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Old laptop with non-funtional display... What do I turn it into (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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So being the tech guy in my family, I just "inherited" my brother's old laptop. It's internals are reasonably modern, it has a Ryzen 5800HS and a RTX 3050Ti inside, the only issue is the display somehow died (I've opened the laptop up and I can't tell how, but it definitely seems to be a hardware issue as far as I can tell - the laptop simply no longer detects the display is connected at all).

I've been able to confirm that full video output still works over HDMI (including access to the BIOS and boot menu, which I've heard isn't a given with laptops) and that it can still boot with the battery removed as long as the stock 20v power supply is used (it won't boot with only usb-c power)

So my question is, what would you do with this thing?

A bit of background on my current setup: I already have 2 mini PCs which I use for Docker containers (*arr stack, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Nextcloud and some other web services. All these run fine and storage is my bottleneck rather than power currently) and the other I use to run Home Assistant OS with a couple of relevant addons (or "apps" as they insist on calling them now)

I'd hate to have that 3050Ti sitting around unused, but I don't really feel like I want or need a local AI server so I'd welcome any suggestions with interesting use cases for that GPU :)

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[–] gastroglizzy@piefed.social 8 points 2 weeks ago

It sounds like your issue might be a bad ribbon cable, connector, or some other easy fix. Getting the display working might be doable with reasonable effort. If not, you can make it a:

Minecraft (or any game you like) server.

Steam remote play host machine. Let the laptop do the processing and send the video signal to a lower-performance client.

Load movies onto an external drive. Load emulators onto the hard drive. Use it as a media PC and emulation station.

Video editing machine.

Either way, make sure whatever screen you hook up to it has at least a 60 hertz refresh rate.

If you stream, a lot of streamers use a second machine to record, manage the stream, run the webcam, etc. allowing their main machine to prioritize rendering the game; you could use it for that.