What to do with 30 old PCs

[Mojo-Jojo]

My uncle works wherever he can and often runs into stuff that noone needs anymore.

For example a couple years ago he got an old limousine that he patched up.

 

Well, now he has 30 HP PCs (He says they're Pentium 4 PCs, but I'll see when they get here. Pentium 4 is the only processor name he knows so he might just think it's a brand.) and since I'm the "Family Computer Guy" he asked me if I wanted them.

 

Of course I have some ideas for one or two of them, and they're great for scrap parts for an engineer, but I was wondering if any of you had any crazy ideas 

[Clyne]

Are they Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading?

[cae]

Donate working ones. Recycle non-working ones.

[Infernal Burrito]

I would put them under my desk and use them as spare parts when needed.

[LemonSpice]

----------------------------------derp

render farm or folding at home bot farm

[Volbet]

• OC them to kingdom come.

Massive folding farm (bonus: Will also provide heat for your house). 

Sell the parts

Give them to charity

Make keyrings out of the CPUs.

[Luc401]

use them as heaters while folding 

[Pugs501]

SHIP SOME TO ME!

[thekeemo]

turn them into a server... there was a project here where someone made a school server using a dozen of them

[Langdon]

Turn old hard drives into fridge magnets!

[Almercenary]

Step 1: Give them all to me

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Don't do step 1.

 

Folding

Server

Sledge hammer them

Overclock them all.

Use them as very expensive power consuming heaters

Make an XBMC PC

Ghetto NAS box.

[Gen. Shepard]

Aan mij geven

Or just keep them as backup, always nice to have a bunch laying around.

SHUSH, NU DUTCH ALLOWED HERE ;D

[Toddwjp]

create your own network

 

and then ask people refer to you as THE ADMINISTRATOR

[Damikiller37]

Sell all of the parts and recycle the metal from the cases and make a custom case/s out of them

[DeViLzzz]

if you are a gamer try to make some of them the best they could be for the time if possible by combining parts and if need be finding an awesome old vid card somewhere if there isn't one in the 30 pcs you were given.  Much more fun to play old games on the machines they were meant to be played on.

[FuzzyYellow]

sell them. you can probably make $25-50 a piece.

[Diederik_Gr]

You could donate them so their final days will at least be of value to some people. If not, try messing around with them a bit, sell the parts or try creating a server.

[ionbasa]

If they are socket 775 Pentium 4 or Ds then they are worth using.You can find anywhere from single core (throwaway) to dual cores, quadcores, and even hyperthreaded chips. 

Personally, I would Install linux on the machines and donate them. 

 

If you want to experiment with a little you can try making your own cloud storage, with  something like openstack. You can also run Folding@Home and and BOINC projects you find appealing.

 

You can scrap the ram and HDDS, use them for a NAS build if you wanted, although the HDDs might still be IDE or SCSI era.

[Guest]

Sell them as a joblot. Could make quite a bit of $

[LemonSpice]

you could also make them any kind of farm no judging

[Nicolas]

Make a retro LAN center and play quake, 1.6, etc...

[deviant88]

Do they have only pentium 4 cpu? they must have gpu or something in them,if you need a fileserver you could setup your own home file server, or webserver if you into that stuff.

Anyway 30 is just too much at most you could use 3-4 even if you were to use them for folding a single modern pc with cpu/gpu folding would probably be faster than all 30 at 1/20th of the power draw.

Donate most of them,unless you run some game servers/web server/file servers at home they will be useless.

[SeriouslyMikey]

A huge PC bonfire. 

[LePawel]

render farm or folding at home bot farm

worth one hundred million billion quadutilipsnhasbngl;usyrbr SFDUHFGAlkdfg illion dollars /hour in power consumption.

[Pugs501]

A huge PC bonfire. 

How about making a LASER that can BURN THINGS!