The fun of home labbing often comes from cobbling together the hardware, building the devices that you need, and seeing how it all comes to life as you add more services, more hardware, and link up as much as you can to make something genuinely useful. However, everyone has one Achilles' heel of the process, where they opt to go the "easy" route. There's nothing wrong with taking that so-called easy route either, not everyone has the capability or even desire to learn every aspect. That's where the HL15 Beast from 45HomeLab comes in.

This product is what I can only describe as a "homelab in a box", and the HL15 Beast lives up to its name. At its core, it's a 5U server chassis with support for E-ATX motherboards, full-size high-end GPUs, and big CPU coolers. However, 45HomeLab also offer more than just the case and backplane, with an additional tier that includes the power supply and another tier that includes the power supply, motherboard, 1TB NVMe, HBA, CPU, and RAM.

Is it expensive? Absolutely. It's not for everyone, but if you're a person who just wants a machine that works, without having to tinker with hardware so you can focus on the software, then the HL15 Beast is certainly worth looking at.

About this article: 45HomeLab provided us with the HL15 Beast for the purposes of this article. The company had no input into its contents.

Pricing is a sore point for many

Though the hardware is quite good

First and foremost, I want to acknowledge the pricing strategy here, as by all accounts, it's an expensive product. These are the following tiers of pricing available:

• Chassis and backplane: $1579.99
• Chassis, backplane, and PSU: $1799.99
• Fully built and burnt in with ASRock motherboard: $2899.99
• Fully built and burnt in with Asus Pro-Art motherboard: $3199.99

What's more, it doesn't typically come with a GPU. I was sent one alongside this unit for testing purposes, so you'll need to add that cost on to your bill of materials, too. Finally, 128GB of ECC memory adds an additional $499.99 to the cost, so for an all-inclusive build with an RTX 4090 (as shown here), you're looking at around $6,000. And that doesn't include HDDs for storage, either.

With all of that said, I don't believe the pricing is as egregious as some make it out to be, but I undoubtedly agree that it's a large upfront cost that you can certainly find cheaper equivalents to. Many homelabbers buy second hand, used enterprise parts, and you can buy an older Supermicro 846 5U chassis with 24 bays for $400 to $600 fairly easily. That's a steep discount compared to what 45HomeLab offers. Yet the HL15 Beast has several advantages, too. Not only is it much quieter than those available options, but it's GPU friendly without any hacks or modifications needed. Plus, you get a warranty and support if things go wrong, which you also typically wouldn't get with a second-hand purchase.

Is the HL15 Beast good value for money? That depends, and it's certainly a hard sell when compared to what you can get. Even the Corsair RM1000x PSU, to buy it as an included tier from 45HomeLab, costs an additional $220... or you could buy it yourself for $170 from the likes of Amazon or Newegg. Even if you were to go with the MSRP straight from Corsair, it costs $210... so there's still an additional $10 markup. 45HomeLab are using the newer ATX 3.1 parts, though, so that's a plus, whereas you might not necessarily find that information so readily when purchasing the same PSU from another supplier.

The HBA used is the LSI 9305-24i, perfect for the eight 2.5-inch drive bays and 15 3.5-inch drive bays that the HL15 Beast supports. Other notable hardware includes the Intel I226-V and Aquantia AQC113 NICs, a full set of Noctua fans for the case and the CPU, and the Kingston Fury DDR5 RAM with a maximum transfer speed of 5600 MT/s. Out of the box, XMP/EXPO is disabled meaning that the RAM ran at 4800 MT/s, and I also noticed that Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) is disabled, too. I can forgive XMP, as four sticks of RAM in XMP can be unstable, but disabling SR-IOV is confusing as it's the technology that allows a hypervisor such as Proxmox to pass hardware through to a virtual machine.

For what it's worth, the hardware is as good as it seems on the surface. After all, $499.99 is arguably cheap for the RAM you get (nowadays, anyway, though I imagine that will eventually increase here, too), and the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, 1 TB Kingston SSD (though DRAM-less), Noctua NH-D15, HBA, PSU, and more, all add up substantially. You pay a small premium for each of those parts from 45HomeLab, but with the HBA, it would cost about $1400-1700 to buy those parts yourself. Couple that with the Noctua case fans, all the wiring completed for you, testing, and more, and the cost no longer looks as high as it may have initially.

In terms of hardware, I only have one major complaint, and it's not something 45HomeLab could have done anything about, aside from using a different motherboard. The Intel I226-V NIC has problems in some configurations, and on Proxmox, it has a tendency to crash and require a reboot. I was able to fix this by modifying the GRUB bootloader and disabling PCIe Active State Power Management (ASPM), and setting the ASPM policy of PCIe devices to performance mode.

