installer for k3s. Here's which one to use for your homelab cluster.
Mikrotik RouterOS for Home Lab
Mikrotik routers cost $50, run a real OS, and humiliate prosumer gear. RouterOS basics, VLANs, firewalling, and why your homelab probably needs one of these.
Dell R720 vs HP DL380 G9: Used Server Knife Fight
Dell R720 or HP DL380 G9 for your home lab? We compare CPU generation, power draw, fan noise levels, iDRAC vs iLO, and which used pizza box wins the fight.
NVMe Heatsinks That Actually Cool
NVMe drives throttle hard at 70-85C. Here is how to monitor temps, intentionally trigger throttling to confirm it, and pick a heatsink that fixes the issue.