Are you getting excited to assemble your dream home server yet? Let’s go through some ideas and considerations.

Since Sentinel Core is a Mini-ITX board, of course we’ll need a Mini-ITX case, but which case is right for you is actually more determined by the PCIe card and PSU you want to use, so let’s start there.

Most network or storage cards are only one slot high, don’t need much power, and aren’t too lengthy; as long as your case has a PCIe slot, you’re probably fine. In some scenarios, you might even get more exotic with half height cards and raisers to get even more compact, but this could limit your room to upgrade in the future.

If you are going to add a GPU, you need to be more careful because they can have significant space and power requirements. So how should you go about it?

At the time of writing, AMD GPUs are by far the best supported on ARM Linux, so unless you’re feeling really adventurous, I would pick an AMD card. The main things to keep in mind for the rest of the build are number of slots, length, and power.

For any card you plan on choosing, make sure to check the Raspberry Pi PCIe Database maintained by Jeff Geerling.

With your PCIe dimensions and power in hand, you can start selecting a PSU and case.

Regarding PSUs, you basically need the power of your GPU plus a little margin. However, PSUs come in several form factors too. The standard one is ATX which is the biggest but also the cheapest. SFX are smaller but more pricy. And then there is the weird stuff like PicoPSU and HDPLEX that are doing their own thing.

The one unusual thing to look out for in PSUs for a Raspberry Pi is "zero RPM" where the fan can turn off completely. The Pi can be cooled passively and draws barely any power so the PSU cooling fan can be a major factor in idle power draw and noise.

Your PSU and case go hand in hand, with most cases being designed for one or the other form factor. Unless you have an aesthetic preference for a certain SFX case, I would recommend picking a mini-ITX case for an ATX PSU that fits your GPU, and that is pretty much all there is to it.

I can’t wait to see what you build, and please don’t hesitate to share pictures or ask questions.