Tech Meanderings: New Gaming Machine, New House Server?

[diffrentcolours]

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.

So I went looking for a cheap refurb PC which could handle at least 8GB of RAM and fit two 3.5" hard drives. The latter actually turned out to be the harder problem - there's loads of mini-PC or thin client stuff on the refurb market, but they'll take one 3.5" drive max. I ended up spending £300 on what I thought was a regular desktop, but which turned out to be a large workstation PC - a Lenovo ThinkStation P500. This is a beautiful bit of kit, back when Lenovo was really going for the "no screws" assembly, so everything slots together with little latches and levers. It's got a Xeon E5-1650 v3 processor, giving me 6 cores or 12 threads to play around with, and a whopping 32GB of RAM. When this turned up, a realisation dawned - it's actually more powerful than my current desktop. Due to some tedious Asus problems I'd never managed to get the Ryzen 5 4500 CPU upgrade mother_bones bought me installed, so I was still using the original A10-9700. So I decided I'd use this workstation to replace my desktop. Only problem is, the P500 doesn't have the right slot for the 2TB NVMe drive in my desktop, so I'm temporarily using an old SATA SSD until I can buy an adapter.

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...