I placed a low bid on an auction for 25 Elitedesk 800 G1s on a government auction and unexpectedly won (ultimately paying less than $20 per computer)
In the long run I plan on selling 15 or so of them to friends and family for cheap, and I’ll probably have 4 with Proxmox, 3 for a lab cluster and 1 for the always-on home server and keep a few for spares and random desktops around the house where I could use one.
But while I have all 25 of them what crazy clustering software/configurations should I run? Any fun benchmarks I should know about that I could run for the lolz?
Edit to add:
Specs based on the auction listing and looking computer models:
- 4th gen i5s (probably i5-4560s or similar)
- 8GB of DDR3 RAM
- 256GB SSDs
- Windows 10 Pro (no mention of licenses, so that remains to be seen)
- Looks like 3 PCIe Slots (2 1x and 2 16x physically, presumably half-height)
Possible projects I plan on doing:
- Proxmox cluster
- Baremetal Kubernetes cluster
- Harvester HCI cluster (which has the benefit of also being a Rancher cluster)
- Automated Windows Image creation, deployment and testing
- Pentesting lab
- Multi-site enterprise network setup and maintenance
- Linpack benchmark then compare to previous TOP500 lists
From the listing photos these actually have half-height expansion slots! So GPU options are practically nonexistant, but networking and storage is blown wide open for options compared to the miniPCs that are more prevalent now.
Yeah, you’ll be fairly limited as far as GPU solutions go. I have a handful of hh AMD cards kicking around that were originally shipped in t740s and similar but they’re really only good for hardware transcoding or hanging extra monitors off the machine - it’s difficult to find a hh board with a useful amount of vram for ml/ai tasks.
