Got a new PC handed down to me. And now have my old one collecting dust. It has a dedicated GPU (GTX 1060 6GB VRAM) i guess the most obvious thing would be an AI model or maybe jellyfin (which is currently running on a raspi 5 just fine for), but was wondering if you maybe had other suggestions?
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Sell it and buy a house from the profits.
“I have a hammer and I hate it’s not hammering, any cool ideas involving nails?”
You see, I have the exact same problem as you, I just can’t stand seeing hardware going unused. Specially computer hardware that deprecates. But I think before thinking “what can I do with this hardware” you should think “do I have a need or a problem that can be solved with this hardware?” And if the awnser is “no” then maybe consider selling the GPU or giving it to some friend who needs it.
My Jellyfin works without a GPU, just my old 2nd generation i3 is enough to realtime transcode video to my phone, maybe I would need upgrade of I had more users, but I’m it’s only user.
Do you have multiple users on your server where you require GPU acceleration, if not there’s no much reason to use GPU accell anyway (which is usually trickier to setup)?
Still reporposing the computer to use as a server seems to be a good idea, because I at least can’t stand the nightmare of using USB hard drives, I’ve hard really bad experiences with those lousy cables and connection. But if you do that. That leaves you with another problem. What to do with the raspberry pi?
Also, I just recently also built a new PC had the same problem of not knowing what to do with my laptop, I came to conclusion that the best thing I can do with it is to run background chat applications on it and maybe web browser via waypipe. So it just looks like a window on my main PC and this way I have ram on my new PC that I may need for some heavy workloads like blender rendering.
Honestly the easiest use for a PC would be to remove the GPU (if integrated graphics are available on the CPU), and to host things like community game servers for your friends (or maybe something like a self-host chat server for Teamspeak/similar).
A GPU of that caliber is not ideal for those kinds of workloads (although it’d work fine for media encoding).
Regarding Jellyfin, if the PC you got has an Intel CPU then using Intel QuickSync would actually easily outperform the NVIDIA card for transcoding.
Up until very recently I was using a cheap i3 to power my Jellyfin instance that often has 5+ streams going at a time. (The only reason I upgraded was that I had a friend getting rid of an i7 from the same gen lol)
