What should I do with spare PC? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- musclegeekz · 2023-10-19 15:54 I have a gaming PC that’s been sitting around and have been thinking about finding ways to use it. Specs: - CPU: i9 9900K - RAM: 64 GB DDR4 - GPU: RX6700 My “homelab” - if you can even call it that - is pretty basic. I have: - RPi 4 running Pi-Hole and TeslaMate - Synology DS218 to backup phones and pcs Should I repurpose my old gaming PC to a Proxmox machine and run everything off that 1 machine? What else can/should I consider hosting? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FunkyTown313 · 2023-10-19 15:59 Turn it into an airplane ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -DoctorFreeman · 2023-10-19 16:28 What a unhelpful comment. It does not have wings, it would be a much better idea tu turn it into a submersible and make some tours down to the titanic. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- oAhT_iAs · 2023-10-19 16:32 You can check out [awesome-selfhosted](https://github.com/awesome- selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted) listed of softwares and see what you're interested in looking to self host. Common things to self host is a media player that host your movies/TV shows/ or music. A Google drive replacement like nextcloud. Another idea to look for is, whatever services you're using already , see if you can self host that yourself and see where that takes you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- hindusoul · 2023-10-19 16:44 Become a miner ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-10-19 16:57 > Should I repurpose my old gaming PC to a Proxmox machine and run everything off that 1 machine? If you dont care about power consumption. > What else can/should I consider hosting? A million things? Look at the subreddit sidebar for the *awesome- selfhosted* list of software, and simply use the search function to find threads like "i am bored" and "what should i host". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Cawilz · 2023-10-19 16:59 Sell it and use the money for someting else ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FunkyTown313 · 2023-10-19 17:03 See, now you're thinking! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- msanangelo · 2023-10-19 17:12 That's a spare PC? I'm jelly. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chrishch · 2023-10-19 17:29 With that much RAM, maybe buy a few NAS drives during Black Friday and use it as a NAS. Get an HBA card if you don't have enough SATA ports, and put TrueNAS on it. ZFS loves lots of memory. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- realraghavgupta · 2023-10-19 17:52 Sell it. You don’t need it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- enormousaardvark · 2023-10-19 17:55 OP owns a Tesla, should give it away ---------------------------------------------------------------------- BoringMode91 · 2023-10-19 18:04 I'll take it off your hands. :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- zntznt · 2023-10-19 18:16 Do a Mr. Beast kind of video where you just give it to someone for free but without filming the video. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Zeal514 · 2023-10-19 18:42 Well.... Thats a beast. Proxmox. Run multiple VMs. 2 VMs for ubuntu server, run all your containers through that, perhaps kubernetes? This way if your containers go down, they just switch over. Super nice. Than with all the extra resources... I mean, home lab for fun. Spin up windows server. Diff Linux distro. Learn arch, etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- l8s9 · 2023-10-19 18:47 So if your spare PC has those specs… what’s the specs of your main PC? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Accomplished-Lack721 · 2023-10-19 18:54 It can handle almost any service you might care to self-host - and with that much RAM, several at a time. You could run multiple VMs and still have breathing room. But a much less powerful box can also handle most self-hosted services well. If your existing Pi is doing the job, I wouldn't switch. The 9900K will consume way more power, which is bad for the environment and your wallet. Maybe make it into a testing station. Or donate it to a nonprofit. Or sell it. Or turn it into a living room gaming station, playing light games natively and streaming AAA games from another machine with Steam Link or Moonlight (in sleep mode when it's not in use?). Or give it to a family member. Or make it available to a neighbor via Freecycle/Buy Nothing/similar gifting networks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SrIzan10 · 2023-10-19 19:06 yeah keep the oceangate legacy going ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jbarr107 · 2023-10-19 19:17 PROXMOX: It would make a very nice Proxmox server that could host many VMs and LXC Containers. I have a similar configuration (though an i7) that hosts 2 Windows VMs, a Windows 7 VM, a Docker VM, and a second Docker VM running Kasm. Everything is accessible externally either public using Cloudflare Tunnels or restricted using Cloudflare Tunnels + Cloudflare Applications. I have a 300x300 Internet connection, and while it doesn't get a ton of use, it's always very peppy, even remotely. