Consolidation of Desktop and NAS into a Server

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ViciousXUSMC

Active Member
Nov 27, 2016
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So I have a gaming desktop that is on 24/7 it uses up a pretty good amount of power with a 2600k overclocked, 6 hard drives, 16GB Ram and a 7970 GPU.

I use it less and less for gaming and mostly for photoshop, voice over work, video editing, web browsing, etc.

I am in the process of building a NAS, I plan to reduce the # of drives in my desktop to just what I need for OS and working files and so that means another 24/7 on box.

Probably for now just a cheap Dell T30 and 4 drives to get me started until I can commit to a bigger setup.

That is where my question comes in. That bigger setup.
I hate having multiple devices on 24/7 and since my desktop is doing a lot of server type duties and I would love to have the power to encode movies faster, do big plex streams, etc etc why not get a BIG rack server and run that?

Main issue now is noise, secondary issue is cost.

To offset the cost I was thinking of decommissioning my desktop. Let the server be my desktop either by "physicalizing" it via PCI pass thru or by RDP with a thin client.

That will make up for some of the servers 24/7 running cost by having my desktop offline and I get all the benefits and features of having a super server for a desktop.

But the question is, is this practical? and what is the best way to implement it?
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Oh man! Eliminate the 7970 and you can power 1-3 low power servers with the power savings alone, and that's not even at 100% utilization of GPU!! This is servers at idle, and GPU at idle (100w).

If you don't play games and do minor photoshop work I wouldn't worry about GPU acceleration, if I did I'd get a newer-gen NVIDIA for much lower power utilization and better performance.

I would keep the server itself, and your desktop itself not 'one' or virtualized.