I got 2 old Dell Optiplex's for £5 each. What should I do with them?

[Queasy Tiger]

I picked up 2 old Dell Optiplex small form factor computers on an imulse from the car boot sale last weekend, and I am wondering what I should do with them.

They are:

1. Dell Optiplex 755 (2007) with Intel Pentium E8400 Dual core CPU, 4GB of RAM
2. Dell Optiplex 380 (2010) with Intel Pentium [N/A] Dual core CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM

I can upgrade them to a core 2 Quad Q6700, and a Core 2 Quad Q9400 respectively, and the best card I can fit in them is a Nvidia GT 1030 (With a TFX power supply upgrade).
There is only 2 SATA ports in one, and 3 in the other, both of which are using one for the optical drive, but an optical drive to SSD/HDD adapter will fix that if I want say an ssd and a hdd.

I have come up with a few ideas so far

 

• A media server to allow my ripped blu rays, DVD's, and other films and videos to be streamed from my PLEX server to my Amazon Fire TV Stick (I currently use my gaming PC)
• A travel PC for light/older gaming
• A NAS server for my home network
• A Firewall server
• A "Frankenstein" PC for testing drives, RAM, CPU's, Hard/solid state drives etc

 

That's all I got.

 

Any suggestions?  Thanks!

[Callum Stringer]

4 minutes ago, gayfurry said:

I picked up 2 old Dell Optiplex small form factor computers on an imulse from the car boot sale last weekend, and I am wondering what I should do with them.

They are:

1. Dell Optiplex 755 (2007) with Intel Pentium E8400 Dual core CPU, 4GB of RAM
2. Dell Optiplex 380 (2010) with Intel Pentium [N/A] Dual core CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM

I can upgrade them to a core 2 Quad Q6700, and a Core 2 Quad Q9400 respectively, and the best card I can fit in them is a Nvidia GT 1030 (Wit a TFX power supply upgrade).
There is only 2 SATA ports in one, and 3 in the other, both of which are using one for the optical drive, but an optical drive to SSD/HDD adapter will fix that if I want say an ssd and a hdd.

I have come up with a few ideas so far

 

• A media server to allow my ripped blu rays, DVD's, and other films and videos to be streamed from my PLEX server to my Amazon Fire TV Stick (I currently use my gaming PC)
• A travel PC for light/older gaming
• A NAS server for my home network
• A Firewall server
• A "Frankenstein" PC for testing drives, RAM, CPU's, Hard/solid state drives etc

 

That's all I got.

 

Any suggestions?  Thanks!

you could use them as a cloud, or a apache server. you could sell a providing service to people you know. 

[Queasy Tiger]

Just now, Callum Stringer said:

you could use them as a cloud, or a apache server. you could sell a providing service to people you know. 

I did ponder that idea very briefly, but having a server to remote source is out of the question with my 3mbps down 0.35mbps up internet 

[Callum Stringer]

Just now, gayfurry said:

I did ponder that idea very briefly, but having a server to remote source is out of the question with my 3mbps down 0.35mbps up internet 

so you want a idea that would be used locally?

[VEXICUS]

11 minutes ago, gayfurry said:

I picked up 2 old Dell Optiplex small form factor computers on an imulse from the car boot sale last weekend, and I am wondering what I should do with them.

They are:

1. Dell Optiplex 755 (2007) with Intel Pentium E8400 Dual core CPU, 4GB of RAM
2. Dell Optiplex 380 (2010) with Intel Pentium [N/A] Dual core CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM

I can upgrade them to a core 2 Quad Q6700, and a Core 2 Quad Q9400 respectively, and the best card I can fit in them is a Nvidia GT 1030 (Wit a TFX power supply upgrade).
There is only 2 SATA ports in one, and 3 in the other, both of which are using one for the optical drive, but an optical drive to SSD/HDD adapter will fix that if I want say an ssd and a hdd.

I have come up with a few ideas so far

 

• A media server to allow my ripped blu rays, DVD's, and other films and videos to be streamed from my PLEX server to my Amazon Fire TV Stick (I currently use my gaming PC)
• A travel PC for light/older gaming
• A NAS server for my home network
• A Firewall server
• A "Frankenstein" PC for testing drives, RAM, CPU's, Hard/solid state drives etc

 

That's all I got.

 

Any suggestions?  Thanks!

Get a q6600 fr about $10 and a Radeon 7770 for about $25.....ND u can easily flip this pic fr about $80-100

[Queasy Tiger]

1 minute ago, Callum Stringer said:

so you want a idea that would be used locally?

Preferably yes.  

But I love my retro stuff and I just remembered I want a windows XP machine...  So that's another option. 

[AskTJ]

Keep one for a Windows XP system, and put some old but decent graphics card in it and sell it as "Retro Gaming PC" . Just an option

[Queasy Tiger]

Just now, tj_420 said:

Keep one for a Windows XP system, and put some old but decent graphics card in it and sell it as "Retro Gaming PC" . Just an option

I'd never thought of that you know, I do need some extra cash, but I love my "Work in progress" computers, so i'm not sure i'd want to because in the back of my mind i'll be thinking "But what if you need it?"
Thanks for the suggestion though!