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- definitlyitsbutter · 2023-10-19 19:23 Overkill for a lot of selfhosting things. Do you have a friend or niece/nephew with a tight budget and want to make a great present and be a coool uncle/father/friend? Alternative: Sell it. Power consumption and sunk money is unproportionate to your homelab/selfhosting. You could with that money buy another synology and some big harddrives and put the box somewhere extarnal to have an offsite backup following the 3-2-1 rule. Or build some low power/energy usage 24/7 running PC for the all in 1 solution. Maybe sell the GPU and Downgrade the CPU and get some i3 or lower? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Realestaste · 2023-10-19 19:23 You drive a BMW you should give me a computer. That's how this wealth shaming works right? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cardboard-kansio · 2023-10-19 19:24 > pretty basic This spec blows my *current* gaming PC out of the water, let alone my homelab which is a 2015 Intel NUC running headless Linux and Docker. This is either a shitpost or you have way too much disposable income. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Realestaste · 2023-10-19 19:25 It's overkill for a proxmox server that will likely sit idle Use it as a streaming PC, buy a quick video capture card and use it to edit, stream and store footage while your main PC stays clean for larger games ---------------------------------------------------------------------- enormousaardvark · 2023-10-19 19:28 lol my bimmer is 22 years old ---------------------------------------------------------------------- zhzhzhzhbm · 2023-10-19 19:30 It seems like a good candidate for local ChatGPT clone hosting, although GPU from AMD might be a hassle. Anyway you can check it at r/localllama or try oobabooga straight away. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Realestaste · 2023-10-19 19:32 Right and Op might be rocking a model 3 on a lease shared with a spouse. Everyone has a story. Assuming he's got a Tesla so just throw away 500-1000 bucks seems kinda closed minded for someone driving a classic sports car ;) You feel me dog or is this all going over your head? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- enormousaardvark · 2023-10-19 19:37 >You feel me dog lol yeah right on, dog lol my diesel e39 is not a sports car lol there will never be a 22 year old tesla ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Realestaste · 2023-10-19 19:43 Looks like it All goes over your head lmao Goodnight halfwit ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Euphorinaut · 2023-10-19 19:46 This gets a bit subjective, because depending on your interests it could be a sort of "if it aint broke don't fix it" situation, so instead of telling you that you should, I'll just describe why the hardware would work well for it, and some benefits of it. "and run everything off that 1 machine" My stance is that a lot of people using dedicated NAS hardware would be surprised how much flexibility they find for the price after they get used to managing a hypervisor. There are plenty of reasons to use synology, but I think a lot of the synology people would feel less restricted once they've gotten used to spinning something up themselves and be more capable with scaling for the rest of their lives. A home hypervisor with a free core frequently already has a case with far more free space for drives than a hardware NAS and has free SATA slots. In almost all cases, someone isn't paying extra for any of that, and the only overhead that wouldn't be used is a CPU core and some ram. That compared to the price of a hardware NAS keeps me from wanting the hardware NAS to be a part of my life. So yes, I think there are some utilitarian benefits despite already having a solution to host those 2 services. "What else can/should I consider hosting?" This is already something you could do with the synology, but if you don't already have a plex server, having a share folder on my network that makes media accessible from every TV in the house whenever I click and drag a video or audio file into it has really added to the flexibility of my life. Recreation aside, one of the folders is "demos" and one of them is "training". Being in IT and having to watch a lot of demos from vendors about what their products can do, I've found my hoarding habits to be way more likely to refresh on the capabilities of a tool once that comes up in conversation again or there's some gap found in a capability. Most other uses I have are IT hobbies so it's harder for