Uses for an old Dell T7400

dragola901

Commendable
Apr 7, 2018
22
0
1,510
I received the system a while back (from my grandfather before he passed away) and I've been trying to find a use for it since. Due to the age (and specs) it takes 3 to 4 times the amount of time to render a video compared to my main rig (specs below), with or without hardware encoding. Now compared to a FX-8350 I had, it performed only 23 points behind in cinebench. My only concern is the power consumption since it uses 2 E5440's which both have a TDP of 80W (160W total). Any suggestions or is it not worth it (rather not waste since just gets melted down)?





Specs:
Dell T7400:
CPU: 2x Xeon E5440
Ram: 16GB DDR2 ECC
Graphics: GTX 1050ti
HDD/SDD: 128GB SSD and 150GB HDD
PSU:1000W

Main Rig:
CPU: i7-7700k
Ram: 16GB DDR4
Graphics: GTX 970
HDD/SDD: 128 M.2, 128GB SSD and 2TB HDD
PSU:650W
 
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COLGeek

Cybernaut
Moderator
Do you have a backup solution to save important files to? That old Dell would make a great server for file sharing, backups, or even a game server. Just a few of the things you could do with it.
 

dragola901

Commendable
Apr 7, 2018
22
0
1,510
Already have a file system and I used it for a minecraft server before but mods like mystcraft take a lot of processing and it crashed the server (while my main rig running had no issues).
 

dragola901

Commendable
Apr 7, 2018
22
0
1,510
Currently Windows 10 Pro (for the 2 physical CPU's) but might switch to Linux depending on what I use it for (have some Linux experience).
 

dragola901

Commendable
Apr 7, 2018
22
0
1,510
I've tried FreeNas before (good but limited) but don't need since I have a file system. I also run my MC server on my main since it handles the mods better. Not sure why you think I want to host a server on it when I indicated it can't handle the mods we use. It is capable of hosting servers but the one's I run are too much for it.
 

dragola901

Commendable
Apr 7, 2018
22
0
1,510
Thanks for the idea's but running a server is not my ideal scenario due to the high power consumption and medium performance.
 

dragola901

Commendable
Apr 7, 2018
22
0
1,510
Of course, you could wipe it and then donate to a good cause or prepare for another family member/friend.
Also possible but I would rather keep the system if I can (plus everyone in my family have or recieved a PC from me). I've looked at sites with idea's for old PC's (security, rendering, donate, firewall, etc.) but none of them seems like a good use. I want to utilize the power of system but nothing that's too heavy (like rendering). The only idea I have right now is to throw linux on it and maybe try virtual machines or something (make use of the 8 cores).
 

dragola901

Commendable
Apr 7, 2018
22
0
1,510
Surprisingly I had an old Acer laptop that ran Bionic Manager (low power and don't do anything with it) but maybe I could have it run when not under high load (or limit cpu's). Thanks for reminding me about that but now the question is what else should I run on it. Might throw a VM software for testing windows/linux but I need something it can do for a few hours a day to fully utalize the hardware. Maybe Bionic and a few other tasks or so. I will do some more searching around once I get my assignments done for school. Thanks again for the help so far COLGeek.