I’ve got a PC the kids and I built years ago as a gaming machine that we don’t use anymore. Thinking of repurposing it for use with my home automation setup (replacing my current Raspberry Pi 4 with Home Assistant installed).
It’s certainly COMPLETELY overkill for that, so I’m curious what other ways I can make use of it as a home automation server of some sort. Or maybe there’s some reason it’s actually a bad idea to use it at all for this?
Specs…
- CPU: Intel i3-8100 3.6Ghz
- Memory: 8GB
- Storage: 2TB
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
- Motherboard: B360M Pro-VDH MS-7B24
Currently has Windows 11 installed on it.
How power hungry is that old PC, though?
8th gen intel has really good idle, so not power hungry at all. most likely in 20-30w range depending on PSU
This. If it’s completely overkill it’s likely going to use a lot of power and you’ll pay for compute power that you don’t actually need.
I’d stick with the pi4. I had 12 or so services running on it without problems.
Not only that depending on how old you might get something much more powerful in a little fanless case that uses way less power. Especially if ARM architecture. Though there are decent Intel chips targeted t this market.