So, my work machine was getting long in the tooth. Occasionally not booting and requiring me to jiggle memory sticks or tighten CPU cooler screws. It was a DDR3 machine with a Xeon E3 1230V2 with 8gb of RAM (and oddly enough an RTX 2060.) The fans were getting pretty loud, too.
I had a Ryzen 2600x and 16gb of DD4 from my home PC lying around, so I bought a cheap mainboard, tore the old one out of the case, attached all the hardware to the new mainboard - including the SSD with Mint installed - and BOOM! It booted first try without issue. Even going from Intel to AMD, DDR3 to DDR4. My mind is blown!
I can’t imagine how borked my machine would have been if I’d tried that with Windows.
Now, what do I do with a still-working Xeon and mainboard?!?
Free drivers to free drivers are easy. The only issues usually occur when you move from Nvidia to something else. Nvidia graphics drivers interfere with free drivers.
Start a self-hosted server. You’re welcome to join !selfhost@lemmy.ml or !selfhosted@lemmy.world.
That’s a great idea! I have an old HDD and a 300 watt PSU lying around somewhere. I suppose I could just mount it all on a board.
Just keep in mind that it will not be power friendly
Be sure to remember to Activate Linux after a motherboard switch!
Remember to install the Activate Linux program to let it harrass you until you do!
I have swapped Linux SSDs with Mint and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed between an AMD desktop PC, an Intel desktop and an Intel laptop and never had any problems. They just boot up and work. Even the NVIDIA card in one of the desktops didn’t cause any real problems.
If you tried this with Windows, the OS would break, even if it booted at all, and the software licenses would all become invalid even if you could fix it up technically. You’d spend days fixing driver problems and teaching it to find its own partitions. Linux is amazingly portable.
I know some of y’all like to bash Windows at every chance, but except for the activation it’s portable as well and the OS wouldn’t normally break. You can put your Windows SSD into other computers and it will boot just fine. This might have been different with Windows 7 and earlier versions, but as of Windows 8 it’s smooth sailing.
That’s good to know. I suppose most of us not knowing this is a good indicator of the average age around here. I think the last time I installed Windows from scratch was 7…
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You can boot windows from a USB stick if you really want. It’s even branded. “Windows to go”.
Linux is amazingly portable.
So I’m discovering! I might just have to install Linux on my home machine, but I’ve been running Windows for so long, I really worry I’m going to break something in that case. I also do a lot of audio production with that machine, and software compatibility might end up being a big problem.
Outside of maybe not having the chipset drivers on newer platforms you can easily move drives from an Intel or AMD system or vise versa. And ever since Windows 8 Windows update will grab basically every single driver automatically for you. Activation is hit or miss unless you have a key in the bios, then it automatically activates itself.
Turn it into a piece of art
This also deserves consideration. More eco-friendly, and it gives me a chance to practice my desoldering skills.
Just take the CPU and put it into resin
Do I need a mold or something? Can I just buy a tube of resin and use a cup I don’t care about?
I think its probably harder than that but I don’t know much. I do know you will need to get rid of the air bubbles some how. I’ve scene people use a vacuum pump for that but you got to get the timing right.
Its tricky but it would be so cool to have a CPU in resin.
I used my Xeon E3 1230V3 with 16gb of DDR-3 and a GTX 1070 up until summer of last year. And I was gaming on it! But recently build a complete new AMD+AMD machine and it’s still there. And I wonder if the SSD with the OS would work when I plug it in a new machine. I always install from scratch in such cases, but can understand the appeal to just change the hardware without all the software work involved. Pretty neat!
So what to do with the old machine? To be honest, no idea. For the performance you get it takes lot of power. So not sure if its worth it anymore, compared to modern hardware. I could use it for creating comparisons and benchmarks or to test software (I wrote). Maybe strip out the graphics card and use it as a server?
