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

  • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz
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    15 hours ago

    That’s true, if there’s no load then the difference isn’t much money.
    I’m running a NAS, some game servers, a forgejo instance and a jellyfin server and more on my machine so it’s never truly idle and I forgot to think about that metric.

    • lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 hours ago

      Slap a few zigbee smart plugs into your setup, cluster them in Home Assistant, and measure the total power draw. That’s what I do. It’s eye-opening… I learned that my 5800X3D/7900XTX gaming PC is capable of pulling exponentially more power than my entire server cluster. I shut that thing off when I’m not using it now haha.

      • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz
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        45 minutes ago

        My server has a gaming vm with gpu passthrough (6650 XT). With my vm powered on and idle the whole server draws about 60w-65w. Monitor not included.