this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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What to do with a bunch of 3rd Gen i7 PCS (infosec.pub)
submitted 1 day ago by ryokimball@infosec.pub to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I got a stack of PCS that are very similar if not identical. Third gen i7, 8 gigs of ram, one terabyte hdd, all but one are the same HP model with the same motherboard, etc too. I upgraded the RAM in a few of them, and I have enough spare TB hard drives to put an extra in each. Two have Nvidia GeForce 210 gpus, and the unique one out of the bunch I'll probably throw in a spare RX 570 I have.

But, what to do with them? Easiest answer is probably sell them all for $75 each but that's not what we do here, right? Right now I'm assuming they all support w o l and I can easily set up ansible/awx for orchestration. I'm just looking for some fun experiments, projects, or actual uses for this Tower of PC towers

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[–] MXX53@programming.dev 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I would want to do a cluster. Just to learn how that works. But just thinking of the electricity cost, I would personally donate them.

[–] earphone843@sh.itjust.works 1 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Unless you're redlining your systems 24/7, the load really shouldn't be that bad.

[–] MXX53@programming.dev 2 points 17 hours ago

That might be the case. But I have done a great job of reducing the power load of my server from 1200 watts down to 65 watts. And I am slowly trying to get the point that I can off load my servers to solar and battery. I live in a place with not so great of sun.

But I realize I didn’t include that in the original post. So, fair point and thanks for the info!

[–] lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

I run 3x 7th gen Intel mini PCs in a Proxmox cluster, plus a 2014 Mac mini on a 4th gen i5 attached to 3x 4TB drives in RAID5 (my NAS), plus an 8TB backup drive. I also run Home Assistant on a Lenovo M710q Tiny (separate because I use Zigbee and don't wanna deal with USB passthrough and migrating VMs and containers...). Total average draw is ~100W.

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Back in the day, I set up a little cluster to run compute jobs. Configured some spare boxes to netboot off the head-node, figured out PBS (dunno what the trendy scheduler is these days), etc. Worked well enough for my use case - a bunch of individually light simulations with a wide array of starting conditions - and I didn't even have to have HDs for every system.

These days, with some smart switches, you could probably work up a system to power nodes on/off based on the scheduler demand.