So being the tech guy in my family, I just “inherited” my brother’s old laptop. It’s internals are reasonably modern, it has a Ryzen 5800HS and a RTX 3050Ti inside, the only issue is the display somehow died (I’ve opened the laptop up and I can’t tell how, but it definitely seems to be a hardware issue as far as I can tell - the laptop simply no longer detects the display is connected at all).
I’ve been able to confirm that full video output still works over HDMI (including access to the BIOS and boot menu, which I’ve heard isn’t a given with laptops) and that it can still boot with the battery removed as long as the stock 20v power supply is used (it won’t boot with only usb-c power)
So my question is, what would you do with this thing?
A bit of background on my current setup: I already have 2 mini PCs which I use for Docker containers (*arr stack, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Nextcloud and some other web services. All these run fine and storage is my bottleneck rather than power currently) and the other I use to run Home Assistant OS with a couple of relevant addons (or “apps” as they insist on calling them now)
I’d hate to have that 3050Ti sitting around unused, but I don’t really feel like I want or need a local AI server so I’d welcome any suggestions with interesting use cases for that GPU :)
You could make it a small server with a built-in UPS. Or hook it up to an external display, keyboard, and mouse if someone wants to use it as a desktop computer and possibly for some gaming. Or just use it to play around with different Linux distributions, or something like that.
One of the problems though with running a laptop as a server running 24/7 is the hardware really isn’t built for that, especially gaming laptops that tend to already run a bit on the warm side. Given it’s also AMD and I’ve not found their mobile stuff to be particularly good, honestly I’d be tempted to pull the RAM and storage - assuming it’s not soldered in place, and junk the rest of it.
@toddestan @SpatchyIsOnline If it does run warm, and since the display is dead, there’s nothing keeping you from removing the motherboard from the case and setting up your own cooling. If the crappy little laptop fan isn’t up to the task, put the motherboard in a larger box and hook up a few USB-powered CPU fans to move a lot more air over the CPU/GPU’s heatsink.