Turning Old Workstation into NAS/Render machine

[SuperSuites]

I've got an old workstation I built in college for rendering and 3d work (3d animation/modeling major).  My career path post college has led me more towards Marketing and Design but I still enjoy Motion Graphics and rendering and am trying to pick up more freelance work in this area.  I won't get anything out of selling my old workstation but I figured it could be a killer network storage and render machine.  I've made a new computer with more streamline gaming type hardware for speed now and am wanting to slap a few NAS drives in my old workstation and let it live on, it's one of my few possessions to make it out of the Camp wildfire in California.

 

I'm wondering the best way to optimize power setting and if I should mess with any hardware besides more drives, or if a another configuration I'm not thinking of is better.  My goal is 
After Effects and Premiere Render node, PLEX media Server, File share and redundancy backup (lost some data to the fire), and ftp (FileZilla) access to my files when I am away from home if need be.  I also have some old websites I'd like to self host eventually to keep the cost down, they are just used as demos at this point for freelance work.

 

Hear are the current specs

• 2 Xenon 6 core drives (slower)
• 48gb ram (this is when ram was cheap)
• Windows 10 Pro
• Super Micro server mobo (pain in the ass in windows 10, may downgrade to 7)
• AMD Firepro w7000 workstation card (same as mobo)
• 512gb ssd
• 1050w gold power supply
• Older Omega Audio Card (this thing is pretty sweet but fits an old pci slot, no combination of adapters got it working in my new machine)

 

What I plan to add

• Network card with Wake on Lan
• 4 6tb NAS drives

 

Should this thing be more of a media home center attached directly to my living room or just let plex rock it?  Anything I can do to get the power usage down, pull the audio and graphics card and smaller power supply?  Is windows server going to be a lot better for every application I want?  I would like a workflow where I have the option to save the project and render off my main pc as well, that's why I thought maybe I should keep the graphics card in there (launching After Effects independently).  Audio card maybe stays if its more of a media center with direct hookup to stereo?

 

This setup is new for me, any advice would be appreciated!

 

 

[Bubbles_TPB]

@SuperSuites ok.

1. Sorry about your loss from the fire.

2. I would. The 6 core Xeons would go pretty well with rendering if you give it some time and if its to slow, just toss a 1050ti in there.

[BobVonBob]

Computers are generally pretty good at keeping their power usage down on their own, as long as you haven't locked the frequency. The audio card is probably nearly nil power draw, probably 0.2W max while not in use, 1W while it is. You might get some benefit out of leaving the GPU in if your rendering softwares can leverage it, since GPUs are by and large more efficient than CPUs for many rendering tasks.

[Windows7ge]

Most of the time the system will underclock itself pretty well when not in use. If you can leverage GPU compute leave that in. If it's useless, remove it and use the vga onboard and/or IPMI (assuming this will become a mostly headless system) the only other thing I can think of is let the HDDs spin-down. I did this on my servers eight 7200RPM drives and it knocked about 60W off (there is a trade-off here so you'll have to decide if it's worth it).

 

Other than that most other power draw is negligible. Fans, ram.