Hello everyone,

I started my journey in the homelab world few months ago, though I got strong computer knowledge prior to this passion.

I got a few pcs running at home that include but are not limited to :- personal computers- work computers (I do video editing at home)- A synology nas that contains most personal and work data- a raspi that I use for streaming games & movies from jellyfin to a projector- A Fujitsu S920 thinclient that runs few dockers containers 24/7 including Pihole, etc (im assuming it to be safer and really power efficient)- And another S920 that is currently used as my OPNSense router (I threw away my ISP router)

The thing is that I’m currently running most of my services (30/40 light services except storage) on a overkill spare computer I got that runs few proxmox VMs. And the electricity bill is just indecent (EU citizen here), plus I’m not really confortable with using powerful gear for simple tasks, while I can use a lighter pc to do the same job while keeping room for the future.

This way, I came upon the famous google sheet (can’t find it right now) that sort CPU by power efficiency, and thus got interested in finding an Optiplex 3500 (in its Small Factor Form) with an i5 7500, 8gb of ram, and a 256gb nvme ssd. Supposed to run really really low on electricity.

My goal is to reduce as much as possible the number of different devices, so I was planning to upgrade the ram to 32gb and make a proxmox host from this Optiplex, virtualize TrueNAS, pass to it a PCIe sata card with my nas drives, and run my services on other proxmox debian VMs.

In the future, I may would like to add a 10gbps NIC + SSD caching to it, in order to be able to work from the NAS part of it, and maybe virtualize opnsense and run my whole stack in the same device to gain even much in power & efficiency.

Is it not enough to fit my needs? ECC memory support apart, is it a viable solution ? I found a lot of people asking about this specific computer, but their use cases were always really different/lighter than mine. If not, may you have any advice or reco on cheap second hand stuff that could handle this, while being power-efficient and future-proof ?

Thanks by advance, and sorry if this post was a mess !

EDIT: I forgot to say, but I really really really don’t care about the room inside, cause I will probably mod a case for it. Im only talking about the electronic stuff.