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 :)
That sounds like a pretty beefy machine. To me it’d be a waste to use it as a server, unless you need lots of hardware encoding for Jellyfin etc.
If I had that laptop, I’d use it as a guest gaming PC maybe or as a Steam Machine in the living room. Imho it’s totally wasted potential as a server, unless you actually need the performance.
that’s a hella rad machine to convert because of something so easily fixable. could be due to a loose cable, or needs a new panel; provided it ain’t of the ultra-spensive variety, 2nd hand laptop panels can be had for like $20-50 from your local junker. short of that, converting it to a full desktop would be the next best use case. using a hexacore ryzen with 3050ti as “media PC” is fucking bonkers, a potato can handle that.
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.
If you end up running it headless (game streaming host, Jellyfin/Immich worker, whatever), two small things save a lot of hassle:
- Get an HDMI dummy plug (a “display emulator”, a few euros). With no internal panel detected and nothing on HDMI, the GPU often has no proper display to render to, and Sunshine/Steam streaming in particular wants a “real” display to capture at the resolution you pick.
- Check the BIOS for a “power on after AC loss” / “auto power on” option. Plenty of laptops don’t have it, but if yours does, it comes back on its own after an outage like a proper server. Otherwise Wake-on-LAN from one of your mini PCs is the fallback.
And since storage is your bottleneck right now, open it up and see if there’s a second M.2 slot. Some of these chassis have one, and then it could hold some data while also taking the Immich/Paperless ML jobs on the 3050Ti.
Double check the CPU is still running at full speed. Without a battery most mopdern laptops will throttle CPU (and maybe GPU) performance.
Also there’s no reason to remove the battery if you can cap it’s charging. 80% is better than 100%, but if it’s plugged in 24/7 cap it as low as it will let you. But 60% is even better than 80% for health. And any cap below 100% severely reduces the chance its battery will expand.
My first thought would be to try and fix it, then you have a nice laptop or get to be the family hero when you return it working to your brother.
Past that there are several services you might use that can take advantage of the video card: Immich image recognition, Paperless OCR, some of the local Whisper servers.
Or you have a nice set-top PC for big screen gaming and media playback.
laptop simply no longer detects the display
it could be a loose connection or broken wires between the main board and the display panel. it might be worth the effort to open it up and examine those.
That was my first thought too, but I can’t really tell why, the display connector appears to be locked in place fine. It could just be a crappy design though because that cable runs through the heatsink, and the connector is partially blocked by one of the heat pipes so possibly thermal damage to the wire or connector?
Even just trying to re-seat the connector would require removing the entire heatsink/fan assembly which is very annoying. It’s not beyond my ability, but I asked the question about running it as a server to avoid that hassle lol, I’d much rather tinker with software than hardware it seems
It sounds like your issue might be a bad ribbon cable, connector, or some other easy fix. Getting the display working might be doable with reasonable effort. If not, you can make it a:
Minecraft (or any game you like) server.
Steam remote play host machine. Let the laptop do the processing and send the video signal to a lower-performance client.
Load movies onto an external drive. Load emulators onto the hard drive. Use it as a media PC and emulation station.
Video editing machine.
Either way, make sure whatever screen you hook up to it has at least a 60 hertz refresh rate.
If you stream, a lot of streamers use a second machine to record, manage the stream, run the webcam, etc. allowing their main machine to prioritize rendering the game; you could use it for that.
I would tend to agree with the other comments - media center device hooked up to the TV if you can’t fix the internal display.
It would even make a decent living room gaming PC. The 3050Ti won’t run the modern AAA junk, but it will handle most indie games and a lot of older games.
Hook it up to the TV and use it for big screen web/media/gaming/retro-emulation. Steam and/or Sunshine/Moonlight can be used for low-latency streaming to play games from another PC (in either direction). You can use controllers and keyboard/mouse through either streaming method or bluetooth/wireless. Also handy for occasionally streaming things that don’t have smart-TV-apps, or for services where the only functional apps are service-locked, shitty and/or “Freemium” (most IPTV apps for example). Set it up for Wake-On-LAN (or Wake-On-WiLAN if it supports it). Lots of things you can do with a PC in the living room.
Non-local ai server! Just the opposite of what you didn’t want /s but fr. ai horde, idk. Else, some other number cruncher… Not crypto. How about those science distributed calcs? There was one for biology, proteinfold
Put some emulators on it, connect it to a TV.
Yeah I’d use it as a media PC, but that’s because that’s what I need right now. Otherwise I’d just fuck around with it.
