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

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    Sell them and buy something newer

    Seriously though the going rate for old hardware isn’t that different from the newer stuff. Try price matching 3rd gen to 6th or 7th gen.

  • MXX53@programming.devEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    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.

      • MXX53@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        2 days 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!

    • tburkhol@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 days 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.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    Refurb all, sell all but three, set up a cluster. Then when you’re satisfied, sell those three and use all the money to buy one or two systems with modern hardware.