So, my work machine was getting long in the tooth. Occasionally not booting and requiring me to jiggle memory sticks or tighten CPU cooler screws. It was a DDR3 machine with a Xeon E3 1230V2 with 8gb of RAM (and oddly enough an RTX 2060.) The fans were getting pretty loud, too.
I had a Ryzen 2600x and 16gb of DD4 from my home PC lying around, so I bought a cheap mainboard, tore the old one out of the case, attached all the hardware to the new mainboard - including the SSD with Mint installed - and BOOM! It booted first try without issue. Even going from Intel to AMD, DDR3 to DDR4. My mind is blown!
I can’t imagine how borked my machine would have been if I’d tried that with Windows.
Now, what do I do with a still-working Xeon and mainboard?!?
I used my Xeon E3 1230V3 with 16gb of DDR-3 and a GTX 1070 up until summer of last year. And I was gaming on it! But recently build a complete new AMD+AMD machine and it’s still there. And I wonder if the SSD with the OS would work when I plug it in a new machine. I always install from scratch in such cases, but can understand the appeal to just change the hardware without all the software work involved. Pretty neat!
So what to do with the old machine? To be honest, no idea. For the performance you get it takes lot of power. So not sure if its worth it anymore, compared to modern hardware. I could use it for creating comparisons and benchmarks or to test software (I wrote). Maybe strip out the graphics card and use it as a server?