Picking a CPU and Motherboard for Your Proxmox Homelab: What Actually Matters
Most homelab buying guides start with the case or the drives, but the CPU and motherboard decide almost everything downstream of them. PCIe lane count sets how many cards you can run at once. ECC support decides whether a bit flip in RAM silently corrupts your ZFS pool or gets caught and corrected. IOMMU group layout decides whether GPU or HBA passthrough to a VM is a ten-minute config change or a wall you can’t get past no matter what you try. None of that shows up on a spec sheet the way clock speed and core count do, which is exactly why it gets skipped over until someone hits it the hard way. ...