Spare workstation, what would you do with it?

Hardware
1

At the moment my Z800 workstation is sitting pretty much unused. I'll probably re-purpose it for experiments with hyper-visors and VM's but what would you do with it if it were yours?

Specs are:

Dual Xeon X5677 CPU's @ 3.4GHz / 8 physical cores / 16 threads.
48GB DDR3 1333MHz with ECC
2 x 120GB SSD's
1 x 1GB HDD
3 spare 3.5" bays
Nvidia GTX 770 2GB
2 x 1GB ethernet ports
USB 3.0 and SATA 3 expansion cards
Plenty of SATA 2 and SAS ports spare.

Oh, and it does work, so no points for "Novelty Doorstop" suggestions :-)

2

Media PC? You could add a TV card maybe a few hard drives and make if a home streaming device.

This would allow for the recording of TV and movie and game streaming to your living room.

1 Like
3

I like the idea, it's a bit loud to be in the living room, but I wonder if I could use a Raspberry Pi hooked up to the TV to play stuff back. I have TV antenna sockets dotted around the house so could probably find a corner for it where it's noise wouldn't be an issue.

Thanks

4

Your welcome, and I don't see any issues in using the pi's for media streaming from the main device but as I'm sure you know it won't be able to game stream. Hope it goes well, ps if you are looking for a good digital card I would recommend black and gold, it's a good brand you can usually find on scan.co.UK but if this is a bit pricey you can always find nice and cheap one's on eBay

5

give it to me. your trash is my treasure

6

Berkeley Folding @ Home data cruncher. (or data cruncher of your choice)

7

WPA/WPA2 wifi cracker. Legally of course.

8

Ok, suppose I did, what would you do with it?

9

Sounds like a good idea for the winter. It would keep my room warm doing that.

10

If you're in the UK I would take it off your hands for a fair price.

If not then I suggest you throw KVM on there and spin up a few VMs. pfSense, a DHCP server, web server, etc.

11

I would use it for video editing and EVERYTHING ELSE as my current rig has only two e5540s that I got for free and they are woefully slow for editing. they were only just barely faster than the i7 930 they replaced.

12

Finish a Genocide run in Undertale so I don't permanently ruin future Pacifist runs. Then, run Furmark and 100% CPU load and put it in the corner of my room as a space heater. Nights in Socal can sure get cold!

13

With those specs i'd turn it into a home server. All of that RAM and CPU power would go to waste on anything less than that.

14

Folding at home.. If you really have no idea what to do with it that kind of machine can make a difference.

15

Play pong in THREE colors.

16

Some good ideas here. I'll create a VM just for Pong.

17

sell it, and use the cash to buy a pi for a media "server" and then get peripheals like screens and stuff.

18

Go with a Plex media server and then use the spare resources, since plex doesn't use that much, for VM's and rendering if you video edit or anything like that. Or donate it to someone on the forum wink wink nudge nudge :P

19

I won't be selling it - as technically I don't own it, I'm just it's retirement home. But I no longer need it for what I was using it for as my gaming machine has now been upgraded (again) and I have new work laptop with enough disk space and RAM for the labs VM's I need to use for my job.

In terms of raw processing power it's probably not as quick as some of you think. Geekbench scores for multi-threaded workloads are only on par with a quad core i7-6700k, single threaded is similar to an FX8350 so quick but not comparable to modern Xeons or S2011v3 i7's.

Having a muck around with PC-BSD and ZFS is on my todo list so it'll likely be running that next, and then I need to take a look at the new versions of ESX and Hyper-V.

1 Like