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 :)

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    42·
    9 hours ago

    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.

    • Psythik@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      How valid of a solution this is depends entirely on whether or not you care about things like 4K, Full RGB (4:4:4), Dolby Atmos, HDR, etc. If you do, the laptop’s GPU and the TV both must support HDMI 2.1 or higher, or they won’t be able to handle the high bandwidth demands of modern home theater display formats. (You need a decent high bandwidth cable too, of course.)

      Thankfully OP might be in luck. I just looked it up and it turns out that the 3050ti does in fact support HDMI 2.1. I’m not sure if that guarantees the laptop will have a 2.1 port like with desktop GPUs but I guess the best way to find out is to just plug in a cable and see if everything works.