Rocky Linux comes preinstalled

Though you should just use Proxmox

If you purchase the "burned in" HL15 Beast, you'll get the company's modified version of Rocky Linux pre-installed. I saw a folder called "test_results" on the desktop that disappeared once I clicked it, which the very existence of tells me that at the very least, the device was tested before being shipped out. On boot, a fork of Cockpit (called Houston) launches as a service, giving you a web UI to control your new machine from.

For first-time users, there's a setup wizard that will SSH into your machine and set up various things, like ZFS for you. However, at the time of writing, only the Windows application is visible on the site. Thankfully, the URL references a GitHub repository, where I was able to download the macOS version of "Houston Client Manager." There are also versions compiled for Linux here, too.

However, my fortune ran out there. The application said that "ssh-keygen not found at ssh-keygen", though when I reported this to 45HomeLab, they said their developers had identified the cause and were rolling out a fix. That fix has now arrived, alongside the removals of all of the emoji in the Houston Client Manager's code.

As an aside, given the prevalence of emoji, and the multiple comments throughout the code that directly reference the user (such as "you explicitly said: 7 prev should be 4") I strongly suspect that much of the code is AI written and wasn't appropriately tested at the time. However, I was able to follow the installation script in the source code, and I set up my server that way.

The next problem I encountered was that there had been updates to Rocky Linux that broke ZFS compatibility. This wasn't in 45HomeLab's control, to be clear, but it's important to keep in mind that ZFS compatibility with Linux in general is rather flaky. To be honest, you're better off using another distribution that will package updates with any necessary ZFS changes in order to keep things working. Otherwise, you run the risk of updating your server and no longer being able to access your data.

In fact, I ran into that exact problem when trying to set up ZFS on my machine. I was unaware that it was broken, and when I tried to use the web UI or the terminal, it would fail to create the ZFS pool. It was only then that I discovered that the most recent update had broken ZFS in Rocky Linux at the time, but if you're buying this device as a first-time Linux user, some of these things may be hard to figure out. When I asked about it, I was told the following as part of a larger statement:

[In t]his latest update to 9.7. Red Hat changed things in the kernel headers and caused compilation errors. That is what caused the issue they referenced. It is closed now and the upstream ZFS packages support this latest kernel change.

I played around with the preinstalled operating system for a while, but eventually migrated to Proxmox, which I've been using since. I'm familiar with it, and getting things up and running was a lot easier overall. I've had no issue with deploying LXCs running llama.cpp, Whisper, and other applications, and the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X alongside the RTX 4090 and 128 GB of RAM flies.

If you intend to use this as a NAS, I'd strongly recommend installing your own operating system for long-term support, be it TrueNAS, Proxmox, or any other distribution known for maintaining ZFS compatibility. It'll be a lot simpler in the long-run for that particular use case. It's nice that a preinstalled operating system is included so that you can boot it up and test it immediately, and for some people it's an excellent operating system to use, but it will likely cause more problems for first-time homelabbers than it will solve.

It's a homelab in a box

In both the good and a bad sense

For someone who just wants hardware that works so they can focus on the software, the HL15 Beast is appealing. It's not the worst deal out there, and saves you needing to scour the internet for second-hand hardware capable of hosting a similar number of drives. Once you add up the cost of the individual components, it starts to make a lot more sense. What it does mean, though, is that you're locked into the hardware options that 45HomeLab makes available when purchasing your unit.

At the very least, the hardware you get is good. It's not the case that you're getting bad hardware for a high price; it's a genuinely high quality case, with great parts, and practically every usecase covered. The pair of NICs used here have served me perfectly well in another machine running Proxmox and OPNsense, and I've already been experimenting with local AI that can make use of all of the hardware. We'll be covering that in the near future, but it makes for an incredibly powerful local AI box, a machine to host a lot of virtual machines, or merely a NAS with a lot of storage available.

The hardware used is of a high-quality, it's new, and it will serve both new homelabbers and seasoned veterans alike for a long time to come. You'll need to bring your own GPU, but unless you also plan on deploying local LLMs or running other AI or graphically intensive workloads, you won't need anything too beefy. The integrated graphics of the 7950X will more than do the job for transcoding Jellyfin, for example.

If you're interested in building a homelab and don't know where to start, I'd recommend starting small with cheaper parts, especially if you already have most of the hardware lying around to build a second computer to work with. Install Proxmox or TrueNAS on it to dip your toes in the world of homelabbing, and then decide whether or not a device like this is worth it. It's a lot of money, and you can still build something similar for cheaper. For the convenience, build quality, and warranty though, the 45HomeLab HL15 Beast is, well, a beast.