Dell Optiplex XE3 for Home Server

I recently got a Dell Optiplex XE3 second hand and set it up as a home server. It’s working great and I wanted to share some info on it in case it’s a helpful reference for other people’s home labs.

The Dell Optiplex XE3 tower is configured with a i7-8700 (6c, 12t), 32 GiB DDR4 RAM (2 sticks), 2 2.5" SSDs, and 1 M.2 NVMe SSD. I installed Debian 12 minimal and services are deployed via Docker. I’m currently running 20+ containers, with some of the heavier containers being Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Paperless NGX, Home Assistant, and Immich. I haven’t performed any software power optimization; it’s just a standard Debian install. When idle with no significant load on the containers, power consumption is 14-15W measured with a Shelly Plug. While not fantastic (my previous server had 6W with similar loads), it is lower than I expected and is quite reasonable.

Overall, I’m impressed with this system. It currently has 4 unused PCIe slots, 2 unused SATA connectors, and 2 unused DIMM slots so it has solid future expansion. I have it laying on its side on a rack shelf and it takes up about 3.5U of space in my rack. While I wish it was smaller, fanless, had lower idle power, and had 2.5G Ethernet it has better idle power than I expected for its configuration and options for future expansion.