What do i do with my "old" gaming PC?

What should I do with my old gaming machine

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MrWizard6600

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jan 15, 2006
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I'm wondering what you guys usually do with old hardware.

Ever since I first replaced a computer I've hoped that one day I would stitch my old laptops and old desktops together with some high speed ethernet and run some Frankenstein linux hyper-V that could do a kind of cluster computing on which I could run _all the things_, but I've never done it partially because such a system doesnt address any specific need.

But now that I've built my new Ryzen 7800-X3D & Radeon 7800-XT (yes, the matching numbers do make me happy), I'm not sure what to do with my old Ryzen 3700X & Radeon 5700 XT gaming machine (more specs to follow), and simply throwing it out, or selling it, seems inappropriate.

Whats your guys go-to use-case for old machines? Any suggestions welcome.

Some wants:
  • Game Console: I haven't had a serious console (oxymoron?) since the PS4, and with my now wife moving in with me I would like to get more into couch games, so something I can play on (or stream to?) would be nice.
  • NAS: I really like a NAS, but my Synology (some realtek chip, 4 bay, 2x 1GbE) seems to be working just fine, still as I look into upgrade paths I'm a little unsettled. In hindsight I would've preferred an old machine with Unraid, but for my needs this synology is just fine.
  • Media center: My only bluray capable drive is an old 5.25" blu-ray desktop drive, and I would like to be able to watch my fairly small bluray collection _somehow_, and I despise the VLC find-decoding driver files and hack them into VLC to get around HDCP.
  • Hosting: I was previously hosting a valheim server on an IBM VM as a way to play around with IBM's vm and docker. It worked well enough, but it was expensive (though my company paid for it). Something that I can run docker containers on for such a use case would be nice. Similarly my work could benefit from an extra windows VM or two.
  • Router: I'm using a TP-Link AC 1750 flashed with DDWRT with its 5-port switch maxed out in a condo with congested wifi. I often loose signal and my wifi speeds arent impressive.

Some problems:
- I'm in canada, I have access to american retailers, but ordering used parts from america will be difficult.
- its using a custom (CPU+GPU) liquid cooling loop with a cracked (and taped) resivour. In a shockingly stupid move I also threw out the stock cooler for the 5700XT. I was hoping to at least replace the pump (because its loud) and the reservoir.
- persuint to that, I'd like to switch to air cooling, which means either I need an aftermarket GPU air cooler --which seems like a mess--, or I need a new GPU.
- Its in a full tower acrylic case, which I'd like to replace with either a media-center format or even a 4U rack format. I've struggled to find something useful here. So far, the SIlverstone GD09 seems like my best option, and it requires me to move off my (triple 120 radiator) liquid cooling setup.
- I was hoping that prices for something like a Ryzen 39X0 would've crashed, but they're actually still moderately pricey on the used market.

any thoughts, or a story about what you did with an old machine after a recent upgrade, are appreciated.
 
The old machine:

Ryzen 3700X
Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro wifi
32GB DDR4 3600
512Gb Samsung 970 pro, WD Black SN750 2TB, WD 1TB disk.
 
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It could do all of the above. The media side, plex et al are the go to, but at least for plex I think intel/nvidia is preferred. Duno never looked very far due to how good quicksync is for those uses.
 
ive given them away to someone who needs it or trash it. stopped storing tons of computer parts years ago.
 
Westwood said:
You mean to tell me my Q6600 and 8800GTS isn't worth anything?
Click to expand...
Not particularly to me. if i didnt have an immediate need, would ask friends family if they want it or just toss it. no need for clutter. My extra pc ends up as a garage pc to browse with but beyond that, maybe someone else could use it. Just how i personally handle the hand me downs.

on ebay the cpu is about $12 and the gpu is about $25-30. So depends what you feel it is worth to you.

Somehow i save power supplies though for some 'project' ill never do and then toss them later lol.
 
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Dude the Q6600 and the Geforce 8800s were possibly the greatest CPU and greatest GPU's of all time. Keep them for sentimental value.

I never had a Q6600, but the 8800 GTS? with its wierd 320 bit bus and 640mb memory? That thing hauled ass. kids today think 30% generation-on-generation is good. Maaan, that Geforce 8 series was something else.
 
kydsid said:
It could do all of the above. The media side, plex et al are the go to, but at least for plex I think intel/nvidia is preferred. Duno never looked very far due to how good quicksync is for those uses.
Click to expand...
the synology nas runs a little plex server. if you ask it to transcode things on the fly it can get a little wonky, but with a solid local network connection it does just fine.
 
kydsid said:
It could do all of the above. The media side, plex et al are the go to, but at least for plex I think intel/nvidia is preferred. Duno never looked very far due to how good quicksync is for those uses.
Click to expand...

Newer components are preferred for Plex as well.
 
MrWizard6600 said:
Some wants:
  • Game Console: I haven't had a serious console (oxymoron?) since the PS4, and with my now wife moving in with me I would like to get more into couch games, so something I can play on (or stream to?) would be nice.
  • NAS: I really like a NAS, but my Synology (some realtek chip, 4 bay, 2x 1GbE) seems to be working just fine, still as I look into upgrade paths I'm a little unsettled. In hindsight I would've preferred an old machine with Unraid, but for my needs this synology is just fine.
  • Media center: My only bluray capable drive is an old 5.25" blu-ray desktop drive, and I would like to be able to watch my fairly small bluray collection _somehow_, and I despise the VLC find-decoding driver files and hack them into VLC to get around HDCP.
  • Hosting: I was previously hosting a valheim server on an IBM VM as a way to play around with IBM's vm and docker. It worked well enough, but it was expensive (though my company paid for it). Something that I can run docker containers on for such a use case would be nice. Similarly my work could benefit from an extra windows VM or two.
  • Router: I'm using a TP-Link AC 1750 flashed with DDWRT with its 5-port switch maxed out in a condo with congested wifi. I often loose signal and my wifi speeds arent impressive.
Click to expand...
MrWizard6600 said:
The old machine:

Ryzen 3700X
Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro wifi
32GB DDR4 3600
512Gb Samsung 970 pro, WD Black SN750 2TB, WD 1TB disk.
Click to expand...

Virtualization host. You can do all the those things.
  • 1 VM for your router. I'd recommend OPNsense with 4GB of RAM and 4 CPU threads. Buy an inexpensive two port NIC for your WAN/LAN port (you can either IOMMU passthrough directly to the VM or create bridges). Does your motherboards IOMMU grouping suck? Don't sweat it you can most likely use the ACS override.
  • You could do a Linux VM with a front end manager for docker containers (e.g. Portainer or Rancher) and scale the resources as necessary.
  • You can do LXC containers for some programs you want to run. These are lighter weight than VMs and share the host kernel, so it's great for many use cases. There are scripts to get a lot of stuff going with little effort.
  • Run a Windows VM with passthrough of a dedicated graphics card.
 
This was my thought too, but ive never configured such a complicated network on a VM before nor have I ever used GPU pass-through. Could be a fun project.

But what really annoys me now is the form factor. I dont want to use my current case, but I need a place to mount a triple 120mm radiator.
 
I have infrastructure for booting diskless on my network, via PXE. It allows me to have spare mainboards floating around that can quickly be booted into whatever.
 
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If it's not worth your time to sell it because the parts are so dirt cheap, and give it away to anybody that could use it even a stranger although friends and family come first
 
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