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!
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Probably schoolwork. I don’t have high computational needs, and these work better than modern Celerons.
With that amount of ram you could make it a hypervisor and host a lot of containers and vms. Maybe proxmox would be a good fit?
Seconded! Recently switched my bunch of raspberries for a proxmox server. Would never go back!
Upgrade the GPU and its plenty good
it could probably run modern titles with a sufficient gpu.
My friend has a 2080 in his and he’s been able to play monster hunter wilds without much issue. It does support nvme.
(He’s on pop os)
“same thing we do everyday, pinky. try and take over the world!”
It’s a bit behind the times for gaming though it’ll probably still play a decent round of Counter Strike.
I used a system even older than that (A core i7 with a three-digit part number, circa 2010) a couple years ago to rip DVDs and run MakeMKV/Handbrake, it did the job fine. Decade old computers aren’t the problem, Windows is.
Switch to something that always delivers the latest KDE Plasma. That’s old.
That’s the last ATX compliant xps PC. I’d swap the wifi card for something else. It has some issues. That bug was patched out afaik.
(Friend has an xps 8900 and it was a unique experience)
I’d also find a cheap gpu to put in it. There is a mount for a 92 mm fan in the front. You just have to remove some tape in the front of the PC covering a vent.
Admittedly my friend games and does dev work on it.
Also it could do with a repaste.
As far as I know you can’t upgrade the CPU on that past the 6700.
Project 1: Install Gentoo on it. 🙂 Project 2: Keep Gentoo installed on it.
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.
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!
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!
Run gentoo instead!
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.
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)_/¯
