Desktop Computers
- Thread starter brekk
- Start date
Haus
I am Big Balls!
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I am having a philisophical quandry....
Over time here at Chez Haus (for over 20 years in fact) the "circle of life" was that when a machine was retired from being a gaming rig, it settled into retirement in my workshop/lab as a lab box for various things I did, usually replicating things for my work.
Now, with the advent of cloud computing, and the ability to roll out compact VMs and Docker in general the need for multiple machines is pretty much gone. I have one moderately beefy lab box (i7 and 32G of ram, 2tb SSD) and it handles everything I have a need for.
So I am looking at what is currently a pool of three perfectly functional , but very old, machines. (Talking i3 and 8-16g of ddr2 for example) and whereas I know "Oh I can slap an efficient OS on that and milk some more use out of it" I don't really have a need to, and it would essentially be getting the same work done using more electricity from running multiple systems. So I figured it's time to ditch the old but workable machines. But the cases are still great, good cases, many of which I have built in extra fans for optimal airflow. Hate the idea of throwing those out, but what do we do with such things these days?
Over time here at Chez Haus (for over 20 years in fact) the "circle of life" was that when a machine was retired from being a gaming rig, it settled into retirement in my workshop/lab as a lab box for various things I did, usually replicating things for my work.
Now, with the advent of cloud computing, and the ability to roll out compact VMs and Docker in general the need for multiple machines is pretty much gone. I have one moderately beefy lab box (i7 and 32G of ram, 2tb SSD) and it handles everything I have a need for.
So I am looking at what is currently a pool of three perfectly functional , but very old, machines. (Talking i3 and 8-16g of ddr2 for example) and whereas I know "Oh I can slap an efficient OS on that and milk some more use out of it" I don't really have a need to, and it would essentially be getting the same work done using more electricity from running multiple systems. So I figured it's time to ditch the old but workable machines. But the cases are still great, good cases, many of which I have built in extra fans for optimal airflow. Hate the idea of throwing those out, but what do we do with such things these days?
Control
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Haus
I am Big Balls!
- 21,015
- 86,780
I've been debating it, but if I'm going to build AI boxes they will have dual GPU capabilities, and these ancient MBs don't have that. heh
Control
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Some of the claw-type automations might be interesting to tinker with and wouldn't necessarily need much gpu. I haven't bothered with it, but I haven't really been doing any automation so I haven't found a reasonable usecase that's personally useful yet.