Hi all,

I am a humble homelab novice and, up until now, have been primarily focused on media/file hosting for my family, home automation, and high-performance networking for my house.

Recently, I have been considering that my monthly spend on various game dedicated servers for my friend group is a compelling reason to start hosting at home since I have the bandwidth for such a task (2000/230mbps). That said, my workhorse of a NUC which hosts all of my VMs via ProxMox is memory constrained. My initial thought was "well, I would just repurpose my 2-year-old gaming PC," but, as you might be able to tell from the photo, my lab lives in my very old basement with very limited space for a big tower. Plus, there is open space in my existing rack!

I am interested in purchasing some type of rack server and am seeking advice from the seasoned veterans in here. I've consulted the wiki and have perused sites like savemyserver.com but am still confused by the general nomenclature of the various options that are out there.

My understanding is that high single core performance is a priority for most games' dedicated servers so that's one of points of confusion for me as it seems like most servers I see have lower clock speeds.

Any recommendations to point me in the right direction?