Dell T3500

Hardware Hub
1

Hello everyone,
I recently acquired a Dell Precision T3500 from a corporate auction for 60 bucks.
It has a Xeon 4c/8t at 3.33GHz, 12GB of ram, a quadro 4000, a perc 6 with two 300gb 15k.7 cheetah sas drives, and I just installed some additional fans and a 6TB WD Blue I'm going to use for backups.
Currently I'm using it to rip and transcode DVDs from a large collection and I'm running BTSync to backup my FreeNAS server.
Ill also be using it to encode my videos from premier, I have setup a watch folder and so I can export my projects from my main computer in DNXHD or a similar mezzanine codec and then use Adobe media encoder to convert it into a nice format for YouTube..
But seeing as it will be seeing a lot of downtime between encoding and backups from BTSync aren't exactly taxing, what other neat uses can I have for this thing? It's currently running Windows 7 but I'm sure I can spin up a VM or two to do some stuff.

Nick

2

Sounds like a bargain. If it has win 7 pro and you upgrade to win 10 pro you get hyper-v built in. If not vmware player or virtual box will run vms on win 7.

You might want some more Ram for vms and maybe even give them their own disks or a small raid array to hols the virt disks.

3

I upgraded the ram to 24GB, sold the quadro, replaced the cheetahs with 256GBCrucial MX100s, and replaced the raid controller with an H200.
Only thing that's disappointing is that a 6 core Xeon of this generation is only as fast as a core i7 2600, which is what is in my nas. So I don't think I can move Plex off my nas.
Decided that video encoding isn't going to be a thing on here... just VMs