What to do with a bunch of 3rd Gen i7 PCS
What to do with a bunch of 3rd Gen i7 PCS
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
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I would look into setting up a proxmox cluster
with high availabilityon them and from there you can look into fun projects that you can run as proxmox vms or lxcs.
https://www.xda-developers.com/proxmox-cluster-guide/
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/High_Availabilityedit: HA seems to require a shared disk, such as a SAN or NAS.
You should be able to do HA with ceph, I think. You can do almost-HA with zfs mirrors, where instead of instant failover you only lose data up to the last mirror sync (a few minutes max).
Ceph is great, we run critical infra at work on proxmox with ceph. Very reliable in my experience. It was definitely helpful for me to have ceph experience from my home cluster when starting there.
Ah right, that rings a bell. Proxmox and Ceph sounds like a perfect experiment for OPs hardware. :)
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pveceph.html
Eh... Maybe for learning.
Although they technically support vt-d, performance on 13-year-old machines will be pretty abysmal by today's standards.
They are not too terrible really. 3rd gen i7 is the Ivy Bridge generation, so 22 nm. For many homelab server tasks the CPUs would be just fine. Power efficiency is of course worse than modern CPUs, but way better than the previous 32 nm Sandybridge generation. I had such a system with integrated graphics and one SSD and that drew 15 W at idle at the wall.
My first gen i7 would still be going strong if the mobo hadn't started dying. Especially running Linux.
Even first gen i-series Intel CPUs support VT-d. I had an i7-870 that ran my entire setup under Proxmox for several years, until early 2023.
What you really need is RAM. In my case, ~32GB per node in a three-machine cluster is not quite enough, but a 4c/8t CPU is more than plenty.
Yeah, I focused on the I’m just looking for some fun experiments, projects part.
I wouldn't use the machines for anything other than experimenting for fun, they're power hungry too if counting per performance.The at load efficency isn't always the most important metric, depending on what you are using the machines for. If they are mostly idle, efficiency isn't too bad. Many server tasks don't load the CPU to the fullest anyway.
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.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.
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.
Damn, that's impressive. My rig idles at ~110W, but I've heard that the 5800X3D just....does that. Especially so with the fact that it has AMD's beefiest GPU.
I went for a tiny Ryzen 7600 (no X), so it comes at the cost of a worse cpu and worse gpu. :)