If you thought the PC-building landscape was full of cool components, just wait until you step into the home lab ecosystem. While you can keep the initial investment cost fairly low by going the SBC or mini-PC route, enthusiast home servers can involve numerous PCs – including those designed for enterprise workloads. You’ll also need a network stack, which typically involves switches, routers, WAPs, and other fun (and low-key intimidating) paraphernalia.

Then there’s the PCIe devices you can shove into your server. Whether it’s low-profile GPUs for your video transcoding workloads or hardcore HBA cards designed for SAS storage setups, you can use several PCIe devices to bolster your home lab’s functionality.

IPMI expansion card

PiKVM is a cheaper solution, though

When you’re tinkering with your home server, you’ll probably rely on SSH clients and web interfaces to manage your host OS over a remote connection. But if you need to access the underlying hardware and BIOS, you’ll have to connect a display and a keyboard to your server, making troubleshooting a royal pain.

Luckily, Intelligent Platform Management Interface (or IPMI) cards can help you manage every aspect of the system, including its BIOS, from a remote connection. But unlike the other options on this list, IPMI cards have some annoying quirks. Newer IPMI cards are extremely hard to find, and you’ll probably end up paying a pretty penny if you manage to track one. As such, a Raspberry Pi-powered PiKVM serves as a decent alternative to IPMI cards. While IPMI cards have better performance and lower latency, a PiKVM setup costs significantly less, and you don't have to deal with the outdated web UIs on ancient IPMI PCIe cards.

PCIe-to-USB adapters

For all the USB devices in your arsenal

USB passthrough is a neat facility if you need to interface additional I/O devices with your virtual guests, be they simple WLAN adapters or something as wacky as an Unraid flash drive. But if you love using extra USB devices with your virtual machines and containers, you’re bound to run out of USB ports on your motherboard.

That’s where PCIe-to-USB cards come into play, as they can increase the connectivity options for your home server. In fact, I’ve got an expansion card with USB Type-C ports simply because my old motherboard lacks the interface. If you’re willing to configure PCI passthrough, you can even use the entire USB expansion card along with the devices connected to it with a virtual guest.

Storage expansion cards

Personally, I steer clear of hardware-based RAID setups

Self-hosted services may not require a lot of computing horsepower, but storage is an entirely different story. Even if you’re not a data hoarder like I am, you’ll still need a few storage drives to house all the VM and container files. Throw RAID provisions into the mix, and you can even run out of SATA and NVMe ports on your server’s motherboard.

PCIe storage expansion cards can help you leverage extra HDDs and SSDs in your self-hosting workstation. Alternatively, if you love tinkering with enterprise-grade components, you can even use Host Bus Adapter cards that support SAS (and even fibre-channel) connectivity.

But a word of caution: unless you’re a hardcore data hoarder with plenty of years under your belt, there isn’t a lot of utility in splurging extra on an HBA with a RAID controller. Sure, hardware RAID has some perks, but software-based RAID setups have gotten significantly better over the years. Meanwhile, your data can be hard to retrieve in case your RAID card drops dead, and you’re unable to find the same HBA model as a replacement.

Graphics cards

You can even share the same GPU with multiple containers

At first glance, GPUs may not seem all that useful for a home lab, especially since graphics cards designed for data center operations cost an arm and a leg. But you’ll be surprised at how well low-profile, budget-friendly GPUs can pair with your self-hosting and experimentation server. If you’re into smart homes, you can hook your GPU up to a Frigate container and use its superior processing capabilities to run motion detection and object recognition workloads. Likewise, arming Home Assistant with some locally-hosted LLMs can help you control your IoT devices and smart gadgets with a custom AI assistant.

AI upscalers can also help you bring old photos and vintage movies to higher resolutions, while Immich lets you speed up face recognition and smart search algorithms with the help of your GPU. The best part? Since containers share the kernel of the host machine, you don’t need to buy separate graphics cards if you’re running your self-hosted stack inside containerized environments.

Network Interface Card

Bonus points if you go for a high-speed NIC

Modern PC motherboards – regardless of whether they were designed for consumer systems or server rigs – tend to ship with at least a 1G Ethernet port. However, there are plenty of reasons to upgrade the networking provisions of your workstation. A 1G port can easily throttle your HDDs, especially if you use them in RAID configurations. Factor SSDs (including those of the NVMe variety) and RAM-caching into the equation, and you’ll end up throttling your data transfers if you’ve got a 2.5G/5G (or even a high-speed 10GbE) switch.

A faster NIC can help your storage drives spread their wings, and you can even configure link aggregation for better fault tolerance and higher throughput for your workstation. Heck, certain projects – like a self-hosted firewall – require at least two Ethernet ports to achieve ideal performance, and you’ll want to go with a PCIe network card unless you’re willing to tinker with a VLAN setup.