I placed a low bid on an auction for 25 Elitedesk 800 G1s on a government auction and unexpectedly won (ultimately paying less than $20 per computer)

In the long run I plan on selling 15 or so of them to friends and family for cheap, and I’ll probably have 4 with Proxmox, 3 for a lab cluster and 1 for the always-on home server and keep a few for spares and random desktops around the house where I could use one.

But while I have all 25 of them what crazy clustering software/configurations should I run? Any fun benchmarks I should know about that I could run for the lolz?

Edit to add:

Specs based on the auction listing and looking computer models:

  • 4th gen i5s (probably i5-4560s or similar)
  • 8GB of DDR3 RAM
  • 256GB SSDs
  • Windows 10 Pro (no mention of licenses, so that remains to be seen)
  • Looks like 3 PCIe Slots (2 1x and 2 16x physically, presumably half-height)

Possible projects I plan on doing:

  • Proxmox cluster
  • Baremetal Kubernetes cluster
  • Harvester HCI cluster (which has the benefit of also being a Rancher cluster)
  • Automated Windows Image creation, deployment and testing
  • Pentesting lab
  • Multi-site enterprise network setup and maintenance
  • Linpack benchmark then compare to previous TOP500 lists
  • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    25 machines at say 100W each is about 2.5KW. Can you even power them all at the same time at home without tripping circuit breakers? At your mentioned .12/KWH that is about 30 cents an hour, or over $200 to run them for a month, so that adds up too.

    i5-4560S is 4597 passmark which isn’t that great. 25 of them is 115k at best, so about like a big Ryzen server that you can rent for the same $200 or so. I can think of various computation projects that could use that, but I don’t think I’d bother with a room full of crufty old PC’s if I was pursuing something like that.