Submitted 6 days ago by tofurious_is_god@lemmy.world to selfhosting@slrpnk.net
Im interested in starting to self host and ive seen that people use old computers, but Im wondering if these specs are overkill:
Intel Core i7 2600K Processor 24GB RAM 800GB SSD NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Graphics Card
Its a used computer, and I was going to offer 150-170? They are asking 250. Things I want to try are:
-cloud storage -immich for photo backup -jellyfin -game servers like enshrouded, vrising, palworld, etc
Thanks in advance for any advice.
The Intel Core i7 2600K will be fast enough for most regular things, but it is quite power hungry, so not so great on your power bill. Also the Intel Quicksync in it is old and thus not very helpful for hardware transcoding videos in Jellyfin, meaning you would need to do it on the CPU, which is much slower.
24GB RAM is definitely sufficient for most things and the SSD storage as well, although you might want to add some redundancy to that at some point.
The Geforce is pretty useless for server tasks and the NVenc chip in it is also pretty old, so I would just remove it, or maybe ask the seller to remove it and sell separately.
Definitely overkill. Depends on your use case though. I have the same computer that I use for HTPC. It’s running Kodi + Transmission. The OS is Fedora, but I could get away with LibreELEC. It’s just that I had Fedora already and didn’t bother to reinstall.
What I don’t like about this computer is that it’s very power hungry if compared to a less powerful one. I have a separate Orange Pi Zero and I’m super happy about it. It serves two functions: downloads torrents and shares them via UPnP (with miniDLNA package). So it’s turned on 24/7, while this big computer is on only when I want to play something.
Immich, I don’t know. I’m yet to discover how it works. I think maybe I’d turn it on when I need it, so that may be an option. This potential computer of yours, if you could turn it on via Wake on LAN, that could help tremendously, if you care about power consumption. If you don’t, I think that’s a decent computer.
All my computers in my infra are super cheap used devices, the first one was hands me down computer some people wanted to throw away, so they asked me to utilise, if I could. I took it, and only later I realised it can be utilised this way. That computer is mostly off, as it’s even more power hungry.
To learn, you can restore literally any computer. To run something long-run, best is N100 or similar mini computers. They are cheap, run cold, some have no active coolers (so, silent), and sip power. That’s what I plan to implement to my home, once I’d settle on what I need.
Isn’t that processor almost 15 years old? Nor sure what kind of price is alright for that. 250 seems a bit much but I don’t really know. I mean it’d probably work fine and 24GB is plenty of RAM for a few selfhosted services. I don’t think you need a graphics card for most services. Jellyfin can make use of it. Or use the encoder that comes with the iGPU in the processor. And maybe the machine learning features in Immich…
No idea about power consumption. I don’t know where you live, some countries have really cheap electricity. Some don’t and you maybe don’t want to run a random (old) gaming pc, because some waste a lot of power and some don’t and there is no good way to tell except measure it.
dan@upvote.au 6 days ago
Do you mean 12600K, or do you really mean 2600K? These days, I wouldn’t use anything older than 9th gen.
See if there’s any e-waste recyclers in your area. A lot of companies are throwing out systems that don’t officially run Windows 11, so you can sometimes find systems with 8th and 9th gen Intel Core processors for very cheap.