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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Get rid of Kubuntu and install Pika OS, then get to gaming.
This looks very similar to my MacBookPro 2013 but running on endeavourOS
Just don’t try to install the patched proprietary nvidia drivers on recent kernel and relay on nouveau. Then all works pretty good so far
😮but definitely enough RAM
Head on over to the self-hosting community
Home server! Not sure how CUDA support is, but exo/petals node for AI and stuff? Immich for photos, Nextcloud for files, homeassistant!
GTX 745 is weird. It’s early Maxwell, not Kepler. It’s not particularly fast and as it is Maxwell, only supports fp32.
I had a 6700k until December just gone. For Linux it can do everything and anything. It’s totally usable! I only gave mine up because of CS2.
It even has integrated graphics - so throw out that GPU, I have my server with a 6700k pull less than 20W at idle!
I have 7700 went with fanless case and ssds, 25w underload, 15w idle. 750w PSU doesn’t use its fan until you hit 30% load.
Jellyfin server!!
You’ll eventually want more storage so LVM is the way to go for making your “drive” easily extendable.
I use my (very similar, just AMD and with a dGPU) for my Jellyfin server and to selfhost some AI models for experimentation, and I’m working on rolling out matrix synapse because selfhosting
Thought the same, although on a second thought Jellyfin would maybe use 1% of the resources of that CPU. But still, I started with Jellyfin and Audiobookshelf on my home server (it has approx. half the computing power of the XPS) and now it has expanded to Immich, LLMs, Nextcloud, and has basically replaced my whole cloud personality. It has a lot of disk space also, so actually - if you don’t need the laptop - set it up as a home server and start with one project on it. I promise it’ll grow fast, haha.
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!
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)_/¯
That is a lot of RAM. Only a quad-core processor, but I imagine should still be fine for general-purpose desktop use.
What would you want it to do? Honestly I would call that over-specced for something like a file server and would probably consume a lot of power if left on all the time. Maybe a media server which can use the discrete GPU for video encoding?
I really don’t have anything specific in mind, but a media server is definitely something that’s been on my list of things I’d like.
As for the ram, it kind of is an absurd amount. I think it only started with 8 gigs (maybe 16), but since it was just my family computer growing up it would get continually more and more bloated and slow, upgrading the ram was the only way my dad knew how to upgrade it so he’d do it every now and then to try and speed it up lol.
definetly bazzite gaming htpc if you get a sufficient gpu in it. stream games from it ota.
if you take advantage of this amount of ram to virtualize, you could do both that and a server simultaneously, maybe more, you have 2 gpus and network that can be assigned independently.
the only downside would be power consumption if kept on, but it can definetly handle more than you would expect.
i think you can also get one of those chinese xeons for dirt cheap on aliexpress and it might work as a hefty upgrade if you really need more cores for a few coins.
Run Docker containers on it, one for media server, one for DNS sinkhole etc.
For the media server, I recommend taking a look at Jellifyn. If you want some fancy statistics use, also give it a look at a Prometheus+Graphana config.
Switch to something that always delivers the latest KDE Plasma. That’s old.
Run gentoo instead!
Cry.
Install Ganeti, or K3s, and do a lot of things!
Project 1: Install Gentoo on it. 🙂 Project 2: Keep Gentoo installed on it.
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.
