I got a stack of PCS that are very similar if not identical. Third gen i7, 8 gigs of ram, one terabyte hdd, all but one are the same HP model with the same motherboard, etc too. I upgraded the RAM in a few of them, and I have enough spare TB hard drives to put an extra in each. Two have Nvidia GeForce 210 gpus, and the unique one out of the bunch I’ll probably throw in a spare RX 570 I have.
But, what to do with them? Easiest answer is probably sell them all for $75 each but that’s not what we do here, right? Right now I’m assuming they all support w o l and I can easily set up ansible/awx for orchestration. I’m just looking for some fun experiments, projects, or actual uses for this Tower of PC towers
They are not too terrible really. 3rd gen i7 is the Ivy Bridge generation, so 22 nm. For many homelab server tasks the CPUs would be just fine. Power efficiency is of course worse than modern CPUs, but way better than the previous 32 nm Sandybridge generation. I had such a system with integrated graphics and one SSD and that drew 15 W at idle at the wall.