ThinkPad as a Server: The Follow-Up

I’m halfway done turning a 2010 MacBook Air with a broken screen into a headless batocera game machine for my living room (halfway because I had to order some more tools because I’m missing a torx driver). It’s actually going to create my ideal computer, I love the keyboard and trackpad of the MacBooks and you just plug in an external display and it works.<p>One helpful thing that isn’t easy to google: if you need to get to Mac recovery console but your MacBook’s screen is cracked, take it apart and disconnect the LVDS (lcd screen) cable, and it basically turns your MacBook into a Mac mini. Otherwise it will boot to its own screen first until the OS is up and ready.

This is a very useful way to retire old laptops. I have a dell business laptop that is rocking an Ivy-bridge quad core.<p>It’s over 10 years now and it’s still running a few low power VMs - pihole and home assistant.<p>But more recently I’ve been moving my workloads to the 2012 Mac Mini i7s quads. Marketplace has them for &lt;$100 if you look carefully. Bought three of those for just $50 + $30 SSD upgrade.<p>Highly recommended vs the RPi.

My main advice for anyone doing something like this is to ensure that the &quot;hot&quot; side of the heat pipe is below the &quot;cold&quot; side where the cooling fan is.<p>Putting it upside down means the heat pipe has to work against gravity and that&#x27;s bad.<p>Even along the same plane isn&#x27;t great, then it has the wick back the condensed cooling fluid, which is less efficient than simple gravity transfer back down.

Just checked, my old dell i3 xps laptop running as a home server with no hardware changes and just its lid closed has the current uptime of 149 days without any reboot. This laptop wouldve sold for next to nothing, and already, it has served me approx $100 of cloud costs.

I&#x27;ve been doing this with an x220. You can also get light ipmi functionality from the Intel vpro me. I can VNC into the laptop and control it out of band. Even going into the bios. This is a must for something you&#x27;re putting into an annoying to get to place.

It&#x27;s great to see others doing this and writing about it. I too browse &#x2F;r&#x2F;homelab and look at some of the power-hungry monsters people are running. Given energy price rises in my country (UK), it makes them too expensive to run.<p>I&#x27;ve managed to get my setup [0], consuming ~8w (idle + running my blog). Going from an old laptop with a broken screen, putting it to use instead of making it e-waste, does feel good<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ryansouthgate.com&#x2F;my-old-laptop-is-my-new-web-server&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ryansouthgate.com&#x2F;my-old-laptop-is-my-new-web-server...</a>

This is such a good idea. You can get &quot;old&quot; Thinkpads with NVidia GPUs and 16+ GB RAM for a very decent price, and use them for home server purposes like encoding and object detection. Much smaller and lower power and heat than a desktop, yet much more powerful than a Pi, Jetson, &amp;c. There are even workstation class models with Xeons and ECC RAM.

Regarding the thermal paste pump-out, it&#x27;s due to using thin paste that&#x27;s not designed for direct die-to-heatsink contact (Arctic MX-5, etc). The constant thermal expansion&#x2F;contraction &#x27;pumps&#x27; the paste out the sides, because the die expands differently than the copper heatsink.<p>You can get a thick paste made for that purpose, like SYY 157 which is what I use, and it will stay in place.<p>I just re-pasted my GPU and had the same issue occur, with standard CPU paste within a week the temperature was very high, after using a thicker paste it&#x27;s been fine and has much lower temps.

No ECC.. hmm. Maybe my data at home isn&#x27;t that important, definitely not $$$ mission critical.<p>Curious what the power draw is with an older Thinkpad like this while idling and under load.<p>Edit: thank you nequo.

Best part about using an old laptop for a home server is the built-in UPS.

Currently got an old ThinkPad X230T running my Valheim server. Been up for over a year straight! That&#x27;s pretty much straight from the person I bought it from -- wiped the noisy old HDD, installed Debian (IIRC) and set up my server. Been running ever since, and easily supports 4+ simultaneous players. Pretty sweet! Yeah, it clicks suspiciously every so often (so I&#x27;m sure the HDD won&#x27;t last), but I automatically back up the game world so the chance of any data loss is slim.<p>Oh yeah, I have wifi off on mine, and the display shut off via command line, to reduce power usage a bit. I wouldn&#x27;t go so far as to start disassembling the system haha

Broken screen laptops are great for server. I bought a 11th gen Intel quad core laptop 1135g7 for $80 last month off ebay and was super happy.

OP’s notion of stripping as much as possible triggered a related question. If I understand correctly many cloud data centers are essentially huge collections of caseless motherboards with disks hanging off them. Near big bodies of water for cooling. Wouldn’t the exposed circuitry corrode or get dusty?

I used to have identical ThinkPad T41&#x27;s. When I went to a coffee shop, I&#x27;d leave one in my backpack running a web server etc, and then develop on the other one.<p>Running on Linode or something could have been faster, but most of the time the coffee shop internet connection was dog slow.

I&#x27;m not surprised there were unexpected issues - I&#x27;ve found running laptops 24x7 (or other SFF devices) tends to get weird heat issues.<p>I had fun with 8th gen Intel NUCs just turning themselves off after a while, turned out to be issues cooling the VRMs. Also had thunderbolt devices just drop after extended uptimes.<p>Similar issues with Asrock Deskminis - although I could mitigate it here by changing the CPU cooler to force more air over the VRM heatsink.

If the thermal paste is dripping out then there likely isn&#x27;t enough pressure from the bracket (plus I&#x27;d take a closer look at the paste brand)

I ran Factorio on a ASUS laptop that I had removed the screen from (to build an external monitor).<p>Headless Factorio on a headless laptop server. (screenless?)

We use Thinkpads for Zoom Rooms and other TV-type displays. Regularly hit 100+ days of uptime with no issues. Such great machines.

I like the approach. How many watts is that setup consuming idle and under load