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
I think the only thing where you can mix CPU architectures without much problems and doing something meaningful with would be a Kubernetes Cluster, e.g. install K3S across the machines.
As others mentioned, the 3rd gen CPUs are probably using quite a lot of power. I’d get something to measure how much the whole machines draw from the wall and decide if you’re fine with that (measure while there’s actually something going over the network interface and some r/w operations).
The CPUs should be powerful enough to run most classic selfhosted apps.