What to Do With Extra Build

[Bokononist]

I recently got done modifying/building out an existing machine into an upgraded machine with a second machine to go beside it, and I find myself with spare parts that with an additional small purchase or two could easily make a third machine. My question, generally, is: What do you think I should do with this third machine?

Specifically, left unused in my possession I have:

An Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (G0) 3.4 Ghz CPU

An ASRock G41C-GS R2.0 Motherboard (Compatible with the Q6600)

2 2GB Sticks of DDR2 PC8600 Ram (also compatible)

A Hyper 212 EVO CPU Fan (Ditto)

A Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 GPU.

To this collection of parts (with or without the here-overpowered GPU, depending on the primary intended use for the final build) I would purchase and add a fresh SSD for running the OS, a power supply, and a case.

As for my existing computer ecosystem:

I have one tower with a Skylake i5 6700k with 30GB DDR4 (Ram overkill, yes, bundle was on sale) and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. This has a dual installation of Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS and Windows 7 Ultimate, and a variety of graphic design/video production/fine art (and a few gaming) peiphials hooked up to it. It is my daily-use, "workhorse" rig, as well as serving a side use as a gaming machine. We split the cost of a black-friday discounted HTC Vive (online), and that's hooked up to this too. Well. Wired so I can plug it in with one cable that's easily accessible.

I have one Xenon Server with a quad-NIC Supermicro motherboard and 32GB Ram, several multi-TB HDDS hooked up to it and an M.2 SSD for running the OS. (Currently a slightly expanded Ubuntu Server pack with ZFS, but I'm playing with VMs of Linux and BSD distros to decide my ultimate choice.) The Server acts as a Media Server, by housing the drives as well as hosting the Lampstack which I use as my custom Media Library on the home network. This is additionally accessed by my phone, my workhorse rig described above; and roommate's laptop, tablet, and two graphic design rigs. (We work in overlapping creative fields and live in a jointly live-work space with separate bedrooms. My roommate is not good with computers beyond how to use them to make pretty pictures, so I mostly handle administration even on his machines. One is an HP Z800 fitted for Graphic Work, the other a Mac Pro tower.)

I also have 1 AMD A6 5400 CPU (on sale on Newegg for $32!!) which I plan on turning into a small, power efficient, pfsense build to run as a hardware firewall for dividing up my network security. Perhaps 2, at that price, if I like the performance.

The thing about the Q6600, it isn't energy efficient for shit. With all these machines as is, I don't want to run it all the time.

So...

Build it out and give it to someone without a computer, or a less capable one? (It's my first CPU, still running! I'd prefer to keep it... Plus the GTX 760 is essentially still current, if not high end.)

Set it up as a headless system backup, to be turned on via magic packet when backups need to happen? (Once a day? I'm not sure how to go about calculating how much power consumption this amounts to.)

Throw the 760 in and put it beneath the livingroom TV as a dedicated game box? I've played Skyrim on this CPU/Ram/GPU combo in a different motherboard, before, so it should be able to play games of relatively recent vintage, especially if I add to the Ram, and I can stick all our older games on there, so my workrig is only really needed for the Vive and current gen AAA titles. (How much longer can we really get gaming love out of these components? Will we play old games often enough or is the thrill mostly short lived nostolgia, there? Old split screen games might get lots of party play.)

Any ideas?

 

[Samaratin]

I like going with the HTPC gaming idea. Pick up a nice horizontal htpc case, or a simple plain server case that you can take the handles off... play games... run some console emulators etc

 

[Bokononist]

Samaritan

The more I think about it the more I lean towards that idea. My one source of trepidation is introducing yet another Windows install to the apartment. But I could run a fullscreen firefox window at startup which displays a TV variant of the Lampstack's media library interface, hiding the actual OS beneath. I'd just have to interact with it for updates and installs. Plus then computer illiterate guests can just pick up an xbox one controller, turn it on, and navigate to movies/games/whatever. Like with a commercial console.

 

[Samaratin]

Currently i have 4 computers, a main, a back up, and 2 for just testing around programs with. The 2 for testing i got to start experimenting with Kodi & Plex to eventually someday have my entire dvd and blu-ray collection on a computer/server of sorts and then have htpc's at tv points to access all the digital content.. kinda tired of my kids scratching and not taking care of the movie collection.. for one of the test pc's i used a refurbed lenovo i found on newegg for like 80 bucks a few months ago.. came with a pentium g630 some ram a hard drive and win 7 pro.... i tossed in a low profile 750ti, an asus sound card, did the free upgrade to windows 10, let it become active... removed the hard drive and put in a 1tb WD and performed a clean install to that drive. left that in the lenovo case til a few weeks ago when i picked up this server case for $25
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811165213
i'm also kinda playing around with the "retroarch" gaming emulator interface which kinda lumps all the different emulators into one UI. It's supposed to also work with Kodi, i think, but i havent gotten that far yet to test it out yet.

 

[Bokononist]

Samaritan

Sounds like a useful and efficient setup. I'm dead against having Windows 10 in my apartment because of all the data collection (frankly, I regard it as malicious software), and I already have the custom interface I drew up and implemented in HTML/CSS working for browsing my non-interactive media library (website archives as well despite being technically interactive), which if anything I'd like to integrate game launching into, so I don't think it would work for me, so much. But it should do you nicely for keeping the little beasts off your discs! (My god can my nephew destroy things.)

In my case, hosting a local website I navigate my media library through has a few advantages over things like KODI and Windows Media Shares:

1) My setup is very lightweight. All I have to do is load a local webpage, the layout and fiction of I get to totally control, navigate to the content I want, and then it gets served to the appropriate local rendering/display program.

2) I'm already familiar with HTML/CSS/ETC.

3) My media library is unified, with custom tables for everything, and categorical sorting, meaning you can search an author-actor and get movies and books, or a historical figure and get books both by and about them, or a song and get both the album it's from and the movie it was in, with more complex searches for more advanced results.

4. Unified cross platform experience.

 

[Samaratin]

I like all those things you said in #3, thats pretty cool

 

[Bokononist]

Samaratin

One of my chief reasons for doing it this way! Genre tags, for example, are split into two fields, a hierarchical 3 part "genre" field, and a flat "sub-genre" field.

So, a mid-2000s electronic dance song with country undertones might be tagged Genre: Popular.Dance.EDM, Sub-Genre: Country-House, Mashup, Electro-Bluegrass.

Downside is, for non-standard stuff you have to tag it yourself. Not a big deal when adding new media, but logging a Back catalog of existing media is a bunch of work. Things like "artist" and "album" I autoscrape.