Use old gaming PC as server?

[Draconis]

I like to buy top of the line PCs and then ride them into the dirt over the course of years. Seems I must restart the cycle.
Is the following  7+ year old PC decent for Unraid?

i7-6700K @ 4 - 4.2gz, 4 core
16gb ram ddr4
AsRock Z170 OC Formula (4+6x Sata 3, 3x Sata Express, OR 3x Ultra M.2) It looks like max 10 Sata drives, if I don't use Sata Express or M.2

drives are a mix of WD Red Plus and Seagate Exos, will need to buy some

My most important stuff is running on vmware VMs like Hass, Pihole, and Plex elsewhere, but I've been using unraid docker for non essential things like arrs and such. My current pair of E5645 @ 2.4ghz, 12 cores, seems to only get upto 50% utilization as a result.

Should I utilize what I have or not?

Edited September 27, 2023 by Draconis

[aburgesser]

As always you need to declare use case.

 

A 6700 can be quite a decent workhorse. If you can settle for the older Quick Sync, it will even transcode H264 and H265 (8-bit). I still think a 6300 is a fairly good Unraid CPU due to the ECC support. Just remember to drop the overclock for stability.

 

16 gb of RAM is serviceable until you want to run more than a bare bones VM.

There are enough M.2 slots to run mirrored cache pools. A plus for redundancy.

 

I've happily commissioned less capable systems myself.

[Draconis]

13 hours ago, aburgesser said:

As always you need to declare use case.

 

...

There are enough M.2 slots to run mirrored cache pools. A plus for redundancy.

Yeah I was not clear that I'll have my more intensive apps running full OSs on dedicated or other hardware. Plex I have running on an old gaming PC with a 1060 for transcoding for instance.

 

I'll just use unraid for smaller, none critical stuff like *aars for instance. I think the most intensive thing I have now is AudiobookShelf.

 

It looks like if I use the M.2 slots it may disable more than 1 sata port each, on this mobo, so I may stick with traditional Sata ssds if I don't need the extra M.2 throughput.