What use for this server?

[Psittac]

I redid my server which was decommissioned due to power draw.  But today I got a new chassis for it an RTX4000 for free from a friend and decided to set it back up.  I'm just installing windows 11 for now to play around with F@H and BOINC

 

5950x

RTX3080

RTX4000

32g? of ram (could be 64 will know shortly)

And I might put 8 4TB drives in and see if they're still good.  They started erroring out in the last chassis but this one has a legit backplane on it.

 

So my question is.... what kind of thing's can I do with this much compute?  I don't plan on running it 24/7 due to electricity and heat concerns.  I have a low power setup for plex and vm's

[Crunchy Dragon]

I like keeping a workstation on standby in case I need compute power for something while out and about.

 

Enable my VPN, fire up RDP, and off it goes. 

 

Local LLMs might run okay if you're interested in those, I've been hearing more chatter lately about running AI in a homelab.

[Dedayog]

31 minutes ago, Psittac said:

I redid my server which was decommissioned due to power draw.  But today I got a new chassis for it an RTX4000 for free from a friend and decided to set it back up.  I'm just installing windows 11 for now to play around with F@H and BOINC

 

5950x

RTX3080

RTX4000

32g? of ram (could be 64 will know shortly)

And I might put 8 4TB drives in and see if they're still good.  They started erroring out in the last chassis but this one has a legit backplane on it.

 

So my question is.... what kind of thing's can I do with this much compute?  I don't plan on running it 24/7 due to electricity and heat concerns.  I have a low power setup for plex and vm's

Nm

[spacepickle]

You can mess around a run a bunch of VMs at once, render 3D scenes with Blender, host dang near anything.  If there's some skill you want to learn (docker, hacking/cybersecurity. web backend) you can use it to practice that. LLMs and stuff should work on it as well.

[Psittac]

ok well running full tilt must be to much for the 850w psu because the system keeps hard stopping.  Probably over current protection.

 

I have a 1000w psu in a different machine that doesn't need that much power and I might swap it tomorrow.  That or keep the 3080 out of this machine in hopes that I can crunch 24/7 with a lower cost on electricity.  I already shut this thing down before because of the power usage so I might go the lower power route.

 

What would be a good way to use it for crunching and VM's?  I don't want a couple of cores to sit idle for some VM when it could be crunching on boinc.

 

What's best practice for resource allocation?  What OS should I use?  Or just run it bare metal with a linux distro?  I might offload some of my power efficient server onto this if I can run it 24/7

[Nikolithebear]

On 4/4/2026 at 7:19 PM, Psittac said:

I redid my server which was decommissioned due to power draw.  But today I got a new chassis for it an RTX4000 for free from a friend and decided to set it back up.  I'm just installing windows 11 for now to play around with F@H and BOINC

 

5950x

RTX3080

RTX4000

32g? of ram (could be 64 will know shortly)

And I might put 8 4TB drives in and see if they're still good.  They started erroring out in the last chassis but this one has a legit backplane on it.

 

So my question is.... what kind of thing's can I do with this much compute?  I don't plan on running it 24/7 due to electricity and heat concerns.  I have a low power setup for plex and vm's

I had an issue like this with my set up. 

I solved this by setting up a wake on lan script that automatically booted my server in the morning, and had a cron script that shut down the server before I went to bed.  This cut down on my power drastically. 

As for use, there's lot of options available to you.  You could run docker, Proxmox, linux (Debian, Ubuntu, etc) on it.  Running LLMs and a local AI server like OpenWebUI would be an adventure.  

Just some ideas.