I’m looking to build a low-end ollama LLM server to improve home assistant voice control, Immich image recognition and a few other services. With the current cost of hardware components like memory, I’m looking to build something small, but somewhat expandable.
I have an old micro-atx form factor computer that I’m thinking will be a good option to upgrade. I’d love recommendations on motherboards, processors, and video card combos that would likely be compatible and sufficient to run a decent server while keeping costs lower, basically, the best bang for the buck. I have a couple of M.2 SSDs I can re-purpose. Would prefer the motherboard has 2.5Gbit Ethernet, but otherwise I’m open.
Also recommendations on sites to purchase good quality memory at reasonable prices that ship to the US. I’d be willing to look at lightly used components, too.
Any advice on any of these topics would be greatly appreciated. The advice I’ve found has all been out of date especially with crypto fading so video cards are not as expensive, but LLM data centers eating up and reserving memory before it’s even manufactured.


That’s sich a Mac answer it’s unbelievable.
Describing “A project aimed to be agnostic of it’s environment” as a design mistake and not a inherent flaw of the OS is… Just wow.
Remember in this thread it’s about the pro and con of Macos as interference hardware. This is a major flaw which comes baked into the hardware. I tested it and find it an unacceptable limitation. It’s important for others to know.
To state “containerization is the issue” though… Just wow.
Unfortunately containerisation on macos usually means running virtualized Linux, which of course is going to add overhead and cut off access to apple APIs and some hardware. So yep. There’s plenty that runs natively.
thanks for clarifying. it was hard for me to dignify such a comment with a response.
you’re also going to run into hardware acceleration issues trying to run Metal acceleration with a Linux kernel. i don’t really see a need to containerize these workloads these days anyway with tools like
uv.it’s a big pain in my ass at times trying to do web dev work with an
aarch64-darwindev env vs the targetx86_64-linux. adding in hardware acceleration issues just sounds painful.i also just personally don’t like containers. feels like bludgeon of a solution.