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 :)
Clearly you should turn it into a gift for me, that’s generations newer than the headless laptop I’m using now lol. Fr tho, find someone who’ll appreciate it. Way too nice a rig to languish as a 3rd server/media box
if you don’t want the gpu to go to waste, folding@home is a great project that can always use some extra compute.
that’s a hella rad machine to convert because of something so easily fixable. could be due to a loose cable, or needs a new panel; provided it ain’t of the ultra-spensive variety, 2nd hand laptop panels can be had for like $20-50 from your local junker. short of that, converting it to a full desktop would be the next best use case. using a hexacore ryzen with 3050ti as “media PC” is fucking bonkers, a potato can handle that.
Good point.
Full disclosure: While I am very happy with my Kodi setup (see my other comment), I somewhat regret that I didn’t just fix the screen. I fixed the screen of my current laptop and I was surprised by how cheap and easy it was (even though I paid someone else to do it).
I also had an old unused laptop with a broken hinge, so I just removed the entire top half of it! My “topless” laptop now runs my Proxmox Backup Server. If your laptop supports it, you could also look into keeping the battery in and just limiting the charging so it isn’t always at 100%, that way you have a buffer if the power input fails or the power goes out briefly.
My first thought would be to try and fix it, then you have a nice laptop or get to be the family hero when you return it working to your brother.
Past that there are several services you might use that can take advantage of the video card: Immich image recognition, Paperless OCR, some of the local Whisper servers.
Or you have a nice set-top PC for big screen gaming and media playback.
KODI.
I have a laptop with a broken screen attached to the wall behind my TV. I love my Kodi media station. It might take a while to setup and customize but it’s worth it. I could use the default android TV, but it’s completely commercial and miserable. I use Kodi for: weather, video games (retroarch and steam), music (radio, youtube, mp3s), podcasts, tv shows, iptv, movies, youtube… I never leave my Kodi to use the android TV (barf).
Also it doesn’t need to be just a media station. You machine can probably run a variety of network apps or whatever else alongside.
If you end up running it headless (game streaming host, Jellyfin/Immich worker, whatever), two small things save a lot of hassle:
- Get an HDMI dummy plug (a “display emulator”, a few euros). With no internal panel detected and nothing on HDMI, the GPU often has no proper display to render to, and Sunshine/Steam streaming in particular wants a “real” display to capture at the resolution you pick.
- Check the BIOS for a “power on after AC loss” / “auto power on” option. Plenty of laptops don’t have it, but if yours does, it comes back on its own after an outage like a proper server. Otherwise Wake-on-LAN from one of your mini PCs is the fallback.
And since storage is your bottleneck right now, open it up and see if there’s a second M.2 slot. Some of these chassis have one, and then it could hold some data while also taking the Immich/Paperless ML jobs on the 3050Ti.
laptop simply no longer detects the display
it could be a loose connection or broken wires between the main board and the display panel. it might be worth the effort to open it up and examine those.
That was my first thought too, but I can’t really tell why, the display connector appears to be locked in place fine. It could just be a crappy design though because that cable runs through the heatsink, and the connector is partially blocked by one of the heat pipes so possibly thermal damage to the wire or connector?
Even just trying to re-seat the connector would require removing the entire heatsink/fan assembly which is very annoying. It’s not beyond my ability, but I asked the question about running it as a server to avoid that hassle lol, I’d much rather tinker with software than hardware it seems
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.
That sounds like a pretty beefy machine. To me it’d be a waste to use it as a server, unless you need lots of hardware encoding for Jellyfin etc.
If I had that laptop, I’d use it as a guest gaming PC maybe or as a Steam Machine in the living room. Imho it’s totally wasted potential as a server, unless you actually need the performance.
