A small rig that's a few years old. NAS or Gaming?

skywake · September 17, 2014

So here's the situation. My brother has an old machine that's sitting gathering dust. It's mostly circa ~2010 after a bunch of upgrades, the oldest stuff in it is older. Has from memory ~3GB DDR2 and what at the time even was a fairly entry level Pentium CPU. He also has a 30GB SSD, a 128GB SSD and a whole pile of random sized HDDs of varying ages.

Separate to that he's kinda impressed with my network setup and wants to get some network storage setup. So he could spend ~$200AU on a two bay NAS OR I could setup FreeNAS for him on this old machine. For this it's probably overkill given that he'll just be using it for "downloading Linux ISOs", backing up his data and media-server stuffs but overkill is better than underkill. Plus if something breaks odds are he'll get me to fix it for him anyway so that's not an issue. However my Niece also wants a new gaming PC, if I go this route I'll pretty much have to build her a whole machine from scratch at most saving ~$80AU on the SSD for boot.

Alternatively I could just grab a 750Ti or 260x for this spare machine and call it a day. Get the NAS separately as a different thing for that couple of hundred bucks but save a good $400AU or so not having to get her a case, PSU, MoBo, CPU, RAM. Even with fairly entry level stuff that adds up. However the question with that is would such a machine be CPU limited vs, for example, an overclocked Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition? If it will be will it be limited to the point where the potential savings aren't worth it?

So which option do you think is best to reuse this ~4yr old PC. NAS or entry level gaming?