It used to be possible to fake a quaddro. I’m sure that doesn’t still work, but haven’t researched.
Okay, so they’re mostly the same, quadro has more computing horsepower.
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I built myself a home server a few months ago using second hand hardware:
-HP Z640 tower
-Intel Xeon 2690v3
-64GB ram ddr4
-ZTurbo Drive NVME with a Samsung 981NVMe hdd for the OS/boot
-5 Various HDDs, some mechanical, some SSD
-Quadro K4200 Graphics card
About 600 bucks for the whole build. Pretty cheap if you consider that this is enterprise quality stuff.
My plan was to have this computer somewhere in a closet, and remote desktop to it from any crappy laptop I have around the house, since I have several laptops and it’s alsways a pain to carry them between rooms, plus sometimes I have stuff in laptop1, sometimes in laptop2, different version of the same stuff…
So what I did was a clean install of windows 7 (yeah, I’m still using this OS and don’t plan to change until I won’t have any other choice) on all these machines. The Server gets an ultimate version with a special mod to enable multiple remote sessions simultaneously, the other ones get a fresh install too with the bare minimum necessary, and updates disabled so they remain super fast and stay this way. Their only purpose is to run windows remote desktop.
So, whenever I’m on a laptop, I simply open remote desktop, connect to my server and work on my server from the laptop. I’ve got all the power of the server hardware, but on a crappy laptop I can move anywhere I want. This way I don’t really care if it gets damaged in the workshop.
The other good thing is that now since everything is on the server, then I only have one version of all my stuff all around the house. I’m also using the awesome program Freefilesync to make automatic backups from my laptops to my server. this way, I have a few folders that get saved and updated on all the machines at once, with the server keeping incremental copies of any changes. Really awesome.
The only drawback is that my network hardware is slow, I’m limited to 100Mbps on some portions of my LAN, so that affects remote desktop. It’s not really noticeable while doing CAD or normal work stuff, but it lags quite a bit while trying to watch videos from the server on the laptop. So for youtube browsing I’m still connecting directly from the laptop, without RDP to the server.
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I’ve tried that in the past. It never worked well for me in the long run.
I do have a server. It runs plex, pihole, homeassistant, and a few more VMs on ESXi. Actually, I have two servers, but the 1U stays turned off. The servers are in my shop. They pull enough electricity to cost about $30/month when they’re both running.
I bought my server on Amazon. It was a refurb for $800. Looks like they’ve gone up in price a bit
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TJ1P3Q7/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
The other server is a 1U HP. Similar specs as that one, but it has 10k spindles and only about 2G of hd space. It also has faster CPUs. I was using it to batch process videos using handbrake. I custom wrote a batch system for it that ran in a Docker swarm on CoreOS. All I had to do was upload the videos to a folder and the swarm would take care of converting them to my preferred format/resolution and drop them onto another file share when done.
One thing I’m not laking in in this house is storage space. I think I’ve only allocated 5TB of the 26TB I have available on the raid array. I went with a Raid6 with 2 parity disks. They’re slower SATA spindles. That does remind me, I need to order a backup disk to keep around in the event one of these fail.
The docker files are here:
https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/niget2002/handbrakewatcher
https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/niget2002/handbrakeexecute
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Well, I didn’t believe in the quadro hype either. I had my previous gaming card bought just for the fact there was a ported driver. Still didn’t work well. My p2000 smokes my old “better” card. It was well worth it. Most things are a bit faster, but more importantly there has not been a random SW crash in forever. My last job had a custom SW workstation built for me when I got there with a quado and it still randomly crashed though. So maybe I just got lucky on this build.
I love putting together a new build but making all the build choices and spending a few days on bios settings as quenched my excitement about doing it as often as I used to.
Just because this the prettiest build i have ever built. I will dust it today, promise.
All the leds are behind smoked glass so the red is very subtle.
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I miss it. I haven’t built a desktop in a long time.
