I just got a Dell optiplex 760 sff with a q6600 and 8gb ddr2 ram for free from work. I am wondering if I could get some advice on the couple of Ideas i have for it. I am thinking either a handbrake machine to convert my bluray and dvd rips to 720p and 480p resolution for storage or a emulation pc. in both of those cases i would get a gt1030 for acceleration. Thank you
I used one of those with a e8400 (dual core wolfdale) as a Minecraft server back in high school. Worked out well. Definitely throw in a SSD in though as it will help make it feel not as old. Just watch your power bill.
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q6600 / 1030 as an emulation pc would probably top out at gamecube games
as long as you are okay with that it would be fine.
for emulation hd speeds dont really matter so much, the original systems you are emulating did not have anywhere near the data transfer rates of a pc hd.
Sure, you can make a decent emulation machine out of it. If you tinker a bit you can run PS2 games without any issue (tested with a Q6600 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM and a 6870). You can make a NAS/server to host anything you want, a VPN, PiHole, Nextcloud.
If you get an old CRT for it (and something like an R9 280 that can use a VGA adapter) the emulation would really be awesome.
Regarding handbrake I have a limited experience with it but I can assure you it will put that system to it’s knees and won’t really be that fast at that.
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I will actually be getting a more serious nas/server in the near future. Also I can’t fit something like an r9 280 into this system both physically and powerwise
If you were going to use it as a handbrake machine there is something that I’ve used to great success was to follow the idea on this blog and create an “automated ripping machine.” In the blog is a git repo that has all the scripts and software that you need to get it up and running. Once you start with the massive rips of all the DVDs, CDs, and Blu-Rays around the house you’ll never look back.
I’ve used this with great success with bare bones host with a spare FX-6300 and 8GB-DDR3 kit and bought a small SSD and a 1TB rip drive.
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this is pretty much what I was looking for, but I only have one question. Can it handle anime?
Sure. You can set it up so that it rips all spoken/subtitled languages. Going with 720p would be your best bet as you get those to around 1-1.5GB per hour.
Hope that helps!
excellent, thank you 
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i’ve got two Q6600 systems running my lil homelab. one runs a flavor of debian hosting Plex and 14 drives of spinning rust (raid1 btrfs). the other runs proxmox with a handfull of VMs for tinkering around with. Both with 8 gigs of ram and they do most of what i need, although x265 and 4k are troublesome, but i don’t use either of those.
I should clarify that was with x264.
One last thing, can it work with tv series, just to make sure. thanks
I too have one running as a home server. Just as we speak I’m transferring everything from that one to my new server. After that I think it’ll be running some VMs and some other minor things, perhaps docker.
The other day I rebooted it for the first time in 193 days, it’s been hosting 14TB of home storage, Plex and/or Emby, openvpn with 4 users streaming from it several hours per day.
If you’re interested, seeing you’ll be using it for conversion. I recently did some x265 to x264 Workstation - i7-5930K 16GB Ram converted at 5.5-5.7x speed
Xeon E5-2407 80 GB of RAM converted at 1.15x speed
Xeon E5-2450L 80 GB of RAM did 2.7x speed
Q6600 with 8 GB of RAM did 1.5x speed
For converting, I made a docker image with three mounts, /script, /media_in, /media_out. Stopped the container, copied the files, started the container again. Script is below
#!/bin/bash
cd /media_in
for i in *.mkv ; do
ffmpeg -i "$i" -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb -sn -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -vcodec libx264 "/media_out/$i.ts"
mv "/media_out/$i.ts" "/media_out/$i.mpg"
sleep 3
done
Edit: Made a mistake with encoding rate of Q6600, wrote 2x it was 1.5x
Yeah no problems there. I’ve been able to rip entire series from DVD/BluRays in about a day. The post processing is minimal because it’s all done in handbrake right when you are doing the rip.
If you have any questions let me know.