> The biggest caveat in re-using old compute hardware IMO is power consumption
This is a relatively recent laptop (it has a GTX 1060 inside!), and I can't get hardware that capable for cheap enough for it to be worth it. My only reason for making it an HTPC is that I don't want to see it gather dust on a shelf for no reason.
> You can try passive heatsink
I've considered that + other cheap ways, but I'm concerned about mounting. The CPU runs hot, even when well cooled, so I'd need some way to get good contact with the die without harming it. There's a few screw slots around it, but those are for the heat pipes it comes with. That's the biggest challenge in this project from my perspective.
> You can also use your hardware for only GPGPU applications & HW accel on GPU to reduce load on CPU e.g. Separate stream encoding machine
Unfortunately, I don't have any use cases where that could come in handy. Working a full-time job killed my dreams of producing content :'). I just want this to sit at my 4K TV and play content without snooping on me, like all the big name boxes do.
I have a 5 year old laptop whose display died after 2 years. Rather disappointing that high-end stuff doesn't last and manufactures don't seem to care, but that's another rant. I plugged it into my TV to use for emulators. It's fun to play occasionally, but overall I hate it because of how whiny and high maintenance windows 10 is. Every single freaking time I want to use it, I have to pull it out from under the blu-ray player and reassure it of its insecurities. Every few days it will randomly wake up and start loudly revving its fans up and down too, just to remind me that it exists to torment me.
When I looked into it 5 years ago, there were supposedly issues with it having a non-standard NVME interface firmware or something. There's a good chance that it would just work these days, but in my experience getting linux to run reliably on a laptop that wasn't designed for it can be tricky. It was originally a work laptop, so linux compatibility wasn't originally a consideration.
Maybe I'll whip up a Linux live usb drive and try booting it this weekend!
> The biggest caveat in re-using old compute hardware IMO is power consumption
This is a relatively recent laptop (it has a GTX 1060 inside!), and I can't get hardware that capable for cheap enough for it to be worth it. My only reason for making it an HTPC is that I don't want to see it gather dust on a shelf for no reason.
> You can try passive heatsink
I've considered that + other cheap ways, but I'm concerned about mounting. The CPU runs hot, even when well cooled, so I'd need some way to get good contact with the die without harming it. There's a few screw slots around it, but those are for the heat pipes it comes with. That's the biggest challenge in this project from my perspective.
> You can also use your hardware for only GPGPU applications & HW accel on GPU to reduce load on CPU e.g. Separate stream encoding machine
Unfortunately, I don't have any use cases where that could come in handy. Working a full-time job killed my dreams of producing content :'). I just want this to sit at my 4K TV and play content without snooping on me, like all the big name boxes do.