What would you do with this old PC if you had €0 to invest in it?
I have an older desktop sitting around with:
- AMD FX-6100, 6 cores at 3.3 GHz
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 730
- 24 GB RAM
- ASRock 970 Extreme R2.0 motherboard
- One SSD and one HDD
It still works, but I currently have no money to upgrade it or turn it into an ambitious homelab project.
I am trying to decide what would be the most useful and least wasteful thing to do with it.
A few possibilities I have considered:
- Install a lightweight Linux distribution and use it for experiments
- Turn it into a local server, NAS, self-hosting box, or automation playground
- Use it to learn more about local AI, although I assume the GT 730 is far too limited for most modern models
- Keep it until I have money for a few upgrades
- Sell it cheaply and put the money towards a newer, more energy-efficient machine
My main concern with using it as a server is electricity consumption. Keeping an older FX-based desktop running all day might cost more, both financially and environmentally, than the practical value it provides.
What would you do in my situation?
Are there any genuinely useful €0 experiments this hardware is still suitable for? Is it worth keeping, or would selling it or reusing the parts elsewhere be the more sensible choice?
Thanks everyone, the replies have helped me clarify what I actually want from this machine.
I should have mentioned that it is also my fallback PC in case something happens to my laptop. I used to play older games on it, and I still have some games on physical CDs and DVDs, so keeping the optical drive is useful. Emulation also sounds like a good additional use.
The idea I am leaning towards now is keeping it as an on-demand multipurpose machine rather than trying to make it a 24/7 server.
I would like to use it for:
At first I can experiment with CPU-based local models, even if they are slow. Later, when I can afford it, I may add a second-hand NVIDIA GPU with enough VRAM for local AI. I would probably keep the current CPU initially and replace the motherboard, CPU and RAM as a separate platform upgrade much later, rather than investing heavily in another FX processor.
For the server side, I do not think it makes sense to leave this old FX system running constantly. My current thought is to let it start file synchronisation and backups automatically whenever I turn it on, run any AI or self-hosting experiments I need, and then shut it down again. Maybe I could experiment with sleep and Wake-on-LAN eventually, but I want to keep the first setup simple.
I will also check the exact PSU, motherboard model, temperatures and drive health before buying or relying on anything.
Does this sound like a sensible compromise? I would especially appreciate suggestions for a beginner-friendly Linux and Docker setup that would still let me use the computer as a normal fallback desktop.
Glad we could be of help :)
Using it as an on-demand machine sounds like the perfect middle-ground! My jellyfin-server is also not running 24/7. Sometimes I think I could as well host jellyfin on the same machine that I’m watching/listening stuff on, as I’m the only one using it. But I started similar as you - I had a machine laying around, and wanted to do something with it.
When it comes to upgrading your machine, which I guess is still years in the future, as you asked for 0$ tips, I’d suggest first seeing how much “compute power” you actually need. People tend to oversize their machines (that also is a problem in data centers [or at least used to be, not sure about AI data centers]), so before you upgrade your machine, check how high its utilization is.
The hill I’m willing to die on is saying that people have too much RAM, and underestimate swap.
As for beginner-friendly Linux distributions, I’m not sure if I can help there, I feel like I’m still somewhat winging it. But there seem to be articles and wikis for everything, or someone somewhere had the same problem and others with more knowledge helped out.
In general, and I’m not sure if that’s blasphemy, I’d say that most Linux distributions are interchangeable. They mostly only differ in the packaging system, the default desktop environment, and the preinstalled software. At most you get a different init system. (Please someone correct me if I’m wrong :D)
I sporadically tried Ubuntu ages ago, then “seriously” started with Manjaro (should have gone for Arch, in the long run Manjaro seems to be just causing problems), and then switched to Void Linux. Arch has a nice wiki that is useful independent of what distro you run. Void Linux also has a nice handbook.
I like the minimalistic approach of Void Linux, and I think it was recommended for old computers somewhere (any distro coming with xfce by default probably is recommended for that, but Void Linux really comes with basically no bloat). It requires some tinkering, as the base install is, well, pretty basic, but it’s doable. I can play games on my desktop PC and have jellyfin running on it in a docker container on my old (now headless 💀) laptop. My recommendation for it would depend on how well you are versed in using Linux in general.
Otherwise, as I said, Linux distros are pretty interchangeable. Point at one that looks nice and shoot. If you don’t like it, just try another one, reinstalling (at least when you don’t have a lot of data stored on it yet) is not really a big deal.
Most BIOSes have a wake on alarm setting so you can very easilu set it to start every day at a specific time, run your jobs on boot, then your last job could be a shutdown command. No need for fancy wake on lan configuration.