me to know what other selfhosted services you'd be into. "Should I repurpose my old gaming PC to a Proxmox machine". I'd just go ahead and try it and decide if you feel into it. Used old hardware is the best for that. 8 cores is plenty to dip your feet in, most use cases will only need 1 core per service on that CPU, and situation where you'd think you need more cores would also almost surely be a situation where you've proven to yourself that you're into it enough that buying hardware for the sake of a selfhosting habit is actually worth the money some day in the future. One benefit of having a hypervisor set up that I've noticed is that if you're lurking through this subreddit and see something come up, you'll be more likely to just give hosting a try on a whim. the added flexibility makes people more exploratory I'd say. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EndlessHiway · 2023-10-19 19:49 Give it to me. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ExcitingTabletop · 2023-10-19 19:51 I have a stack of CAD workstations I keep in a closet as spares. They're a bit long in the tooth now, but were $5k per at the time. Still works fine for all but the highest end gaming, video rendering or CAD. I use them for basic games and mostly as a HTPC for Plex and streaming. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2023-10-19 19:51 [removed] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- enormousaardvark · 2023-10-19 19:58 This may help https://www.oed.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Realestaste · 2023-10-19 19:59 Lmao I love how you get more ignorant with each reply. Do you truly not see the irony in your situation? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kachunkachunk · 2023-10-19 20:08 My mom was complaining about performance issues on her cheap desktop, so I repurposed an old dual-Xeon workstation with 96GB of RAM so she can do trading and spreadsheeting on it. Very overkill. Power bills are like $15 a month higher now. :P ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cgassner · 2023-10-19 20:09 If you install pterodactyl you can have as many wings as you want. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mclovine_aus · 2023-10-19 20:46 This should be the top comment, give it to this guy. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Rabbitmincer · 2023-10-19 22:19 Im using an old system as a dedicated server for a couple different games. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EndlessHiway · 2023-10-19 22:24 I am poor and not above begging lol. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mclovine_aus · 2023-10-19 22:29 In payment for my support I demand 1 cpu core in perpetuity. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EndlessHiway · 2023-10-19 22:43 okay but it is on an old I5 6500. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- linkthepirate · 2023-10-20 00:07 What kind of trading? I've supported energy clients where they had like 8 screens doing their thing and needed overkill or they would lose money. Excel is no joke either. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- linkthepirate · 2023-10-20 00:09 I do Debian with a kvm virtual machine, and tons of docker containers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gordGK · 2023-10-20 03:11 Setup an XNS relayer. https://xns.tech/relayer/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HoustonBOFH · 2023-10-20 03:34 So a high dollar classic! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- pivotpixels · 2023-10-20 04:55 +1 for proxmox. He can also run a Hackintosh VM reliably since he got an AMD GPU. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fmillion · 2023-10-20 05:05 LOL I have almost the same config except the GPU is a 1060 3GB. Planning to throw Arch Linux on it and really dive back into desktop Linux. (I actually used Linux as my main OS for a few months in my previous job where everything we worked on ran great on Linux.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- paoloap · 2023-10-20 06:50 Llama2 for self hosted text-to-speech, speech-to-text, Immich’s AI- powered photo recognition. Hardware transcoding for Jellyfin. These are two things that need a good GPU and might be cool in a self hosted environment imho ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kachunkachunk · 2023-10-20 08:20 Day trading, her system really was grinding to a halt before though - lots of excel, inefficient browser pages with dozens (or hundreds) of updates per second, and just also being a tab monster. I still need to look into how to get her browser(s) to utilize more CPU/threads, and maybe disable all efficiency modes/settings among them. Lots of resources to go around. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Necessary_Dare3443 · 2023-10-20 09:56 Me with my dying 1050ti and i5 6400 looking at this post: [meme](https://imgur.com/a/6vN6jfH)