Custom PC Builds
I spec and build the exact machine for the job, including the platforms most people avoid.
Overview
When I need a machine, buying off the shelf usually means overpaying or compromising on what the box is actually for, so I spec and build it myself. The builds run across mainstream platforms, Intel LGA1151 and AMD AM3+, and into territory most people avoid, like a dual-socket X99 workstation with two CPUs on one motherboard. This is less a single project than an ongoing practice: the machines it produces do not sit on a shelf, they get worked, and the older ones get pulled apart and fed into my homelab server stack.
Why dual socket
The X99 workstation is the build I point at first, because it is the one that makes people ask why. The answer is high core count on a budget: two processors sharing one board, on a platform consumer builders rarely touch. The price of that is a build where nothing is quite standard. Memory belongs to a specific socket, so slot population is a decision rather than a habit, cooling has to keep two CPUs happy inside one case, and the BIOS is written for people running servers, with far fewer other builders online who have already hit your exact problem. Working through those quirks is most of the value of doing an uncommon platform at all.
Repurposed into production
Very little of this hardware retires. Older builds and parts feed my homelab, a rack built into an amplifier flight case running Proxmox, TrueNAS and Docker, and that stack hosts this website along with my client work. That gives the building a point beyond the building: a machine I assembled and tuned is not a bench toy, it is infrastructure that has to stay up. It also changes how I approach used hardware, because repurposed machines almost always arrive with something wrong, and the job is finding out what before they earn a place in the rack.
The repeatable part
Underneath the unusual builds is the ordinary discipline: part selection matched to what the machine will actually do, clean assembly, and BIOS tuning to get the platform behaving properly rather than just booting. The judgement is in matching platform to job. Sometimes a budget AM3+ box is the right answer, sometimes LGA1151 covers it, and sometimes the job genuinely justifies two sockets. Knowing which is which is the skill, and it is the same skill that keeps the server stack cheap to grow.
The hardest problem
The dual-socket X99 build carried most of the difficulty. Two CPUs on one board means the machine stops behaving like a normal desktop: memory is laid out per socket, so which slots you populate actually matters, cooling has to handle two processors in a case designed around one, and the BIOS exposes server-grade options with little of the community documentation a mainstream platform enjoys. It is an uncommon route precisely because of those quirks, and getting it stable meant working through them one at a time.
The other half of the difficulty is repurposing. Older and second-hand hardware arrives with something wrong, and there is no error message that says what. The work is systematic diagnosis, isolating whether the fault sits in a part, a setting or the interaction between them, then deciding whether to fix it, work around it or strip the machine for parts before it goes into the homelab.
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Everything on this page was designed, built and hosted by one person. Tell me what you need and I reply with scope, cost and timeline, usually within two working days.