Tech Meanderings: New Gaming Machine, New House Server?

Now we've had a smart meter fitted, I've started to want to put together some kind of in-home monitoring of energy usage, temperature etc. with the intention that eventually I could start doing things like smart radiator control and so on. Obviously this will need a computer that's on 24/7 to look after things. The only computer in the house that fits that description is my fileserver - it's an old HP Microserver with a 4TB RAID where I keep backups and other files. It's been struggling for a while just running a few services such as the Unifi wireless controller, so it's clear it wasn't going to cut it for anything more.

( nerdy stuff )

This means that I'm now able to take full advantage of the AMD RX 6650XT graphic card which cosmolinguist bought for me. I'm enjoying the dappled sunlight through the swaying branches in 7 Days to Die and I'm struggling to get it to drop below 60fps, the maximum my monitor will support. Not only that, but I'm now in a Steam "Family" with gamer stepson L, so I have access to his vast library of games. This means that I've dipped my toes into Helldivers 2, a co-op shooty game which is basically Starship Troopers with the serial numbers filed off. Some of the local Discord people play it and I've joined in a co-op session with them now. Even though it's a Windows game running through Proton (formerly WINE), I'm still getting that maximum 60fps with lovely quality graphics (by my relatively low standards).

All this gaming has rather distracted me from the original purpose of this hardware - I need to transplant the hard drive from my old desktop into my new workstation when the NVMe adapter arrives, then transplant the hard drives from my fileserver into my old desktop and use it as the always-on system that'll monitor the house. So maybe that's a project for the coming weekend...