Had several old PCs over the years from relatives, but either gave them to other people or threw them to the trash because I didn’t see the usefulness back then…

Right now all I have is my PC (which I guess I could put VMs on), and maybe a few phones (maybe just because they kinda are there like backup phones), which I couldn’t find how to root, if these are of any use with unrooted Termux.

Do you have any advice about it? Should I start with my PC with VMs? An unrooted phone with Termux? Try to look somewhere that is gonna get rid of PCs or something? If so, where?

  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    This.

    I look for corporate desktops that are off-lease or EoL. Big fan of Lenovo M series. 6th/7th gen still have lots of life left in them and plenty of power for most homelab tasks.

    Anything much newer than that will consume less power per core (usually) but will cost more up front and probably be more expensive to put upgrades into (i.e. DDR5). Anything much older than that won’t be worth the performance per watt. By the time you put a 7th gen through its paces, you’ll be ready to upgrade and have a much clearer look at what you want/need.

    Right now I’ve got 3x M710s forming a kubernetes cluster, and another running opnsense only.

    Kubernetes was built on top of VMs in proxmox, but I’m thinking I will move them to metal.

    I also have what was my PC down in the basement, with proxmox, running a TrueNAS VM and a Bazzite VM for GPU passthrough and Sunshine, but I’m gonna reclaim those guts, put a spare 6th gen with DDR3 and run TrueNAS on metal. Then I’ll have my PC back.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      Anything much newer than that will consume less power per core (usually) but will cost more up front

      I did a little passive research on the Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro that @DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world recommended. For my locale you could run that 24/7 for about $2.00 USD per month. I like to stay in the DDR3 range of equipment because those are not nearly the same price for units using DDR4 or higher, and as far as performance goes, are still on the green of newer DDR4 & 5 units. Plenty enough computing power to handle a lot of Docker containers, etc.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Yeah the SFFs and uSFFs are great for consuming low power.

        I’ve got a couple m910q’s that I bought for htpc purposes but honestly I might be better off putting the thick ones on htpc duty. Just gotta work out some kinks with how they handle suspend when hooked up to a TV.

        They’ve really shot up in price…I bought two for 130 shipped (total) with i5-7500T and 16gb back around last Halloween. I’m seeing singles not specced as well for the same price

        The tough thing about uSFF is that they usually don’t have any PCIe slots…so if you need a second NIC, or want to upgrade to mGig, you can’t, or they have to be over USB 3.