Building a Server Part 1 - Micro Center

Micro Center

On Saturday, we went to micro center to browse and maybe buy things.

CPU

The first thing we went to see and that we knew that we were gonna buy was the cpu. Online I had already seen the Intel i5 14400, which was on sale by about $20. However, when we got to the cpu cabinet, we also saw the i5 14600k, which was about the MSRP of 14400 or $200. This seemed to still fit in the budget and was a significant performance boost, we thought “Why not?” I was a little concerned about the power consumption, but since my dad pays the power bill anyway, and he agreed, I’ll take it.

DDR 5

We looked around at DDR 5, and found a decent G.Skill kit that was 32 GB, because the Silicon Power kit on my first list was not there. It seemed to be the similar price and specs, so that is what we went with.

Power supply

When thinking about it, I realized that ITX cases might require a smaller PSU. After a quick google, I found that most ITX cases do require a SFX power supply. Since I was rack mounting, however, I didn’t think that it would be a problem. My dad thought that if I were to add a GPU to my system later, I might need more, so we bought a 850 W power supply, the MAG 850GL. I that that this was a bit more expensive than on Amazon, but I didn’t check at the time.

Cooler

I took a quick look at coolers, but I didn’t find the Thermalright AXP 90, the cooler that I was planning to use, so I planned to get it online.

Misc

We also bought an RPI zero 2 W that is going to (hopefully) be used for a music client in homeassistant.