[King_of_Oz]

All of those ideas sound nice. Since you got them for so cheap, I would just take out the HDD and put them in your personal rig IMO.

[Queasy Tiger]

2 minutes ago, King_of_Oz said:

All of those ideas sound nice. Since you got them for so cheap, I would just take out the HDD and put them in your personal rig IMO.

Aah...  They were smart and took out the hard drives before they sold them.  It has everything else though.
But there is a 2nd hand parts retailer here in the uk where I bought 2 250GB SATA 7200RPM Hard drives for £3 each to go in them!

[ScratchCat]

The "Frankenstein" PC seems the best idea, you can use it to try out new Linux distros or shady programs you don't want on your main PC. If something does wrong just wipe the drive an start again - no important data lost.

 

The PCs may be a bit power hungry for use as a NAS unless you will be seeing a lot of usage/it is of great benefit to access your files remotely. You probably will not be able to use RAID due to a lack of space to install a second drive unless you remove the optical drive.

[Ezzy-525]

57 minutes ago, gayfurry said:

• A media server to allow my ripped blu rays, DVD's, and other films and videos to be streamed from my PLEX server to my Amazon Fire TV Stick (I currently use my gaming PC)

I'd double check what sort of performance they'll get when it comes to transcoding blu-ray quality video on Plex. Old dual cores probably ain't gonna be great but with some tweaking it might be ok for 1x 1080p stream.

[Queasy Tiger]

2 minutes ago, Ezzy-525 said:

I'd double check what sort of performance they'll get when it comes to transcoding blu-ray quality video on Plex. Old dual cores probably ain't gonna be great but with some tweaking it might be ok for 1x 1080p stream.

I did think of that, and while I could look to find out, i'd prefer to just go with trial and error. 

But I use a piece of software called MakeMKV to convert my blu rays to MKV, I know that the output of MKV DVD's and Blu rays are different, but I thought that it'd still work going straight from a hard drive.

What do you think?
And besides, if it doesn't work with blu rays, then I can just do it with DVD's. Mpeg 2 won't be a problem I'm sure. 

Although if you think about it, Fire TV sticks and Fire TV (4K) use ARM processors and they handle it f.....  Ohhhh....  I forgot, they're streaming... not serving...  
Any comments?

[Ezzy-525]

44 minutes ago, gayfurry said:

I did think of that, and while I could look to find out, i'd prefer to just go with trial and error. 

But I use a piece of software called MakeMKV to convert my blu rays to MKV, I know that the output of MKV DVD's and Blu rays are different, but I thought that it'd still work going straight from a hard drive.

What do you think?
And besides, if it doesn't work with blu rays, then I can just do it with DVD's. Mpeg 2 won't be a problem I'm sure. 

Although if you think about it, Fire TV sticks and Fire TV (4K) use ARM processors and they handle it f.....  Ohhhh....  I forgot, they're streaming... not serving...  
Any comments?

I just looked up the two processors and Plex forums say you typically need CPU's with a PassMark score of 2000 per 1080p stream.

 

• Dell Optiplex 755 (2007) with Intel Pentium E8400 - PassMark of 2154
• Dell Optiplex 380 (2010) with Intel Pentium [N/A] (This should contain an E7500) - PassMark of 1877

That being said...I had a Q8400 which has a PassMark of 3181 and it wasn't very good at transcoding. But sometimes it's the luck of the draw and what quality settings you're ok with. But like you say, for your DVD rips, it will be ok.

[Queasy Tiger]

1 minute ago, Ezzy-525 said:

I just looked up the two processors and Plex forums say you typically need CPU's with a PassMark score of 2000 per 1080p stream.

 

• Dell Optiplex 755 (2007) with Intel Pentium E8400 - PassMark of 2154
• Dell Optiplex 380 (2010) with Intel Pentium [N/A] (This should contain an E7500) - PassMark of 1877

That being said...I had a Q8400 which has a PassMark of 3181 and it wasn't very good at transcoding. But sometimes it's the luck of the draw and what quality settings you're ok with. But like you say, for your DVD rips, it will be ok.

Thank you!  That's really helpful!  

[Ezzy-525]

Just now, gayfurry said:

Thank you!  That's really helpful!  

No problem! I try to do the same sort of things with old tech...I have 3 computers (only 2 running) and always want projects to do...then I just end up browsing Imgur and LTT on a computer capable of doing so much more 

[Queasy Tiger]

4 minutes ago, Ezzy-525 said:

No problem! I try to do the same sort of things with old tech...I have 3 computers (only 2 running) and always want projects to do...then I just end up browsing Imgur and LTT on a computer capable of doing so much more 

I'm the same, I always have to be in the middle of doing something, that's why I keep buying £5 computers at car boot sales

I always have 3 computers running too.  My Win10 Gaming PC (for games), My MacBook pro (for music and video production), and my beloved scratch built Windows 98 music production computer!