Wanting to turn old PC to a home server, but very overwhelmed

[MrMcNoob]

I've recently got given another PC that I'm wanting to use as a multimedia/file server, and ideally a dedicated gaming server if possible (so I can swap between Minecraft and Ark, I do not need both at once).

I've never built a server, so I am very overwhelmed and don't know where to begin. I would like to have some sort of encryption between the server and my main pc (I may do it to my whole network but that's for another day), just to learn how to do it, but I don't think its very necessary, its not going to have personal information or statements. I would also like a VPN however, with how many their are I don't really know if theirs any difference.

Is their any other Forums or YouTube Channels that are good to learn and show what is needed for a server.

The specs of the PC are:
Motherboard: Crosshair V Formula-Z
CPU: AMD FX(tm)-8350
RAM: 12gb of DDR3 1600MHz
Storage: Samsung 860 EVO 500gb & ST31000524AS
GPU: GTX 1070
OS: Windows 10 Pro
and everything is water-cooled and should not run hot.

I do not know much, and this will 100% take ages for me to do.

Thanks

 

[beers]

Hello,

That's going to suck a lot of electricity.

Local traffic encryption exists like MACSec but it's probably outside of your use case, although you could VPN internally to your host if you wanted to I guess. You don't really gain much of value by doing so when your PC to server flow is local to the ethernet switch inside your router and doesn't even hit the router component. Some protocols like HTTPS already have integrated encryption at a higher layer.

Otherwise it's still just a computer, pick the OS you want and install it and then whatever services you want. I'd probably do something like proxmox so you could spin up additional virtual machines concurrently, although 12GB runs out pretty quick.