Advice on what to do with old parts, LGA 1150

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I built my sister a Pentium G3258 build about 4 years ago. She is ready to upgrade now, and I am trading her 16GB of Gskill DDR4 for her old parts.
It is a Asrock H97itx/AC board with one gigabit qualcom NIC
8 GB of DDR3 1866
GTX 1050

I already have a beast main rig, so I want to use these parts to build something else useful.
I was thinking of just cramming them into a SFF case and having a secondary rig for leaning Kali Linux
Or, Swapping the pentium for a Celleron that supports AES-NI and buying a intel PCI-e NIC and turning it into a PFSense router
Also have considered (for close to the same price as a Celeron on Ebay) Swapping for a Xeon and building a VM server to use for a lab. Would probably also upgrade to 32GB of DDR3 as it’s dirt cheap now.

What would you do with these parts?
Any unforeseen flaws in my plans?

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Use as a HTPC.

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I had considered that, but I do not really have a use for an HTPC. I spend all of my time in my office lol

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What about a multi-purpose server? Set up Docker on it and run some things like Nextcloud, Plex (with that GPU you can stream multiple videos without loading the CPU), Mumble/Teamspeak, Minecraft server, VPN, PiHole. Can be a nice playground to test these kind of applications and see if you want to have a stable setup for some of them or if you’re not interesting.

In general I’d make it a tinkering machine you can do things on every day without being worried about having to reinstall the OS.

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  1. Sell it
  2. PFSense after a CPU upgrade (fourth gen i5’s are pretty cheap)
  3. Virtual machine host (using HyperV standalone ISO, Virtualbox, or whatever alternative you want to learn)
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MetalizeYourBrain:
That is kind of what I meant about setting it up as a VM lab.
I think that this is the way that I am going to go. I hadn’t considered using the GPU for Plex media server. That is brilliant!

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The I-5s don’t support AES-NI was why I was considering swapping in a Celleron. It’s been a while since I deep dove into PFSense. Last I heard a few years ago, they were going to require AES-NI support moving forward. Has this changed to your knowledge?

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All Haswel CPU’s support AES-NI except i3-4000m, Pentium and Celeron).

Example: i5 4570 supports AES-NI, according to Intel Ark (near the bottom of the list).

Last I heard, Netgate reversed this decision because of competition arising and consumers jumping-ship.

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you can also make a batocera emulation box

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