Comment by sph
9 days ago
I work on a desktop, but as a backup I have bought a refurbished Dell Latitude, there are a lot of decent ones for €250 on eBay. Put Linux on it, it’s good enough for most workloads.
I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
> I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.
I have a similar rig, but a 10th gen i7, 128GB of DDR4, 2TB NVMe, and dual RTX 3090s. Built it in 2021 for crypto mining, it ended up paying itself off just before Eth went PoW. I kept it mining even after profitability, because it ran warm enough to heat my apartment leaving my HVAC on fan-only to circulate the heat around.
After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine.
It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free".
You might sell it for more but buying a replacement costs even more so you’re losing money either way. The only way is to sell and never look back.
I won't sell my 3090. It's still one of the best cards for a local AI and gaming mixed use. I put a waterblock on it and it just purrs along at 50C no matter what I throw at it.
I did exactly this and suggest it. Used Dell Latitude (the one I got is one from 2019 - model 5300). I put Linux Mint Debian Edition (https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php) on it. Works absolutely great.
Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers.
I got an old hp elitedesk off of eBay, I don’t remember the cpu but it has 8 gig of ram and an ssd. Ubuntu+dokku and it runs all my self hosted stuff.
in the U.S & other regions it sucks cz you can hardly ever get static ip addresses at residential addresses to host things & expose to the internet
It’s almost like the stuff the IPv6 people and the P2P protocol people have said for 25 years was true and correct but nobody listened or cared.
You can use a reverse proxy.