There are computers all over my house. Most of my time is spent between my laptop and desktop; however, there’s also an assortment of Raspberry Pis and Intel NUCs.
Since my last post I’ve reimaged a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8GB of RAM with the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS Lite and installed Pi-Hole on it. There’s also 4GB Raspberry Pi 4B in a Seeed Studio DeskPi Pro that serves as a portable Jellyfin server for use during glamping, and a 2GB Pi 4B running OctoPrint. A Pi Zero W sits on my nightstand with a small E-Ink display and gives me the current weather and the day’s forecast, updated every 15 minutes, and a Pi Zero non-W with the HQ Camera strapped to it acts as my webcam. I built a PiGRRL 2.0 with a Pi 3B and have a 3A on standby that I want to use for future project.
The NUCs are an i3-6100U that serves as a second portable Jellyfin glamping box, and an i5-4250U that was a TrueNAS Scale box. That one’s off now because there’s some weird hardware issue that I haven’t bothered to troubleshoot yet.
I’ve given my kids a couple of my previous gaming rigs. My son’s running an i7-4930k with 64GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA SSD, and a GeForce RTX 2070. That box is running Linux Mint Debian Edition. My daughter’s on an i7-2600k with 32GB of RAM, a 240GB SATA SSD, and a GeForce GTX 970, with Pop!_OS 22.04.
My wife’s on a 2nd-generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga (i7-7600U, 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD) with Windows 11, which does decently well despite running on “unsupported” hardware. I’m pretty sure that’s the only physical machine running Windows, and that’s only because it has the license embedded in its firmware. My own laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad T460 composed of a hodgepodge of eBay parts — it’s currently an i5-6300U with 16GB of RAM and a 960GB SATA SSD. I distro hop a lot on this laptop, so it has a 100GB btrfs boot volume, and the home partition that takes up the rest of the drive is ext4. The laptop’s currently on EndeavourOS, though it’s had Pop!_OS, Rocky Linux, Debian, openSUSE Leap, and NixOS on it before.
That brings us to the main rig, which is sort of a Ship of Theseus that’s been following me around since 2004 or so. I don’t believe it has any of the original parts left, though. Currently, it’s:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (cooled by Noctua NH-D15)
- RAM: 64GB Corsair Vengeance LPX, DDR4-3200
- Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite w/discrete TPM (they were dirt cheap on Amazon)
- Boot SSD: 1TB Corsair Force MP600, split into 100GB btrfs and the rest ext4
- Data SSD 1: 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus
- Data SSD 2: 1TB Crucial MX500 SATA
- Low-Speed Data: 2x 6TB WD Red Pro (zfs raid 1)
- GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT (the OEM one from amd.com, not a board partner’s)
- Add-In Card: Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4k
- Case: Fractal Design Torrent, gray with dark tempered glass, with RGB fans
- Power Supply: Corsair HX850
OS on this one is also EndeavourOS. That btrfs boot volume has bailed me out multiple times, and this thing runs games really well. I have kvm installed on the machine but use VMware Workstation when running Windows VMs as 3D graphics perform better on it. There are two Windows VMs: one running 10 (for Fusion360 and Garmin Express) and the other running the 32-bit version of Windows 7 (for an ancient photo scanner). I don’t currently have any Linux VMs but those go on kvm.
So, there we go. Something of a menagerie, but it handles everything I can throw at it with zero trouble.