So I have some old hardware lying around one being a core i5 750 quad and a p55 mobo. I also have some old hard drives spare but i still need to buy a PSU, GPU and ram to complete it. I just wondered if any of you jolly peeps could give me some ideas of what I could use it for once its together? Thank you in advance :)
you could build a NAS or a Router.
media server, nas, HTPC, surveillance, game server, file server, ftp server, webserver, email server, pfsense.
Heard a lot about people turning there PCs into routers but I'm confused about the benefits given over a normal one?
I'm not 100% sure as to all the benefits of turning a full PC into a router, but some advantages I know of would be the amount of customization you can do with it. As in, you'd be able to do things like run a VPN, run a PXE server (as (from what I've heard) you need a special DHCP server to enable PXE booting to function), run a more advanced firewall for your entire network, run anti-virus for your entire network (as in, scan all incoming/outgoing traffic), run adblock for your entire network (if you use adblock :p), etc.
However, what I would suggest is not using it as only a router, as that would be overkill unless you have hundreds or thousands of computers on the same network. What I'd suggest doing is running a host operating system and then run something like QEMU on there and have a bunch of virtual servers going (this is what I do with my spare computer :p). Then you can have one virtual server for all your router stuff, one for network storage, etc. Basically you can have as many servers as you want provided you have enough RAM.
While you could all run this on one OS, it's much better to split up per service like that (at least, in my opinion), as this way if something breaks you only have to deal with the one service being down, until potentially everything being down. As well, running things in a virtual environment allows for very easy backup managment.
Often people use Proxmox for this however; I used to use that and it is good but I personally prefer just putting on something like Ubuntu Server and then setting it all up myself (but that's more because then I know exactly what is going on with my system).
You don't really need a GPU for it though if you plan to just be running servers, as this can be done headlessly. However, if you don't have onboard graphics you may need to put a GPU in temporarily just to get Ubuntu setup to the point you can use SSH for everything else. Although if you want to do things like Bitcoin mining then you would want a GPU. :p
If you wanted to do Bitcoin mining what you could do would be have all your services seperated like that, and then run the mining software on the host, as this way you have full access to the GPU (and all the other services will primarily be using the CPU, so it won't affect performance of the GPU much if at all).
Alternatively you could run that Fold@Home thing and have your machine help medical science. :P I was doing that for awhile but then it stopped working and I'm not sure why (so I need to look at it sometime). There's also many other things you can contribute your computing power to in order to help science. And you don't need to take up all your resources doing it (I ran it as a separate virtual machine and limited it to two or three cores (which I let it use 100% of) while still allowing all my other services to run without being impacted).
But anyways; what I personally run on my machine is ownCloud, Minecraft, and then an SFTP server for all my code (I'm still working on the SFTP server though as it doesn't seem to be working properly). I run one service per virtual server. I also use this computer as an alarm clock. :P I have a bash script on the host which is triggered by a crontab and plays music at whatever time I set in the crontab. Then I have it talk and tell me the date and time and various other information.
I would honestly recommend turning it into an HTPC, you get a the hdds plugged in and a wireless remote to control it. you get a remote keyboard or enable web UI to download and grab whatever you need!
I use one of my extra machines as a sandbox. I chiefly use it to try different programs and operating systems that I am not familiar with.
^ This.
You can easily get some kind of chromecast or other set-top-box/usb to act as a client for your TV. no need for HTPC imo.
Hook it up to your tv :)