I got this PC from my dad when he upgraded in like December ish. I’ve been running Kubuntu on it and just using it like a sort of general purpose desktop for me and my wife, but I’ve got a hankering for some tinkering and feel like it has more potential, so I’d love some project ideas!
That is a lot of RAM. Only a quad-core processor, but I imagine should still be fine for general-purpose desktop use.
What would you want it to do? Honestly I would call that over-specced for something like a file server and would probably consume a lot of power if left on all the time. Maybe a media server which can use the discrete GPU for video encoding?
I really don’t have anything specific in mind, but a media server is definitely something that’s been on my list of things I’d like.
As for the ram, it kind of is an absurd amount. I think it only started with 8 gigs (maybe 16), but since it was just my family computer growing up it would get continually more and more bloated and slow, upgrading the ram was the only way my dad knew how to upgrade it so he’d do it every now and then to try and speed it up lol.
If you want to get into running a home lab, this world probably be a nice start. So throw proxmox on it and host all the services you want (in containers or VMs). Media server like jellyfin, maybe a nextcloud, storage/Nas services, automate your home with home assistant.
It has a relatively large amount of memory for that generation of system, but also will probably not exactly sip power for the performance your getting. So if power is expensive where you are, think twice about it.
What is the benefit of running it in Proxmox rather than just containers on bare metal?
Depends what you want to do. If you want only docker containers, it’s the wrong tool. If you want to run a mixture of VMs and LXC containers, it’s literally a management interface made for it. So it’s pretty good at it.