Overview
Started at 12 with a first gaming PC. Scrounged parts, watched tutorials, figured it out. That first build was ugly, the cable management was terrible, and it posted on the first try by pure luck. But it ran, and that was enough to start a lifelong practice.
The Progression
What started as gaming rigs evolved into workstations and then into homelab servers. Every build taught something new — thermal limits, power delivery, component compatibility, the difference between specs on paper and performance in practice.
Gaming Rigs
Where it started. Budget builds, mid-range builds, enthusiast builds. Each one pushed further than the last.
Workstations
Development machines, 3D modeling rigs, AI workloads. Performance where it matters, not just benchmark scores.
Servers
The natural endpoint. Gaming PCs became test servers. Test servers became the homelab. The homelab became production infrastructure.
Philosophy
Every component chosen with purpose. No pre-builts. When you spec a machine yourself, you understand exactly what it can and can't do. When something breaks, you know where to look. When something bottlenecks, you know what to upgrade.
Skills
- Cable management — clean builds run cooler and are easier to maintain
- Thermal design — airflow planning, fan curves, knowing when water cooling makes sense
- Component selection — balancing budget, performance, and compatibility
- Troubleshooting — diagnosing POST failures, driver issues, hardware conflicts
- BIOS/UEFI tuning — memory timings, boot configuration, virtualization settings
From Gaming to Infrastructure
The builds led naturally into the homelab. A retired gaming PC becomes a test server. A test server gets a GPU for inference. Before long, you're running Proxmox with KVM passthrough on server-grade Xeon hardware with ECC memory. The path from "I want to play games" to "I run my own AI infrastructure" is shorter than it sounds.
Current Focus
Server-grade hardware for AI workloads. Xeon processors, ECC memory, high-VRAM GPUs. The gaming days taught the fundamentals — now those fundamentals serve a different purpose.
$ cat build_history.log [2012] First gaming PC — scrounged parts, miracle POST [2014] Mid-range gaming rebuild — proper cable management [2016] Enthusiast build — first overclock [2018] Workstation pivot — dev + 3D modeling [2020] GPU flipping — broken eBay cards, PCB diagnosis, reflow/reball, resell refurbished [2022] Xeon build — ECC memory, server-grade [2024] AI inference rig — R9700 32GB, ROCm stack [curr] Continuous iteration — always upgrading
Technologies
Related
- Homelab Infrastructure — where the server builds ended up
- Hardware Setup — current hardware specs and configuration
Status
Ongoing. Always building, always upgrading, always learning. The next build is already being planned.