In this first part of my “Budget Server Saga”, I’m basically looking at a pile of old parts I’ve got doing absolutely nothing — an old small PC case with the motherboard and a 300W PSU from my previous setup — and turning it into something useful. The big idea is to reuse what I already own, keep power draw low, and build a cheap little server that doesn’t cost a fortune to run. I went hunting for a bargain LGA 1200 CPU and ended up grabbing a Pentium Gold 4GHz for about £20 (after missing a £12 deal), which should be miles better than the awful HP “server” I was using before. I also explain why I’m going M.2 for the boot drive: this system has annoying proprietary SATA power, and I’ve only got a splitter for two drives. By using an M.2 SATA SSD (probably 128GB) for Windows and a few programs, I can still run two laptop hard drives for storage — hopefully a 2TB from a friend plus a spare 1TB I already have — giving me around 3TB usable. Software-wise, I’m thinking Jellyfin for media (because it’s free and I don’t want to mess with Plex Pass), plus an SMB share, maybe a Minecraft server, and AdGuard once I’ve got a proper Ethernet cable sorted. Next video is CPU install and getting the hardware working.