{"slug": "homelab-critique", "title": "Homelab critique", "summary": "A homelab user identified as gessha detailed a home setup that uses two Nvidia RTX 3090 GPUs in an i5-8600K workstation to host Qwen 3.8 27B and Qwen 3-VL 4B models via llama-server, alongside three mini PCs, a Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 5, and a QNAP TS-231P NAS. gessha asked whether the distribution of services is reasonable and what expandable platform to use for moving the 3090s to a multi-GPU system, and a commenter recommended a used AMD Threadripper 3960X Proxmox build with 2x16 and 2x8 PCIe 4.0 slots, three NVMe slots, eight SATA ports, and built-in 10G networking.", "body_md": "[gessha](https://forum.level1techs.com/u/gessha)\n1\n \nI have a somewhat unconventional way of heating my house, setup listed below.\n\n- \nworkstation - i5-8600K, 32GB DDR4-2133, 2x Nvidia RTX 3090, Ubuntu 26.04 (friend’s e-waste aside from the 3090s) - Used for: llama-server hosting models (Qwen 3.8 27B, Qwen 3-VL 4B), Ubuntu 26.04 VM guest as LLM blast zone\n- \nlaptop - Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 5, Ubuntu 26.04 - used for laptop purposes\n- \nmini PC 1 - i5-4570T, 8GB DDR3-1600, integrated GPU, Debian 12 (decommissioned corporate mini PC) - jellyfin, couchdb(Obsidian), searxng, backups, custom webapp\n- \nmini PC 2 - Ultra 5 235, 16GB DDR5-5600, integrated GPU, Debian 13 (questionably decommissioned corporate mini PC) - docker VM with docker containers: hister, openwebui, forgejo, grafana, postgres, label-studio, minio, etc\n- \nmini PC 3 - (not set up yet) - ??? - I haven’t checked exactly what it is, probably similar to proxmox mini PC 1 (decommissioned corporate mini PC)\n- \nNAS - QNAP TS-231P\n\nContext: I use the 3090s for coding via Pi+Qwen 3.8 27B Q4_K_M, Q8 KV and for custom apps where it’s used for structured data extraction from text, and images.\n\nSome questions:\n\n- \nIs this a reasonable setup and distribution of services?\n- \nIs there a better way of organizing the services over the compute?\n- \nif I want to move the 3090s to a more expandable system with room for more GPUs, what would you recommend? I’ve previously thought about an old Threadripper for a 4-card setup but I’ve also oogled EPYC CPU+mobos\n\n \n\n \nI’m currently running a threadripper 3960x for my proxmox rig. It has been rock solid for the year I have had it. Got it used off of ebay.\n\nBoard has 2x 16 and 2x 8 pcie 4.0 slots. Three nvme slots and 8 sata ports with built in 10g networking.\n\nShould give you plenty of room to grow the workstation.\n\nAlso, if you wanted to play with proxmox. You could put the workstation in a VM, and then run a bunch of your other services on the threadripper as well. That might free up a rig or two for you.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/homelab-critique", "canonical_source": "https://forum.level1techs.com/t/homelab-critique/256221#post_2", "published_at": "2026-09-15 19:02:27+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-15 19:18:08.822891+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "large-language-models", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["gessha", "Nvidia RTX 3090", "Qwen 3.8 27B", "Qwen 3-VL 4B", "llama-server", "AMD Threadripper 3960X", "Proxmox", "QNAP TS-231P"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/homelab-critique", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/homelab-critique.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/homelab-critique.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/homelab-critique.jsonld"}}