Tinkerbox

Hardware Build a PC
1

A bit of a long time lurker here, but I need input on some stuff.

I am in the process of upgrading my main workstation (4770K, Asus VI Hero, 4x8GB DDR3, GTX1070) This is a straight old winbox mainly used for gaming, office tasks, MATLAB, programming, photo and video editing (both Adobe suite and Resolve15).

I was originally thinking of repurposing CPU-Mobo-RAM to my secondary rig. I have been using the secondary rig (2600K, Asus Z77-I, 2x8GB DDR3, GTX970) as a spare winbox and a “tinkerbox” where I have been testing out distros, hypervisors and such. Nothing time or mission critical unless I am using the winbox boot SSD to off load workload from the main rig.

The “problem” with my original plan is, these two cpu/mobo-combos doesn’t support VT-d and passthrough was my next thing to try out and if I want to get this working I need to swap both motherboard and cpu.

So starts the mission creep … I have been looking at getting a decent X79 board and a Xeon. Motherboards getting a bit hard to find at reasonable prices, but Xeons are legio and I have all the RAM i need already.
Looking at X99, the supply of motherboards seems a bit better and cheaper in most cases, but CPUs starting to get costlier and I would need new RAM. Total cost is starting to go up. I could also go the Ryzen route. A good x370/470 board, a 1700/2700 and 2x8GB DDR4 3000Mhz would go a long way for this, but in a different way from the older HEDT stuff.
A threadripper (1920x) system would be very nice, but then it would start to cut into my budget for my main workstation upgrade a bit to much. It seems using an AMD platform also need more messing with to work for a lot of this, but I guess that mileage may vary a lot. I am sure this will be adressed by someone.

So there’s my dilemma, spend money on “outdated” hardware or spend even more money on more newer stuff removing monetary resources from the main mission.
Part of the fun using the older stuff I already have was seeing how far I can stretch it.

I’d appreciate any thoughts and inputs you guys have.

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there is nothing wrong with re purposing old hardware as you keep it out of the landfills.
there are so many ways the older stuff can be used that it can boggle the mind a bit.
for instance in my shop is one old pc that i use just for testing and bulk wiping drives for for forensic work,
there are also thin clients set up on a rock cluster for smp computing.
and a couple for distro testing.
I guess the motto is if it still works make some use of it rather than tossing it in the trash.

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If the older hardware has all of the necessary features to do what you want, why spend more? Particularly if it will require cutting into planned upgrades on your primary PC.

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i carry 3 usb sticks with g parted on them when i have to wipe on site i delete the partition, repartition, reboot and repeat the sequence.
then when at the shop run a low level format and overwrite the drive or run d-ban on them.
all work to wipe the drive clean

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