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Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
(www.howtogeek.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Highly doubt it's worth it in the long run due to electricity costs alone
Depends.
Toss the GPU/wifi, disable audio, throttle the processor a ton, and set the OS to power saving, and old PCs can be shockingly efficient.
You can slow the RAM down too. You don't need XMP enabled if you're just using the PC as a NAS. It can be quite power hungry.
Eh, older RAM doesn't use much. If it runs close to stock voltage, maybe just set it at stock voltage and bump the speed down a notch, then you get a nice task energy gain from the performance boost.
There was a post a while back of someone trying to eek every single watt out of their computer. Disabling XMP and running the ram at the slowest speed possible saved like 3 watts I think. An impressive savings, but at the cost of HORRIBLE CPU performance. But you do actually need at least a little bit of grunt for a nas.
At work we have some of those atom based NASes and the combination of lack of CPU, and horrendous single channel ram speeds makes them absolutely crawl. One HDD on its own performs the same as this raid 10 array.
Yeah.
In general, 'big' CPUs have an advantage because they can run at much, much lower clockspeeds than atoms, yet still be way faster. There are a few exceptions, like Ryzen 3000+ (excluding APUs), which idle notoriously hot thanks to the multi-die setup.
Peripherals and IO will do that. Cores pulling 5-6W while IO die pulls 6-10W
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-5700x/18.html
Same with auto overclocking mobos.
My ASRock sets VSoC to a silly high coltage with EXPO. Set that back down (and fiddle with some other settings/disable the IGP if you can), and it does help a ton.
...But I think AMD's MCM chips just do idle hotter. My older 4800HS uses dramatically less, even with the IGP on.
So I did this, using a Ryzen 3600, with some light tweaking the base system burns about 40-50W idle. The drives add a lot, 5-10W each, but they would go into any NAS system, so that's irrelevant. I had to add a GPU because the MB I had wouldn't POST without one, so that increases the power draw a little, but it's also necessary for proper Jellyfin transcoding. I recently swapped the GPU for an Intel ARC A310.
By comparison, the previous system I used for this had a low-power, fanless intel celeron, with a single drive and two SSDs it drew about 30W.
Ok, im glad im not the only one that wants a responsive machine for video streaming.
I ran a pi400 with plex for a while. I dont care to save 20W while I wait for the machine to respond after every little scrub of the timeline. I want to have a better experience than Netflix. Thats the point.
Eh, TBH I'd like to consume less power, but I mean, a 30-40W difference isn't going to ruin me or the planet, I've got a rather efficient home all in all.
I have a 3600 in a NAS and it idles at 25w. My mobo luckily runs fine without a GPU. I pulled it out after the initial install.
A desktop running a low usage wouldn't consume much more than a NAS, as long as you drop the video card (which wouldn't be running anyways).
Take only that extra and you probably have a few years usage before additional electricty costs overrun NAS cost. Where I live that's around 5 years for an estimated extra 10W.
As I wrote below, some motherboards won't POST without a GPU.
Yeah, and what's more, if one of those appliance-like NASes breaks down, how do you fix it? With a normal PC you just swap out the defective part.
Most modern boards will. Also there's integrated graphics on basically every single current CPU. Only AMD on AM4 held out on having iGPUs for so damn long.
I'm still running a 480 that doubles as a space heater (I'm not even joking; I increase the load based on ambient temps during winter)
A 486, eh?
I am assuming that’s a GTX 480 and not an RX 480; if so - kudos for not having that thing melt the solder off the heatsink by now! 😅
The GTX 480 is efficient by modern standards. If Nvidia could make a cooler that could handle 600 watts in 2010 you can bet your sweet ass that GPU would have used a lot more power.
Well that and if 1000 watt power supplies were common back then.
If they're gonna buy a nas anyway, how many years to break even?
I have an old Intel 1440 desktop that runs 24/7 hooked up to a UPS along with a Beelink miniPC, my router, and a POE switch and the UPS is reporting a combined 100w.