I built my household server on a **Minisforum N5 Max** (Ryzen AI Max+ 395, Radeon 8060S, 128 GB unified RAM, 5 bays) running **Proxmox VE**, and documented everything — including the mistakes: https://github.com/Mensra/n5-max-homelab
**What it runs:** ZFS raidz2 (5×14 TB) with SMB shares and Time Machine; PBS backups to a separate 48 TB USB enclosure; Jellyfin with iGPU transcoding; Immich; TeslaMate; AdGuard DNS with automatic router failover; Caddy; Authentik SSO (OIDC + LDAP for Samba); plus Ollama (a 70B model fits), Open WebUI and ComfyUI running **full-quality FLUX.2 dev**, all offline.
**A few things I wish I'd known:**
* The **M.2 heatsink shipped loose in the accessory box**, and only one M.2 slot is PCIe 4.0 x4.
* The **HDD fans follow ambient temperature, not the drives** — base fan speed is what actually cools the disks under load.
* **GPU memory (GTT) isn't counted against any container's memory limit.** A big model can starve the host while every limit looks fine.
* **ComfyUI needs `–disable-mmap` on Strix Halo**, or every model costs ~2x its size in RAM.
* **Ubuntu's stock `nftables` service wipes Docker's firewall rules when the package updates** — in your DNS container, that takes the house offline.
* **Jellyfin: passing `/dev/dri` isn't enough.** Mine transcoded on the CPU for two weeks before I noticed.
* **I tested my SSO fallbacks with Authentik actually stopped** and found documented passwords that didn't work anywhere. Test yours.
There's also a MISTAKES.md with the times I broke things (including an unquoted heredoc that ran a live `zfs rollback`).
**Is it worth it?** With 128 GB of DDR5 alone around $3,400 this year, I couldn't find anything cheaper that matches it for storage + local AI, even as a multi-box setup. The GPU is mid-range in speed (a 1536² FLUX.2 image takes ~18 min), but it *holds* models no consumer card can. Comparison with sources in VALUE.md.
Happy to answer questions.
Source: r/homelab · by /u/Love_Late