Sign in to your XDA account Contrary to what you may believe, home labs don’t require a lot of monetary investment. Depending on your requirements, you can put together a reliable containerization server using budget-friendly SBCs. Heck, if you’ve got a spare PC gathering dust, you can even arm it with a virtualization platform and turn it into a powerful home server.

Speaking of servers, you’ll often find enterprise Xeon processors with huge discounts on flea markets and websites that see used hardware. Assuming you find them at dirt-cheap rates, they can serve as terrific rigs for VM-heavy workloads – and I don’t mean CPUs released in the last few years. Leaving their godawful power efficiency aside, a Xeon processor from the last decade can outperform expensive consumer-tier CPUs at server-heavy tasks.

Xeon processors are terrific for home lab tasks

Solid performance even with dozens of VMs and containers

Unlike gaming workloads, home lab tasks – especially those involving virtual machines – prioritize multi-core performance and favor processors with multiple cores and threads. Whereas the average consumer-grade CPU is optimized for single-core workloads, their Xeon counterparts leverage the extra processing power of numerous cores. And that’s before you include dual-CPU Xeon rigs, which provide double the core and thread count in exchange for siphoning extra energy.

Take my Xeon rig, for instance. I bought both processors and a motherboard for roughly $150, which was extremely cheap considering the excessive import duties I tend to pay for modern hardware. Despite featuring CPU architecture released way back in 2016, each Xeon E5-2560 v4 processor brings 12 cores and 24 threads to the table, bringing the total v-core count for my server rig to 48. With 64GB of DDR4 memory, I can run multiple virtual machines and dozens of containers inside Proxmox.

Leaving Proxmox aside for a second, Harvester has the most demanding system requirements out of every virtualization platform I’ve tried so far, with even the minimum specs being an 8-core CPU and 16GB of memory. For someone still rocking 6-core CPUs in my gaming machine, my Xeon server is the only one that can run a couple of virtual machines inside Harvester.

Although the extra CPU cores and threads are the standout feature of Xeon processors, the server-grade mobos you’d slot these processors into have a handful of neat facilities. The non-name X99 motherboard that shipped with mine supports ECC memory. I wouldn’t say it’s mandatory to use ECC-rated RAM sticks in home servers, but when I run mission-critical VMs on my workstation, I’d rather have the bit-rot protection offered by ECC memory modules.

Likewise, server motherboards include plenty of RAM slots, with mine capable of supporting eight DDR4 memory kits for a total capacity of 256GB. Throw in the extra PCIe and SATA slots, and you can see the extra benefits of going with old enterprise CPUs and motherboards when building a home lab.

Single-core performance isn’t their strong suit

Just don’t expect ultra-high frame rates in modern titles

Unfortunately, the performance advantage only extends to multi-core tasks, as Xeon processors are pretty slow at anything that requires more horsepower out of a single CPU. That doesn’t mean you can’t use a Xeon for gaming. If you find one of these server-grade processors at dirt-cheap prices and have as low energy prices as mine, they can double as budget-friendly gaming systems.

But if you’re planning to run e-sports titles and multiplayer games at sky-high FPS, you might want to look otherwise. When I got my Xeon rig, I ran a handful of benchmarks using my graphics cards, and the CPUs were a huge bottleneck for my RTX 3080 Ti – and even the GTX 1080 at 1080p. Sure, I could game reliably with them, but even budget-friendly consumer-tier CPUs would surpass them in sheer single-core performance.

You should keep an eye on their power consumption

These CPUs guzzle energy like there’s no tomorrow

Despite their low price and multi-core prowess, the biggest drawback of Xeon processors is their abysmally high energy consumption – to the point where your server PC can significantly increase your electricity bills. During the first couple of months, my Xeon server forced me to shell out extra bucks on the energy bills, and its power consumption came close to hitting the dangerous zone earlier this year. And don’t get me started on its annoying ability to turn any room into a furnace during summer.

Luckily, modifying the CPU governor and enabling global C-states has lowered the idle power consumption of my rig. Considering that the Xeon lineup wasn’t built with power efficiency in mind, I find it hard to call old Xeon processors the be-all-and-end-all systems for home labs. If your energy prices aren’t that high and you love the feeling of running numerous virtual guests as much as I do, you’ll be content with a Xeon system. But for the average tinkerer who only needs to run a handful of self-hosted services and the occasional VM or two, a mini-PC is a better option.