Hey all, I have a few parts from a fairly old build that I don’t want to just throw away. Not sure how much they’re worth to anyone trying to build something practical in 2024 and there’s a moderate amount of sentimental value in the CPU, it was my very first
AMD FX-8350 8 Core 4 GHz CPU
SAPPHIRE NITRO Radeon RX 480 8GB GDDR5 GPU
16 GB DDR3 Kit and a much older 8 GB DDR3 Kit
Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P ATX AM3+ Motherboard
Corsair CX600M 600W 80+ Bronze Semi-modular ATX Power Supply
Corsair Carbide Series 500R ATX Mid Tower Case
Any fun, useful, interesting, or even artsy ideas? I tried making a home server with them already and it worked as a proof of concept but struggle-bussed trying to play back content with JellyFin.
If you’re otherwise comfy with it as a home server, and jellyfin playback is the main hangup, a GPU update would fix that. A cheap intel ARC card would enable it to play anything up to and including AV1 content.
Jellyfin transcoding with AMD gpus is a bit of a crapshoot, especially on older hardware. If you want a good card to transcode, Nvidia Quadro P400 is “best and cheapest”, can be had for beer money on Ebay.
You can certainly do things with this hardware, the issue is that it is typically going to be heavily outclassed by even mid-tier mobile CPUs today, and that it is likely to be relatively power inefficient. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep it in service for sentimental reasons. Or if you just want another box to play with.
If I had the same hardware I’d probably do the same thing, find a stable overclock if possible, install proxmox or some other way to run Virtual Machines and just begin playing around. the simplest way is to just run windows and throw on VirtualBox or something for the VM’s, you can run media services like Jellyfin or Proxmox off windows and run anything specific on the VM’s.
I think the most limiting hardware here is the DDR3 and the relatively small cache. You can not change that without swapping out the CPU, motherboard and ram.
