How to Run LLMs on Old Server Hardware: A Practical Homelab Guide [2026]

You have an old server gathering dust in the garage — a retired PowerEdge, a repurposed Proxmox node, maybe an HP workstation from 2013. Somebody told you that running AI locally requires an NVIDIA H100 or at least an RTX 4090. That is not true. Running modern LLMs on old enterprise iron with no GPU is not only possible — it is practical. This guide covers the hardware you need, the software stack…