I used to have a big desktop machine with a beefy video card, a big PSU, CPU, etc. We kept it on all the time and also used it as a file server (it had RAID5). I went around the house with a kill-a-watt, and found out that 25% of our electricity was from this computer being on 24/7. I ended up turning on automatic hibernation (or maybe even just automatic shut down) and then figured out a wake on lan script we could run from the laptops to turn it on just for the times we needed the RAID. That worked for a while, but it was fragile. We ended up buying a QNAP NAS that sips power in standby, and I have had it for probably 7 years or so. It has updated and can run containers (docker images) and still does a great job as a NAS. We have swapped the drives out for larger ones (it is currently 8TB, RAID5). If I did another desktop build for myself, I would be careful about the energy consumption, although the easiest solution is just to turn it off when I’m done. Having it run for 1 hour/day instead of 24 is a huge savings.
On a side note, I also found that the heater on my fish tank was using close to another 25% of our electricity so when my tiger oscar died, we got rid of the heater and have big goldfish in it now. It is a 75 gallon, and has to be close to the largest goldfish tank in someone’s house.
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I ignore electricity usage.
Servers, pool pump, aquariums, woodworking tools… it all adds up way too fast.
The 120G Reef tank was one of our heaviest draws. The pool pump was slightly higher.
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Our solar makes up for the network in the house. I think it’s up to 4 desktops, 5 or 6 laptops, 4 network switches, 10 access points, and a couple dozen smart lights. Plus my two 3d printers.
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Dui, are you viewing the videos in the RDP connection, or playing them locally from a shared drive?
Love this. Use it to automatically sync my downloads folder to my server. Best app ever.
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It lags when I try to see them over RDP.
When played from the shared drive they lag much less, but they sometimes do. I heard that RDP is less efficient regarding bandwidth and there’s also something involving compression that I forgot.
That’s mostly annoying when I try to watch youtube videos over the RDP.
You’ll probably ask me, “well, why the heck don’t you just watch youtube on your laptop, like a regular dude, dude?”
And that would be a very valid question.
The reason is that my plan was to kill entirely all unnecessary resources on the laptop. So, not loading the desktop, not loading any service that is not absolutely necessary, purchasing the smallest and cheapest (but fastest) possible hard drive, etc. The only thing the laptop would need to do would be to automatically load RDP at startup, connect to the server 's desktop and voila. Fastest start times, great reliability and probably less power consumed overall. That would also mean I could use the cheapest of the cheapest laptops, cover them under loads of dirt and don’t care at all how long they survive.
Unfortunately, because of this network speed glitch I’m unable to do that. I think it’s too bad there doesn’t seem to be better softwares than RDP for doing that, that seems to me like a really great way of recycling old, otherwise useless hardware. You’ll just need a powerful home server and the rest are basically just screens nd keyboards to interact with it, no matter how old and crappy they are. No need to purchase new laptops every year, just update your server.
It sounds a bit like the promise of a chrome book, except in that case, all the apps have to be web apps, run in the cloud.
Just setup a bind server and point *.google.com to the rdp server. Chrome book solved 
Yeah, I was just going to say that RDP is good for sending keystrokes and mouse clicks, not so much real-time video. It’s kinda like Citrix is/was, (are they around anymore?), great for distributed productivity apps, but anything that requires high frame-rate screen updates, it’s better to do that client-side. But I understand wanting to use your laptop like a thin client and have all the work done on the back end.
I think most current chromebooks can run native android apps now. My chromebook is the original beta unit from google, so I’m kinda behind on updates.
@Strider_Matic Unfortunately citrix is still a thing. Your doctor probably uses it for his emr system.
Motherboard came in early, so I got started on the build tonight. All of the hardware is in, now I just need to run all the cables.
Parts going in
Naked case
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Where do I send the shipping label? 
She’s all done.
I’ll be spending the rest of the day updating software and transferring all of my files from the laptop.
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We have super similar cases, love the build…now get to work on that bios. So many settings these days. Mine came severely under preforming and needed to do a ton of settings changes. Once I got it I took pictures of the bios screens.
Super nice! Makes me jealous… a good motivation to get my side-job tinker-maker-enterprise going to earn some bucks and get one myself 
Yeah. That’s going to take a lot of research. I did bump up the ram speed to what they are rated at. Everything else is still set to Auto.