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what can i do with a spare Athlon 2500+ box?

mckickflip

mckickflip

Member
i hope this is the right place to post this! i looked around but this seemed like the most appropriate section.

i just got an excellent new ThinkPad T61p. it's way more powerful than my desktop pc (Athlon 2500+, 512mb RAM...), so I was thinking about just getting a KVM switch and docking the T61 to use at the desk with the monitor and all. what can i use the old desktop pc for now? it seems a little too powerful to turn into a hardware firewall, and it's got about 600gb of HD space so I was wondering if I could turn it into a bittorrent slave or something like that. if i was to do that, would a KVM even be necessary? how could I make this work?

thanks~
 
for bittorrent you'd have to underclock it..well to save power😛
ultra vnc is all you need to control a slave. no kvm necessary
that being said, i'm not sure its worth the power it consumes.
such is the suck of old computers. only newer low power intel chips and such are great for leaving on 24/7... or old laptops which are designed to use ~30watts.
my guess is a 2500+ is like sucking 100watts pretty constantly..more if you got a gpu
 
could set it to power down but wake on lan, be aggressive with the power saving options and turn off everything unnecessary in bios? Of course as bittorrent slave it'll never turn off, but for storage it'd work. But, still a solution in search of a problem.

There's plenty under privileged kids who would appreciate the pron and learning to script trojans. Few charity shops will take electronics but you may well find a specialist via google. Remember to scrub the disks.

I have a 3700+, 2gb of nice ram and a 160gb drive to do something with. It's annoying that I can't make a worthwhile HTPC with it either since anything remotely decent seems to require a newer chip and anyway the cooling for that thing would be too noisy. It's not even worth it anyway due to the price of a decent HD freeview recorder (UK). Cant even upgrade my sister's ancient PC as would need to buy a new PSU, Windows (I thought about Ubuntu, no.) and possibly a case for which you can just about buy a Dell.
 
i'd definitely think about donating it to someone, but it's rather finicky. i'd have to fix it up more before that.

if i was to make it a server for a short time though, wouldn't it be easier/less resource consuming to do something like run rtorrent and ssh to the server?
 
What operating systems have you got access to? What have you got already installed on the Athlon system? With Windows XP Professional or a Server OS, you can Remote Desktop into a 'headless' box from your ThinkPad, maintain the Athlon system, run torrents, serve files, etc. On other operating systems, you can always instal VNC or another remote access technology.

I've two Bartons myself. One of them powered my primary workstation (from which I'm typing right now) which I'm replacing with a Wolfdale system (see my signature rig below). I spent five years on this Athlon XP! Anyhow, the other Athlon XP is powering a peer-to-peer server, which is essentially 24/7. It's not terribly power-efficient, but I don't pay my eletricity bill here. 😉 That said, I am hoping to consolidate my servers to a more low-power AMD 780G system, maybe with an Athlon X2 4850e.

If I recall correctly, the Athlon XP 2500+ dissipates about 65 to 70 watts, which looks at first glance comparable to the 65 W TDPs common in today's cpus. However, because of the lack of power-saving technology, the Barton will likely idle at higher power than modern cpus. On the other hand, the total system power doesn't have to be that bad -- less than 100 W at idle is entirely possible, which isn't that different from a modern desktop.

In summary, I'm not sure that running the Barton as a server will consume that much more energy than a modern cpu. It will be less efficient, especially performance per watt, but I suspect it won't use that much more energy over time than, say, an Athlon X2.
 
Hah I'm on one right now.

That is correct: 65W TDP for the 2500.

Mine happens to be a Barton XP-M 2400 35 Watt model. OC, of course.

There are mods you can do to super underclock, still needs a fan tho. Uses: for raid storage, printer host, dmz and firewall, skype, backup and guest computer, server.


Linux box, testing partitioning software, development, etc.
 
Originally posted by: trexpesto
Hah I'm on one right now.

That is correct: 65W TDP for the 2500.

Mine happens to be a Barton XP-M 2400 35 Watt model. OC, of course.

There are mods you can do to super underclock, still needs a fan tho. Uses: for raid storage, printer host, dmz and firewall, skype, backup and guest computer, server.


Linux box, testing partitioning software, development, etc.
Click to expand...

:laugh: that's what i'm typing from right now. i've got it oc'ed on a crappy fan (seriously) to 2.2Ghz without any more voltage then the stock. it plays HD (720p obviously), plays crysis alright and is acceptable. perhaps i'll upgrade when i get out of the army in a couple of years. no point now.
 
Obligatory "Make it crunch!". 😀 A 2500+ can get some decent scores in some Distributed Computing projects, and it's great for use with nominal tasks like what is being suggested. It would have problems crunching and doing tasks like file server, etc.
 
Originally posted by: Winterpool
-- less than 100 W at idle is entirely possible, which isn't that different from a modern desktop.
Click to expand...
Just to put that into context, a normal lightbulb is usually 60w, so it's less than 2 lightbulbs.

Though perhaps that says more about traditional lightbulbs, for 100w you could light up a whole house on energy savers 😉

 
I have an old Barton system. I plan on making a Linux box to play with. I have never played with Linux before. Some tech friends say that once you start using Linux, you don't want to go back to a MS Windows environment. I am curious to see if this is true.

I realize that if I want to game, I will have to stay with Windows.
 
What about snagging a capture card with hardware encoding and building a PVR? I'm thinking of doing that with the old parts I have in the closet (Athlon XP 2100+ and an ASUS A7V880).
 
Pickup a modern GPU that has hardware HD assist and build a HTPC. Thats what I'll be doing with my 2800+ when I finally upgrade.
 
been thinking about this too since I haven't been lucky to sell my 939 system (here)
The thing is, even if i want to donate it for charity, I'd have to rebuild it (cost more money)
 
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