This is the finale of the Home Lab Challenge Season 2, where I finish my $500 homelab build, run the benchmarks, and then let Jeff Geerling decide who actually “wins.” The last stretch was classic me: I was over budget, a cheap eMMC SSD didn’t work, and I managed to break my CPU cooler mount… so yes, I zip-tied the cooler on because the video was going too well and we needed some amount of jank. On the build side, I ended up with a pretty practical setup: OpenWrt on a little router, a Ryzen 5300G box running Debian 12 with Portainer stacks (AdGuard Home, Home Assistant, Jellyfin with AMD hardware transcoding), and a Dell Precision running TrueNAS with two 12TB drives in a ZFS mirror. I also added 2.5Gb and 10Gb networking through a small switch, and I hunted down a cheap UPS locally—then got NUT working so both TrueNAS and Debian shut down cleanly on power loss. The big takeaway: my lab isn’t flashy, but it’s efficient. With the “idle workload” running, I was sitting around 53–54W, and that efficiency ended up being a huge reason Jeff gave me the overall win—even if Brett’s build was absolutely ridiculous in the best way.