I got this PC from my dad when he upgraded in like December ish. I’ve been running Kubuntu on it and just using it like a sort of general purpose desktop for me and my wife, but I’ve got a hankering for some tinkering and feel like it has more potential, so I’d love some project ideas!
You must log in or register to comment.
Head on over to the self-hosting community
Cry.
Install Ganeti, or K3s, and do a lot of things!
I had a 6700k until December just gone. For Linux it can do everything and anything. It’s totally usable! I only gave mine up because of CS2.
It even has integrated graphics - so throw out that GPU, I have my server with a 6700k pull less than 20W at idle!
I have 7700 went with fanless case and ssds, 25w underload, 15w idle. 750w PSU doesn’t use its fan until you hit 30% load.
Jellyfin server!!
You’ll eventually want more storage so LVM is the way to go for making your “drive” easily extendable.
I use my (very similar, just AMD and with a dGPU) for my Jellyfin server and to selfhost some AI models for experimentation, and I’m working on rolling out matrix synapse because selfhosting
Thought the same, although on a second thought Jellyfin would maybe use 1% of the resources of that CPU. But still, I started with Jellyfin and Audiobookshelf on my home server (it has approx. half the computing power of the XPS) and now it has expanded to Immich, LLMs, Nextcloud, and has basically replaced my whole cloud personality. It has a lot of disk space also, so actually - if you don’t need the laptop - set it up as a home server and start with one project on it. I promise it’ll grow fast, haha.
This looks very similar to my MacBookPro 2013 but running on endeavourOS
Just don’t try to install the patched proprietary nvidia drivers on recent kernel and relay on nouveau. Then all works pretty good so far
😮but definitely enough RAM
Can’t do much with these specs. You could make it headless and lose the desktop environment to make it much more useful.
Can’t do much with an i7, 60Gb RAM, and a discreet GPU?
XD I mean, there are also discreet GPUs from the 90’s, yet pretty much all integrated GPUs are far more performant than that.
Your discreet GPU is over 12 years old and even back then it was an entry level card. So, actually, it is very weak and, for many use cases, weaker than many current integrated ones. Not to mention possible lack of current driver support, etc…
You could also look up the other parts, I won’t do that for you. But the same counts for the “i7”. If the i7 is nearly as old, it’s weaker than some i3s from today and definitely weaker than lots of i5s, nowadays.
Again… Same goes for the RAM, etc… If your RAM is really slow, then the size of the RAM will only be useful for certain use cases.
Again and again… You have to research for every part, to really know, what they are capable of. Just saying “i7” and “discreet” does not make the PC any better, whatsoever.
In short: you can use the computer for a lot of stuff, but only very limited. If you want to do something very specific, really well, then you need to find the right niché, where it might work well. Otherwise, as I initially foreshadowed, there is actually not much you can do with those specifications. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Jellyfin server? it’ll do hardware transcode handily! Lots of RAM is good for something like TrueNAS since ZFS will use it as a cache.
Uptime: 29 seconds
Don’t worry about it, you’re not in a rush to do anything. How about getting a cup of tea for starters?
That made me laugh too!
Imo too high power consumption for 24/7 operation so I wouldn’t use it that way. If I only had this machine to work with, i’d probably use it as a media server or NAS but turn it on only as needed. Wake on LAN to turn it on and configure it to auto turn off.
Run gentoo instead!
If you want to get into running a home lab, this world probably be a nice start. So throw proxmox on it and host all the services you want (in containers or VMs). Media server like jellyfin, maybe a nextcloud, storage/Nas services, automate your home with home assistant.
It has a relatively large amount of memory for that generation of system, but also will probably not exactly sip power for the performance your getting. So if power is expensive where you are, think twice about it.
What is the benefit of running it in Proxmox rather than just containers on bare metal?
You can migrate without downtime from one proxmox host to the other
Depends what you want to do. If you want only docker containers, it’s the wrong tool. If you want to run a mixture of VMs and LXC containers, it’s literally a management interface made for it. So it’s pretty good at it.
Convenience, time saved.
I have something similar, but with an old nvidia 1070.
I run a file server, nginx for my web dev, git server, postgres and, surprisingly, ollama.
The old nv 1070 is CUDA capable and it’s doing an OK job for my usage.
Check if you can put your hand on an old NV card for an AI agent.
Cheers!
Project 1: Install Gentoo on it. 🙂 Project 2: Keep Gentoo installed on it.
Switch to something that always delivers the latest KDE Plasma. That’s old.
