My budget is ~500 Euro.
I haven’t built a PC in 10 years, I gave no idea where to start.
It will mostly be used to run Nextcloud, Minecraft Server and some future homelab projects.
I’m thinking of using this for the case https://www.the-diy-life.com/introducing-lab-rax-a-3d-printable-modular-10-rack-system
Where do I start? What CPU or motherboard would you recommend? I want it to be somewhat future proof and also act as a NAS
I would say with all of these recommendations, you can probably look to find an AM4 motherboard and user ddr4 instead of ddr5 ram secondhand. If you play heavily modded Minecraft, ddr4 ram will be much more affordable to opt for 64 GB if you want to allocate 20-30gb and keep a lot free still. AM4 motherboards cover a large range of CPUs up to ryzen 5xxx I think. there’s a lot of room for upgrades if you can only find one of the older CPUs. I jumped from a 2700x to a 3900x recently and it’s been great
Edit: only just read your future proof comment. Older parts may not be the way to go then, since you’re restricting upgrades to things which already exist Edit again: I thought about it some more and I think this tier of parts is actually future proof, in that it should do the things you said you’re interested in doing into the foreseeable future
From my experiance with minecraft servers ryzen is the way to go.
I would recommend getting a used ryzen 5 5600g or ryzen 7 5700g i found some for less than 80€ on ebay. For the mainboard i would either get a cpu + mainboard combo or get it new as i haven’t found any non broken used boards. Pretty much anything is fine, just look out for the number of pcie slots and the lane distribution between them and if it supports lane bifurcation (you need this if you want to add m.2 expantion boards) if you want to add a hba or network card later on and that the board has 4 ram slots. Get at least 32gb of ram, 64gb is better and get them as 2 sticks, so you can upgrade later, ddr4 is cheap now. Storage wise I would reccommend 2 sata ssds as boot drives and 2 nvmes (if the mainboard supports it) for data.
So as an example (only 1 boot drive) with the prices ive found:
U: used (ebay); N: new
This mainboard isn’t itx, but you should find one that is for a similar price!
Software wise you can try out debian, truenas or something else, but try to use zfs. Im personally using debian on zfs root running minecraft servers in docker containers with docker-compose but running lodestone (a web ui for mc servers) would also be an option. Running nextcloud in a container is also pretty eanew
This is a great specific response based on the principle in my comment. Thank you for taking the time for OP and others. I feel like the Vega iGPU on the ryzen 5xxx is meant to be pretty good too right?