With manufacturers introducing new components every passing year, it’s only a matter of time until the most cutting-edge hardware gets obsolete. I often upgrade my PC components one at a time, until I have a Ship of Theseus moment and end up replacing all essential parts. But unless the old components have become completely unusable, I typically grab a new case and turn them into a separate rig.

The oldest one among such systems is the second PC I ever built. It has a first-gen Ryzen 5 1600 CPU, 16GB DDR4 memory, and a GTX 1080, which was a solid combo when I built it in 2017, but it can’t handle modern games beyond 1080p in the big year of 2025. And you know what? It may not have the ideal power efficiency or killer performance, but I refuse to part ways with it.

It doubles as a terrific home lab node

Name a better duo than Proxmox and an old system

I’ve been a part of the home server ecosystem for a few years, and it was this very PC that served as my first tinkering node. While it can’t run the likes of Harvester or the compatibility nightmare called ESXi, it’s more than capable of running Proxmox with a couple of virtual guests. And I don’t just mean LXCs, either. Thanks to its decent memory and a 6-core processor, I can easily run two virtual machines alongside an arsenal of containers without running into any performance issues whatsoever.

The best part? Since I use an entirely different PC (which I’ll go over in a bit) for my daily tasks, I don’t have to hold back when using the ol’ beast for my tinkering experiments. It’s currently serving as the primary node of my high-availability Proxmox cluster, which consists of two other budget-friendly devices. But before I got my hands on a dual Xeon workstation, the Ryzen 5 1600 system was my primary Proxmox node and served my self-hosting and virtualization needs pretty well.

Heck, since it has superior IOMMU implementation, it’s actually better than my Xeon system and its no-name X99 mobo for anything involving PCI passthrough for virtual machines. This includes everything from adding an NIC to an experimental router to creating a remote gaming VM that can harness my GPU collection.

I often use it for bare-metal projects

With extra SSDs, I don’t have to wipe my PVE instance, either

Although Proxmox delivers solid performance and compatibility with VM-heavy projects, there are certain cases where a bare-metal setup is ideal. For example, if I want to write about a new distro, I use the Ryzen 5 1600 + GTX 1080 system to gauge its responsiveness and hardware support. Just a few days ago, I wanted to tinker with XCP-ng, a virtualization platform that’s often considered Proxmox’s biggest rival – and my old system came in real handy for this project. Qubes OS is another example where my bare-metal setup was better than going for a VM, as the distro relies entirely on virtualization.

Before that, the ol’ reliable machine helped me play around with NomadBSD, GhostBSD, EasyNAS, and a handful of other operating systems. Since I’ve plugged a few SSDs into the system, I can simply install the new distros on a separate drive and keep my Proxmox partitions away from my distro-hopping misadventures.

I always have replacement parts with this PC around

Yet another reason to love the AM4 era

Even if I didn’t actively use the PC for my home lab experiments, I’d still keep it around simply so I could use its components as replacements should the hardware in my daily driver bite the bullet. Being somewhat broke, I’m still using a Ryzen 5 5600X processor, which supports the AM4 chipset and has the same socket as my Ryzen 5 1600. You may have realized that I avoided talking about the motherboard, and that’s because the system has had a couple of mobos over its tenure.

Well, I initially used a B350 mobo as the base for the PC, before swapping it for a B450 motherboard – which ended up kicking the bucket in 2022. Both the old rig and my current gaming PC have B550 motherboards. So, if anything untoward were to happen to the latter, I could just reuse the components from the old system to continue my everyday tasks without scrambling around for replacement parts.

Sure, I may have some trouble gaming or multitasking with dozens of browser tabs, but the retired PC still has plenty of fight left in it. The GTX 1080 can run lighter LLMs for my smart home, and even trade blows with modern games at 1080p (and sometimes, even 1440p). Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 1600 is still useful for everyday tasks, especially with the 16GB DDR4 memory. Throw in all the times when I’ve used the components in separate machines over the past few years, and you can see why I won’t get rid of the PC until it has drawn its last breath.